Hope I tour again before I get old
I would like to say I was really hip last night and spent the evening seeing some band that I know about and you don’t. But I can’t lie to you (well, OK, I can but I won’t), I was actually at Madison Square Garden seeing The Who. Now, I like The Who, I have since I was a small child watching the turntable spin around, but I don’t think I would have been there had tickets for $150 seats not been handed to me.
Still, it’s always fun to see a spectacle on that scale. My first concert ever was at MSG and while clubs are great there’s also something to be said for the show with its revolving screens and smoke machines. Actually, I’m not sure if there were smoke machines, maybe we were just sitting in the smoke machine that was our neighbors in Floor Section Six. Not that I’m complaining.
If I had to sum up the whole show in words other than “Baba O’Riley, fuck yeah!” it would be that it was like a personal conversation between Roger & Pete and all the baby-boomers in the audience like, “remember when we were young?” If your mind completed that sentence with “you shone like the sun” then you would have been right at home in this crowd. But the screens showed a montage of 60’s images, mostly from swinging London, and there was an Elvis tribute as well. Now, unlike a lot of dinosaurs of rock, The Who actually have a new CD coming out that they were pushing. Good on them. It’s unreleased but even if the audience had been remotely familiar with it, I think the reaction would have been pretty much the same. “Play Pinball Wizard!” Actually, most people just sat down, including me. It was easier to check the Yankee game score on my Blackberry that way. Yes, going mobile means something different these days.
I think I was the only one in my age bracket there, everyone else seemed to be over 40 or the child of someone there. It’s to this last group I address the following. If you like the same music as your parents, you are not rebelling. This goes against nature and you should probably see a mental health professional ASAP. This has been a J-Ball PSA.
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The title comes from “My Generation” but I’ve always hated that song. Instead, I’ll go with a better reference from the post.