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It's only rock 'n' roll, but I like it

June 7, 2009 12:36 am

A FEW FRIDAYS ago, my wife and I checked out the Gin Blossoms and Tonic, two bands that achieved some measure of fame in the 1990s, and who were performing as part of the Celebrate Virginia concert series.

To be honest, neither was an absolute favorite of mine--like most self-designated hipsters, my tastes ran (and continue to run) to more outre and fringe acts--but a few of their songs--the Blossoms' "Hey Jealousy" and Tonic's "If You Could Only See"--continue to enjoy healthy rotation in the cranial jukebox of anyone who lived through that fin de millennium decade.

These Celebrate Virginia concerts are held in a field near the Expo Center and the soon-to-open Wegmans. It's not Max Yasgur's farm, but rather an unremarkable patch of green near all those various big-box temples of consumerism in Central Park. But, no matter. We'll leave the half-baked Marxism for another soapbox on another day. Back to the show.

Tonic and the Blossoms RAWWWKED, dude. The so-called Gin and Tonic tour was utterly inebriating and best enjoyed in immoderation. (Too bad there isn't an oldies outfit called the Lemon Wedges currently touring just so they could have been on the bill and made the aural libation perfect.) It's a good thing the music was intoxicating, too, since at $5 a beer--more on this deeply distressing fact later--you'd have to be a Rockefeller to get a buzz on.

For one who has entered those great middle years of life, attending concerts featuring bands of one's lost youth is perplexing. The best strategy is to engage in a rather willful suspension of all disbelief: Check it out, man, it's 1995 again, and I am a young fellow, carefree and callow, heading out to catch some tunes and hang with my bros. (My apologies to any young people reading this. Sadly, we did talk this way in the old days.)

Then Bam! A reality check as brutal as the hockey body variety slams into you when you run into a friend from back in the day. "How they've aged," you forthrightly think--those gray or diminished hairs, those wrinkles, maybe more avoirdupois than you recalled from their Frisbee-tossing, keg-tapping days--only to be astonished and grievously affronted when these middle-aged friends don't note your remarkable--nay, your exact!--similitude to that 1995 self so fondly recalled. Because in your heart of hearts, you know that you've retained a Dorian Gray freshness while these poor buds of yore have sadly metamorphosed into a bunch of dowdy Sirs and Ma'ams.

You have to imagine, too, what it feels like for some of these bands that once filled stadiums with the adoring young and beautiful to now play before gaggles of comfort-fitted moms and dads, awkwardly swaying, shouting at their kids, and sipping warm lite beer, on a muddy, halfheartedly seeded field. Maybe like so many others these days, the rock 'n' roll veterans are glad just to have a job.

A good deal of unplanned entertainment came from a muddy area next to where my wife and I watched the show. Due to the slowly deepening darkness, and perhaps abetted by a beer or two, people went sliding through this slough all evening. Here was a faint echo, a diminished chord riff, of those fabled mud baths of Woodstock, a kind of human mud bog--moms and dads skidding clumsily through on their way to the Porta-Potties, some bemused, some not--in any case, good, not-so-clean fun as folks waded in and tried vainly to gain traction as they windmilled through.

On to issues of greater significance: those aforementioned beer prices. (Wine is available, too, for the misguided types who think that wine and rock actually mix. I say wine, unless it's cheap jug wine and is passed around in abandoned Dionysian fashion, has as much place at a rock concert as a half-smoke does at the opera.)

First, you have to buy drink tickets at 5 bucks a pop. I don't know about you, but the last time I presented a ticket for a beverage, a scowling cafeteria lady handed me a micro-carton of strawberry milk. And it cost 5 cents. Maybe the beer prices are meant to be prohibitively high, to monetarily limit overindulgence. And maybe that's best. These are, after all, attempting to be family-friendly shows.

Sunshine, fresh air, chilly beverages (did I mention what they cost?), and rock music. Summer's here. Thanks, Celebrate Virginia folks, for bringing these shows to our humble (but increasingly less humble) burg. With gas prices inching upward again (just Texaco Exxon Mobil's way of saying "Have a great summer"), it's nice not having to drive to Richmond or Washington to catch some live music. Although you're going to get gouged here, too--at the taps.

Rob Huffman lives in Spotsylvania County.