Just Like A Rock Star Hey Hey Hey!

Last night Matthew and I went to a concert. A big grownup concert. (Not Laurie Berkener.)We saw Radiohead at the Prudential Center in New Jersey. To be honest, I don't know much about Radiohead, except for a few popular songs from ten years ago. But I recently learned that my husband had never been to a live concert. Me, I used to be a band girl. I dated musicians in college. I carried drums and crammed into the backseat of cars with six other people on the way to some dank basement club. And I went to a lot of real concerts too. I slept in a dusty field for a weekend and listened to Phish play four hour sets. I've seen the Rolling Stones at Giants Stadium. I saw Aerosmith and Counting Crows and Dave Matthews Band. I even went to see Meat Loaf. (Go ahead and laugh but it was a pretty good show!)

I haven't been to a real concert in years but it was inconceivable to me that Matthew had never gone. So I went to my friend Patrick (who happens to be a musician himself) and asked for advice. It went something like this:
Me: Matthew has never been to a concert. Where should I take him?
Patrick: Go see Radiohead.

The show was awesome! I still don't know much about Radiohead but I have now decided they belong on my Ipod. A live show can do that to you.

Actually, it's not quite true that I haven't been to a show in years. Every summer Madison Square Park has free concerts for kids and I have taken Maya to a bunch of them. She loves live music. In particular she loves to dance around in the grass, elaborate productions which include pirouettes, karate kicks and cartwheels. (She requires a lot of space.) The other kids are usually dancing too so if you look at the crowd from a distance it looks like a bunch of bobbleheads in a field.

This is actually not that different from the Radiohead concert. (minus the cartwheels) Matthew and I were really really high up. (If it were an outdoor stadium we would have been enjoying Thom Yorke's crooning from atop a nice fluffy cloud.) When we looked down all we could see was a huge sea of gently vibrating bodies.

It would seem that concerts are concerts. There is a band on stage. There is dancing. Drinks. Spilling of drinks. Occasional crying. However, there were some notable differences in our adult concert experience that you may not see at a Wiggles show:

1. Weed. I was comforted to learn that people still get high at concerts. Not that I have any interest. (Because I am OLD.)  But really it would not be a live show without contact high and stinky hair. Why is it that the minute the lights go out humans assume it is ok to break laws?  Weed is still illegal right?  (BTW, I am not judging, at the Stones show in college I was so baked I could barely see Mick Jagger's lips. ) Man I am old.
2. The eerie glow of cellphones. Hundreds of cellphones. Thousands of cellphones. People updating their Facebook statuses ("I am high as f--k! Radiohead woo!") and videotaping and texting their friends at the other side of the building, ("I am high as f---k! Radiohead woo!") When I was younger we waved lighters during the slow songs. Now it is Iphones.

Maya likes the Fresh Beat Band. (If you do not know who this is, picture four teenagers who sing and rap and dance. But not Brittney Spears or that damn sexy Justin Beiber. Sweet, fully clothed, non-intimidating teenagers who sing upbeat songs that a four year old would love. And that, once you hear them, will never leave your head.) She likes them a lot. So when I learned that they were actually doing a fall concert here in NYC I tried to get tickets. The concert is completely sold out. Tickets are currently selling for $350 on Ebay. Radiohead eat your heart out!

The concert went pretty late and Maya was up at 6:45 this morning ready to go. I only drank two beers last night but I am exhausted and my head kind of hurts. Still, I can confidently say that I have learned two things. One, Radiohead is a pretty good band. If you have the chance to see them in concert I highly recommend it. 

Two, I am really really old.