Feel Like a Brand New Person

A while ago, a blog called The First in Line posted a story I wrote about a Weezer concert I attended with my friends in 1997, right after our freshman year of high school. I enjoyed writing it, and remembering the experience, and so I wrote a piece about another more recent concert: Tame Impala at Merriweather Post Pavilion last June. I never submitted that one to the blog though, and in fact, I forgot about it until last weekend. When I tried to submit it then, I realized that The First in Line seems to be taking a break. In fact, my story about Weezer, posted on July 31st, is still at the top of their archive of recent stories. I tried submitting it to another music publication and was rejected more or less immediately.

It turns out my blog is not as discerning as most other publications, especially when it comes to my own writing, so for now I'll just post it here. And incidentally, this song has the highest number of plays on my itunes and is still firmly stuck in my head.

I haven’t lost the capacity to become enraptured with a new band. But – partly because I teach high school, and I maintain what I like to think is a healthy distance from my students, and partly just because I’m a little older – I think I’ve lost the capacity to feel a kinship with a new band’s audience. These are the two main conclusions I’ve reached, while sitting on the grassy slope at Merriweather Post Pavilion, alongside my friends Nick and Steve, waiting for Tame Impala to take the stage. Tame Impala is an Australian rock band whose front man Kevin Parker is, at thirty-one, a few years younger than I am. Their sound, however, is a kind of a throwback to the late sixties and early seventies. (To me, Parker’s voice sounds strikingly like John Lennon’s.) And for this reason, their genre is almost always described as “psychedelic rock.” So they sound a bit like bands from before my time, and their main fan base is decidedly after my time. I would conservatively guess that the average age here is about twenty. More than a handful, I’ll wager, are here celebrating the end of their second year at College Park.

It’s hard to accept that I’ve become one of the old guys at the concert. But all the same, I’m excited for this show in the way that I haven’t been in a long time. For the past two weeks, I’ve been listening to their latest album Currents on a virtual nonstop loop. The bouncy synth chords on “The Moment,” which sounds a little like a more sinister version of “Everybody Wants to Rule the World,” have burrowed their way into my ear. The mere thought of the hypnotic main riff on “Mind Mischief” makes me spontaneously and purposefully nod my head.

Me, Steve and Nick - approximately a half hour before the weather got ugly.

In an effort to save a few bucks, my buddies and I agreed to pick up lawn seats, instead of the more expensive seats underneath the covered pavilion. For the entirety of the opening band’s set, I’m glad for this decision. The opener is French Electronic group M83, whose music, despite my never having heard of it before last week, has earned a major following in its own right. I recognize one of their songs, a soaring ballad with a big, anthemic chorus, from an itunes commercial. Millenials have a reputation for being ironic about everything, but their sound is refreshingly sincere, and I hope it serves as the backdrop for a romantic moment between two of the College Park sophomores. It isn’t until after M83’s set that the first raindrops hit my arms. By the time the lights go down for Tame Impala, rain is falling at a steady pace.

Buying tickets to a show at Merriweather Pavilion, or any equivalent half-lawn/half-covered venue like New Jersey’s Garden State Arts Center where I saw some of my first shows, is like a poor man’s lottery. Do you save some money and go with the lawn seats, crossing your fingers for a lovely evening? Or do you pay a bit more for the peace of mind that comes with covered seats? We chose the former and, although it hadn’t seemed that way during the opening set, we were getting burned.

The good news, such as it is, is that during a rainy concert, there comes a point of saturation – both figuratively and literally – at which you stop caring about the rain, because you can’t get any wetter. Choosing appropriate clothing for an outdoor show had actually proven even more difficult than the question of whether or not to purchase uncovered seats. You don’t want to be too cold, so normally you might dress in layers. But you really don’t want to be carrying around a sweatshirt if it stays warm out – especially in the rain. And wet jeans are the absolute worst. For me, there was also the matter of dressing fashionably enough to look like any other (relatively) young person enjoying a summer concert. They say that as you age, you start to feel less concerned with what other people think, and in general I think that’s true, but weirdly, some of that old college self-consciousness starts to return to me when I’m in the presence of a bunch of college kids, even though I realize intellectually that no one really cares what I’m wearing. On this night, in the unlikely event that anyone was paying attention, they would have seen a guy willing to forgo style for comfort. My choice of gym shorts, a t-shirt and a bright orange raincoat felt fairly ridiculous at the outset, but as the rainfall became certifiably torrential, I felt increasingly pleased with my decision. Actually, the raincoat did little. The drops inevitably infiltrated my pockets, soaking my keys, phone and leather wallet. (I would have to use my wife’s hairdryer the next day, to dry out each individual dollar bill I carried.)

When, a few songs into the set, Kevin Parker shouted, “How’s everyone up there in the rain?” the crowd roared back to signify their total euphoria. I roared along with them, and my roar was genuine: none of the standard “I’ll humor you” tone I usually reserve for responding to the standard, “How are you feeling, Baltimore?” I was paying my dues to see a band I really liked, and I wanted everyone to know it, especially those bastards underneath the covering in front.

There was no point in feeling self-conscious now. I bought a round of Flying Dogs for Nick and Steve (the tall-boy cans) and brought it back to our muddy spot, about two thirds of the way back, dead center. I took a big swig and danced to that groovy bassline on “The Less I Know the Better.” (There is, to be sure, no other appropriate reaction to that bassline in any scenario, even for the usually reluctant dancers like myself.) I belted out the lyrics to “It Feels Like We Only Go Backwards,” even though I messed up a few of them.

By the encore, I was far beyond caring about the soaked contents of my raincoat pockets, focusing instead on the all-consuming rhythm of “New Person, Same Old Mistakes” – the last track on Currents, and the last tune of the evening.  I sang along with the chorus, “Feel like a brand new person,” and felt as though I had written it myself.

As if on an automatic setting, my head kept right on bobbing as I trudged toward the parking lot, which by this time, was more of a marsh. Traffic moved slowly out of the lot, but having no plans for the following day, I felt none of the impatience that usually comes from sitting in a line of parked cars.

This picture is from our show - but our view from the lawn was nothing like this.

I first discovered rock concerts when I was fourteen years old, and for a while, there was a sense of euphoria that came from each one of them. That feeling has been hard to find lately, in part because I don’t go to as many concerts as I used to, but also, I think, because I’ve grown a little jaded. Tonight though, because I was with friends, because I had had a couple beers, because the rain had lent the evening a weird, though not unpleasant sense of chaos, and most importantly, because Tame Impala had just solidified my infatuation for them, that jadedness had evaporated. As I sat in that unmoving line, I pulled up Currents on my ipod and cranked the volume on my car stereo, contentedly drumming my fingers on the steering wheel while I waited for the car in front of me to move.