ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED BY THE SOMERS RECORD (11-20-25)
When we attended a Robert Plant-and-friends show at the Capitol Theater last Saturday I realized I hadn't been to a bona fide sit-down concert in quite a while, one that I wasn't working at as a volunteer usher, as I do at the Tarrytown Music Hall. Plant, performing a smattering of Led Zeppelin songs, evokes a bygone age of rock and roll, when it was okay to bite the heads off bats, or play so loud that blood could be seen coming out of the audience members' ears, or light your guitar in flames without first going over the fire safety exit plan.
When I was in high school, there was a heyday of rock and roll. This was before artists were formerly known as other artists, or people brought their kids and put ear protection on them. There was an element of danger to the whole experience. You could fall in with the wrong kind of crowd, or even become trampled by the wrong kind of crowd. You used to be able to get tickets to a show at Roosevelt Field for 8 bucks, complain about how much prices had gone up, pile into your Mom's station wagon and be on the L.I.E. before she reported it missing. If anyone remembered what exit the stadium was it was a bonus, but if you simply followed the traffic you had a 50/50 chance of getting there, unless you ended up at a hockey game. You could save your ticket stub and show it off the next day to your friends, a conquering hero, if you weren't grounded for two weeks. I tried showing off my e-wallet account history to my friends after the Robert Plant show, but it just wasn't the same.
What is your favorite concert experience of all time? When I think back to all the concerts that I can recall, I realize that it's remarkably few. Not because I didn't attend that many, but because I was a child of the '70s. So if I tell you that I remember many of the details, I probably really wasn't there at all. But one performance does stand out in my memory: seeing Emerson, Lake and Palmer at the Garden with a 70-piece orchestra on hand to play the album, "Works." The production was an absolute gem, but once someone actually did the math, including feeding all the musicians on a daily basis, the show proved fiscally unviable, and the tour was aborted. Remember, while rock stars can subsist on a diet of cheese steaks, beer and used carburetor parts, classical musicians need to eat hummus, fresh fish and French wine in order to survive.
There are so many bands I wished I had seen. The Beatles, obviously. I picture myself at the Ed Sullivan theater, age 12, screaming at the top of my lungs, at all the annoying girls who won't shut the hell up. The who is another group I wish I had seen. Who could write an entire rock opera about a deaf, dumb and blind kid who became famous playing pinball, and have it all make sense? Come to think of it, it did not make any sense. But I still loved the record.
Believe it or not, I never saw the Grateful Dead in concert. But from what I understand, the Grateful Dead could play a four-hour show, using only one song, and at some point during the performance, you could drop out of school, join the army, get married, have a baby, undergo a religious awakening, denounce God and eat an entire anchovy pizza before ending up in the medical tent, where you were declared perfectly normal and therefore asked to leave.
My niece recently traveled all the way to Germany to see Taylor Swift perform, because it was actually cheaper than seeing her in America, once all the numbers were run and every employee of Ticketmaster had received a $2000 bonus. Thus was ushered in a new era of music-Taylored tourism, and also, Swiftian irony. Just another of Taylor's many eras.
I'm afraid to see any artist live who was born after 1967, because I'm concerned that I may become annoyed by incessant lip-syncing, Autotune and excessive choreography. I come from a generation that just wants to you do the songs that we all remember, to see if you really know all the chords and can sing that high. And if you MUST do songs from your boring new album, don't expect a medal. And for GOD's sake, don't dance unless you absolutely have to or an insect flies into your pants.
At the end of the concert, the band walks off with a wave, and it's up to us, through only the power of our enthusiastic applause, to coax them back onstage to continue the revelry. We carry on for a good while, because that's what we do. I steal a glimpse at my watch as I applaud. Is "Dateline" on? The intensity of my own personal clapping is based on a complicated algorithm that takes into account the quality of the performance, the length of the show, how long my car ride home is, their likelihood of returning, whether or not I have to go to the bathroom, and other data that are carefully factored in. Meanwhile, the stage crew has removed two microphones in an effort to test our resolve. What if they never come back? What if they're already at their hotel, drinking, carousing, breaking furniture and throwing fashion models out of the window into the hotel pool? Maybe that was the old Led Zeppelin, but the septuagenarian Robert Plant probably hasn't lost a step. He could be up in his room, cheating at Scrabble, or under-reporting his sodium intake to his cardiologist. BUT, just as the skin on my hands begins to wear away, the group returns to the stage and the magic continues, if only for a moment longer.
