showing my age
There are few pleasures in life better than seeing one of your favorite artists live. But what happens when you feel like you have aged out of going to concerts? They start/end too late, you don’t enjoy being in a crowd like you used to, you feel conspicuous, especially when the music you like tends to skew much younger than you. Do you just give up that pleasure?
When I finally grew out of my angsty heavy rock/nu-metal phase in the early 2000s, I started taking my musical cues from my kids, who were then in middle school. They turned me on to emo and indie music and I’ve never looked back. We bonded over music, and artists I listened to out of curiosity over what my children were listening to turned into an obsession of sorts. I eschewed everything I was listening to for this new-to-me genre of music. Whether I was listening to it for the content, for lyrics that hit me in my 30s the way Springsteen lyrics hit me in my late teens, or whether I was just filling a space in my life, the music quickly wormed its way into my heart and soul. My kids and I were a united front when it came to music and as any parent of teenagers know, you take those united fronts when you can find them and your revel in them.
It’s many years later and that passion for emo and indie music has not waned. My favorite bands read like a list of artists a millennial would have penned in the margin of their high school notebook: Taking Back Sunday, Brand New, The Front Bottoms, American Football, Modern Baseball all figure prominently in my day to day listening. But it wasn’t until my daughter started asking me to go to shows with her that I gave any thought to how my age figures into what I listen to.
I didn’t really start feeling my age until 55. I was ok with 50, I felt like I had a good grip on life and was aging gracefully. But when 55 hit, so did the aches in my bones which reminded me that I was no longer that young woman who could take on anything. I was aging. And it felt sudden and horrible. So I try to stay young, to an extent, and perhaps in the most immature of ways, by having a mini post-midlife crisis. I’ve gotten six tattoos in the past two years. I’m an extremely online person, on twitter for many hours a day, tweeting out memes and shitposting as if I wasn’t a 56 year old secretary staring in the face of retirement. Going to shows would be another way to keep me young, I thought, when my daughter first brought it up. After all, I’d been to hundreds of shows in my lifetime. I was a pro at concert going. I’d have a great time reveling in the music I love, seeing my favorite bands live, mingling with the kids, staying up late.
What I didn’t take into account was that two of those things — staying up late and hanging with kids — would have the opposite effect of what I was looking for; they made me acutely feel my age. I would often complain if there was more than one opener, glancing at my phone to check the time, calculating how late I would have to stay up. 90% of these shows are standing room only. Standing in one spot for hours at a time is not conducive to being in your 50s and I often end up with aching knees halfway through the show. I try to alleviate all that by taking off work the day after a show, and taking some Advil beforehand. But those things don’t stop me from feeling my age.
It’s partly my own fault. I stand in the venue before a show and case the crowd, looking for anyone who is anywhere near my advanced age. I usually don’t find anyone and I become hyper aware that I’m the oldest person in the place, employees included.
The Brand New show at Madison Square Garden wasn’t so bad. The crowd was so large that I was able to get swallowed up by it and had hope that nobody noticed there was an olds amongst them. But when we saw them at Kings Theater in Brooklyn, the venue was smaller and I quickly felt out of place. I tried to talk myself down from “I don’t belong here” ledge, and wasn’t comfortable until the lights went down and the show started. Once the music kicks in, I can lose myself in the show and forget that I am ancient compared to everyone else there. But sometimes as I sing along to songs filled with youthful angst, I feel it. I feel every bit of it. I feel like I don’t belong, that I shouldn’t be listening to this music, that it’s 10pm on a Thursday night and I should be home getting ready for bed. I feel, more or less, like an imposter. A 56 year old feigning youthfulness, a sham of an adult.
The first show we went to together was to see Kevin Devine at Amityville Music Hall, a tiny, local club that holds a few hundred people. It was Mother’s Day and my kids though that would be perfect. I found a place to stand in the back where I could lean against a wall and planted myself there for the duration. Occasionally I’d look around, scanning the crowd for anyone who looked like me; old, out of place. At one point Kevin said that there were several people in the audience who had taken their mothers to the show that night. I glanced around, looking hopefully for women my age, but I didn’t see any. I enjoyed the show, Kevin was fantastic. But I left feeling like I had intruded on a ritual meant only for the young.
I’ve been to quite a few shows with my kids since then, mostly at small venues where I tend to scan the face of every person in the crowd looking for a kindred spirit. Sometimes I’ll spot someone who’s obviously older and we’ll give each other a knowing nod. There’s a camaraderie there, a shared experience. “We’re old,” the nod seems to say, “but we’ve still got it.”
I’m going to a show tomorrow night (Joyce Manor and Saves the Day). I just bought tickets for three other shows, one in November (The World is a Beautiful Place), and two in December (Kevin Devine and Manchester Orchestra). The average age of the audience will be about 25 years younger than me, and I’ve got to do some soul searching about that fact. What if I go into this with the attitude that I’m going to enjoy the hell out of these shows not despite my being the oldest person there, but because I am. What if I wear it like a badge of honor? I’ll walk in head high, stand right there in the middle of the floor instead of leaning against a wall, and flaunt my age instead of hide it. I’m old and I’m cool, my demeanor will say. I’m tired of shrinking back, of feeling like I don’t belong. Never once has any kid at a concert given me a look or made me feel like I shouldn’t be there. This is all coming from within, my own sense of self doing me in. I love this music, I’m passionate about it, it’s an integral part of my life and I belong because of that.
For the past two years or so I’ve been half-enjoying shows because I’ve been so self conscious about just being there, like I was an ancient relic amid a sea of youth. I owe it to myself to shake off those feelings, loosen the grip age has on me. That conspicuous feeling I have at shows is just a microcosm of what I go through daily since hitting 55; I feel my age, I walk around as if everyone thinks I’m old and useless now, and I’d do well to shed that negativity and embrace the fact that I’ve gotten better at life as I’ve aged. I’m worn but I’m wiser for it. I’m older, but I’m more settled, more content than most of the younger people I feel intimidated by.
I’ll go to the Joyce Manor show tomorrow night with a new, improved attitude. But I’m still taking off the next day.
