Your Dad’s Rock and Roll

With Thanksgiving just around the corner and everyone flocking back home to be with family, Trashwire brings you a new piece by Will Ables about bonding with his dad over The Boss, vodka on the rocks and all things classic rock and roll.

You really should call your mother. I could list a series of “special” reasons why you should do this but it’s just simpler to tell you that it just makes life easier. That said, you should also call your father. Trust me, he wants to hear from you too. But I’m going to go one step further, you should visit your father, and you two should do something together.

What do I think you should do?

You should go to a concert. It’s great if it’s something you both like but it’s more important that it’s a band that he likes. I’m sure you two can find some common ground, and if you can’t, than it’s most likely your taste in music sucks. I guarantee your father likes at least one great band or singer that is still out there, alive and kicking. There are plenty of options out there: Robert Plant, The Rolling Stones, Roger Daltrey, The Allman Brothers, Levon Helm, and many, many more. If you don’t know what the hell your father likes, ask your mother when you call her, or raid his record collection. Your dad has one, somewhere, and it’s probably cooler than yours. So you’ve found a band, bought the tickets and, unless it’s the Osmond’s show in Vegas, you should be excited. Go to the show, don’t pussy out, and I guarantee it will be one of, if not the best, concert you’ll ever go see.

The reason for this is not the concert itself. It may be great, or it may even be incredible, but you will have an even better time with what happens after the show.

Recently Bruce Springsteen did a series of shows to close out Giant’s stadium in the Meadowlands before it gets the wrecking ball treatment. For five nights over 10 days Springsteen played a combination of full album front-to-back sets, some hits, and covers and forgotten tracks. It was a show for the die-hards, of which my father is without a doubt one. So on a rainy September night in the swamps of Jersey I watched, with my father, one of, if not the greatest, rock and roll performers of all time. Playing through all of Darkness on the Edge of Town, Springsteen’s third album (and a personal favorite of mine) as well as new and old material and a few unexpected covers (i.e “Jailhouse Rock”, which I learned has about thirteen verses). The Boss kept fifty thousand standing on their feet, dancing and singing, for three and a half hours. It made me feel like a pussy in ways that even Bonnaroo failed to do. It was exhausting—amazing—but exhausting.

There were perfect moments during the concert, many of which I am sure I will never forget, some of which would take to long to recount and others of which I’m going to keep just for me. The look shared between my father and a good friend of his, both with strong ties to New York, during the September 11th themed “Long Walk Home” or the hand shake The Boss himself gave my father during “Hungry Heart” are some of the things I take away from the concert. But the really great stuff, the stuff that shapes relationships between father and son, that came after when the crowd had spilled out of the Meadowlands and crossed the river to the New York side.

Over a series of vodkas on the rocks (my father’s drink of choice, which I chose to adopt for the evening) I talked about music with my father. Or, to be more honest, he told me about music in a way that is better than any other: In the words of Rob Gordon in High Fidelity, “Autobiographical.”

At age 22 and probably containing more pent up irresponsibility than I could manage in a lifetime, my father and six of his friends piled into a car that was lucky to have four wheels and drove across half the south to see the Rolling Stones in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. At the concert, my dad squeezed into a corner of the pit, drumming his elbows so hard against the concrete barrier that he literally made himself bleed during “Street Fighting Man”.

At another concert, my father recalled Roger Daltrey screaming on stage while swinging his microphone around like a madman, sending it flying through the air into the crowd. In the course of it being passed back to the stage a knife fight broke out between the people next to my father. He seems to remember someone getting stabbed but forgets the details; apparently the second verse of “Won’t Get Fooled” again took precedence.

For some reading through these they probably just seem like a disconnected series of vignettes that may or may not seem kind of cool. But for me they create context not just for great music, but great music as it was experienced firsthand and how those experiences shaped my father and my family. If I haven’t convinced you by now I don’t know what will. You really should go to a concert with your dad. It’s good for you, for your family, and best of all it will make great, classic music that much more important and meaningful to you. You’ll connect with a parent and you’ll connect with music that belongs to another generation. Also, side note: It’s fine to take your mother to a concert and you’ll likely have a similar experience. For me this was a father-son thing, but it could just as easily be mother-daughter, father daughter etc.; the point is just to go.

Oh, and call your mother. She wants to know why you’re still single at your age.