One hot dose

Friday night I got thirty years of rock condensed into one spectacular . . . ly long night of Nascar T-shirts, male short shorts, bad bleach jobs, worse facelifts, and of course all the homophobia you could shake a broomstick at.

The band was RUSH, the anniversary was diamond (paper depending on whose grandmother you talk to), the crowd was stoked and also mostly high or drunk, the performance--I understand--was quintessential. I say understand because I really have no frame of reference to compare it to, having only previously heard Tom Sawyer and a handfull of tracks from Roll the Bones. So I take the word of my two young cousins, who accompanied me--or rather, whom I accompanied. They supplied the ticket and the running commentary on Neal Peart's all inclusive drumming aesthetic and the evolution of Geddy Lee's voice; I supplied the car.

As this was technically a family outing and I really never see my family as I live such a distance away as to make travel prohibitive, I tried to understand this thing that my cousins were obviously so wrapped up in. The task proved more or less impossible. There was just too much funny shit happening in the audience to care about what was happening onstage.

Cousin: Whoa man, did you hear the guitar at the end of Working Man there?
Me: Yes, wow.
Cousin: That was amazing
Me: Yeah, so is that man with the David Crosby Haircut and Marlb-rolled sleeves.
Cousin: [laugh] Yeah
Me: Wow he must've really liked the solo too, he's taking off that bleached denim sleeveless jacket with the Rush pentagram thing and holding it aloft. And now his girlfriend--there, the one with the track marks--is illuminating it for all the world to see with her Harley-Davidson Zippo.

That was almost word for word one of the many FANTASTIC observations I was able to make of this most American crowd in their natural habitat: Drunk and blindly clutching at lost youth.

There was also the guy in the threadbare shirt commemorating Rush's 1976 "Two Hemispheres" Tour with hair more or less like these guys, who kept looking back at me with a more or less ironic look on his face, mocking the fact that I wasn't double-fisting the devil horns. He actually smirked in disbelief and shook his head. I'm a lost cause, you're right

There were of course SCORES of ex-high school football players, whom you could distinguish easily enough by their tight, curly mullet and full beards, their mil-spec cellphones clipped to their large-buckled belts and the small studded earring they kept in their left ear--a silent vigil to that district championship, that miracle season, 197x. The sub-genus, Ex-quarterback, further differentiated by the bleached-blonde silicon repositories that hung off their arms, their baby-doll t-shirts doing nothing to hide the scars from that third cesaerean section.

I'll add more to this later . . . .