<p>Dad’s POV (needs registration)
A father’s fling with Flaming Lips
( Boston Globe, by Don Aucoin, 2006/08/12 )
I am standing 10 yards from a stage at Lollapalooza in Chicago, which is way too close, if you ask me, when a band called Death Cab for Cutie decides to crank it up. I am in my ninth hour of virtually nonstop aural assault. I am at least 25 years older than everyone else in the heaving, dancing mob …</p>
<p>My sister wanted to go see Good Charlotte a few years ago so my mom decided to take her… and she decided I should come as well since Everclear was playing and at the time I was into them. It was at the First Union Center in Philly. (Which is where the Sixers and Flyers play for all of you non-philadelphians.) She searched through all of the tickets online and decided it would be best to have an actual seat, rather than being on the floor, and she thought it would be nice to be directly looking at the stage. So there we are, as far away from the stage as possible, in the very very very top row of the First Union Center. I, being afraid of heights, was terrified. I sat down in my seat scared to death during the entire concert… and the people to the left and right of us up in the nose bleed section were smoking pot the whole time. I’ll never let my mom live down getting those seats at that show.</p>
<p>S attended some of our concerts as a toddler( I played keyboard in H’s band in previous life) . Now we enjoy attending concerts together. Great bonding experience. :-)</p>
<p>My H took our boys to wild concerts up until they were old enough to figure out that funny smoke engulfing them was marijuana (not from H, from fellow concert goers). The boys wore earplugs.</p>
<p>Cypress Hill was a memorable one as I remember…</p>
<p>^^^^^^
We are immigrants too. Played rock in USSR when you could get expelled from school or even arrested for doing it. Those were the days…:-)</p>
<p>Cheers, i’ve seen cypress hill twice. they played their song “hits from the bong” or whatever it’s called and brought this giant bong out on stage at Penn State University Park. Within two seconds the entire place smelled like marajuana smoke. The other time I saw them it was outdoors so it wasn’t nearly as bad.</p>
<p>I’ve been to 3 warped tours and too many small clubs to count to see start up bands trying to make it. My D gets a kick out of the fact I get into conversations with all the kids in the bands about run of the mill stuff. I wear ear plugs so I do not lose my hearing.</p>
<p>bands i’ve seen with my parents: matchbox 20, soul asylum, blink 182, new found glory, goo goo dolls, tonic, the barenaked ladies (if you like concerts and entertainment you should see them, they’re hilarious), good charlotte, everclear, live, the wallflowers, and fuel. these were 5+ years ago.</p>
<p>I would have been mortified to been seen at a concert with my parents. Of course, that was so long ago that the top draw was Org Beat on Rock with Stick - Make Sound</p>
<p>Now that my daughter is 14, she’s apparently too old to go to concerts with her parents.
We’ve taken her to see the Foo Fighters, Weezer, Madonna, Green Day, Jimmy Eat World, RHCP, Offspring, REM, U2, All-American Rejects and KROQ festival shows with artists including Audioslave, Interpol, Queens of the Stone Age, Sum 41, the Srokes, NIN, Korn, My Chemical Romance, AFI, Franz Ferdinand, the Killers, Fall Out Boy, the list is endless. It was a blast sharing music – but now we have to bow out. She’s seeing the Chili Peppers again, this time without us. We still share a love of music (ingrained in them since birth – my son was named after my husband and my favorite singer), but going to concerts (i.e., out in public!) with us is apparently now in the past.</p>
<p>As for the guy who wrote the article – it’s hard to imagine Death Cab “cranking it up”! That’s like the Fray or Keane head banging.</p>
<p>This is working with my son also … generally he considers my a hopeless old man. I lend him a bunch of my CDs about which his first reaction is quite negative but then a week later or so a couple of the CDs go missing. This seems to be the first evidence, other than sports, of Dad not being a total dork since my son reached teenagehood.</p>
<p>Took my younger S to see Alanis Morrisette when he was seven. OK, not exactly rock and roll, but. We share an itunes library on the family computer. I take care not to download the hip hop to my ipod, but we do share some musical tastes. Last year, his grandmother gave him the sound track to the Last Waltz for the holidays.</p>
<p>As a sophomore, he took a half credit course in rock and roll history. Broadened his musical tastes. I thought that was great until he took a film elective this year. Important cultural background. Came home talking about a great movie he saw about the Korean War. Turned out they were doing a unit on Robert Altman</p>
<p>I was going to share two stories, but they weren’t really about my parents, so I deleted…I will leave this little bit, though:</p>
<p>There is a GREAT commercial for our local indie music store, Plan 9, that is a remake of that anti-drug commerical that shows the kid yelling “I LEARNED IT BY WATCHING YOU!”</p>
<p>They redo the entire thing, but the voice over says “Parents who play air guitar have children who play air guitar. Talk to your children about music.”</p>
