Does anybody really know what time it is?
There’s something about the music of your youth that can take you way, way back
There are a lot of advantages to having children.
I can’t think of any right at this moment, but I’m sure with time and some therapy, a few will come to mind.
Seriously, having kids teaches you many things. For example, biology. Early on you learn that a human can go days, even years, without a full night’s sleep and still manage to perform badly at work.
And physics. From my kids, I discovered that “force equals mass times acceleration” particularly when the mass is baby vomit and the target is your new suit.
Or mathematics. From my teenaged kids, I learned that “only a few” — as in “friends coming over to the house” — meant anything under 100.
But perhaps the greatest thing your kids can teach you about is music. Why? Because without kids playing the music they love, everyone would be listening to the same 12 songs they liked in 1981.
Kids force you to hear music being made after the year 2000 — even if you hate most of it. My son James introduced me to Linkin Park (which I still blast in the car when I’m alone) and we went to see Green Day and Blink-182 in concert in Toronto. Against all odds and despite some spontaneous ear bleeding, I had a great time. Blink blew Green Day off the stage as I recall.
My son Matt got me onto the fun ska-punk band called Reel Big Fish and my daughter dragged me out to her first live concert — Hilary Duff (not exactly a musical high point, but big on glitter) — but later on, we went together to see The Kings of Leon for a show that ranks among the best I’ve ever seen. As well, she provides my wife and me with a steady stream of new songs from people we might otherwise never hear about, like Bon Iver, The Lumineers and Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros. She does this not out of deep love, but rather to prevent my wife from playing the same Michael McDonald CD in the car forever. (I wish I was kidding about this, but if I have to hear “Minute by Minute” year by year, I might go insane).
Without our kids, I have a feeling my musical evolution would have ended sometime after the first ice age and just before Ronald Reagan took office. Thank goodness the same isn’t true for hairstyles and fashion or I’d still be sporting a layered shag and trying to not fall off my platform shoes. But there’s something special about the music of your youth that sticks in a way nothing else does.
That’s exactly what I thought when I happened upon a full-page advertisement in the newspaper for a concert featuring Chicago and Earth, Wind & Fire. Without a pause, I said to my wife, “OK, we gotta go to that.” Unfortunately, she wasn’t in the room at the time. Nevertheless, I was committed and I let a few high school and university friends know about the concert and pretty soon we had more than a dozen people on board. We had all loved the bands of that era that had strong horn sections — like Lighthouse, Tower of Power and Blood Sweat & Tears — and this was a chance to hear two of the very best.
And so that’s how we found ourselves on our feet dancing in the aisles to the blasting brass of songs like “Gotta Get You Into My Life” and “(I Just Want To Be) Free” like a bunch of 20-year-olds.
Well, like 20-year-olds until it was time to sit back down when my friend Ron leaned over and said, “That’s the sound of 10,000 people grunting.”
But as the bands played on, the years disappeared. Songs are a kind of time machine, propelling you back to the moment you first heard them, to the darkened gym of your high school dance, to the pulsing, strobe-lit floors of disco, to riding in a car with the radio way up loud.
The music — your music — plays and in an instant you’re back. To a hot, sunny “Saturday In The Park” or talking with your friends late into the night when it’s always “Twenty-Five or Six to Four.”
Paul Benedetti lives in Hamilton where he still listens to Frank Sinatra.