If It Sold Out Too Fast, You're Too Old

Dinosaur Jr is coming through town tomorrow. They are one of my all-time favorite bands: their albums accompanied many an endless Baltimore summer, and they're one of the two or three bands whose music can automatically make me happy. As a kicker, my hero of bass guitar, as well as one of the few honest dudes in rock music (others include Ian Mackaye and Steve Albini), Mike Watt, is opening for them.

Too bad it's sold out. (So is the presale for Sonic Youth at 930 in DC, but there's still the regular sale tomorrow.) My bad, really, should've just gotten tickets right when they went on sale. But the truth is, I'm just not as vigilant anymore; shows don't register on my mental radar as much as they used to, dates grow fuzzy (both concert dates and current dates). The days are long gone when I woke up at 7AM for presales and planned my calendar around concerts in blocks of 2-3 months. That was pretty much how I spent my college years.

I remember when I first came to Baltimore in 2004, I was so overwhelmed that bands I knew only through listening to albums repeatedly as I simmered in suburban New Jersey ennui were playing right! here! in my same city! (or DC, or Towson) that I went to basically every single show with a band I'd heard of and liked, or that one of my friends had heard of and liked. I saw bands early on that I wouldn't begin to comprehend until years later. I saw one of the very first Dan Deacon shows in Baltimore in fall 2004, weeks after I moved here (for reference, the gushing Pitchfork review of Spiderman of the Rings, by Baltimore operative Jess Harvell, begins: "I first saw Dan Deacon play live in August 2005, just after I moved to Baltimore..."), though I came away with a take-home message of little more than wtf-was-that? (Which is why I'm not a Pitchfork reviewer, I suppose.) For those more inaccessible shows in DC, I would beg my friends who had cars to come along and drive; or take the train and wait around until 3AM for the first Amtrak of the next day back to Baltimore, which cost another $17 and once resulted in two of my friends and I falling asleep in the quiet car and waking up halfway to Wilmington, Delaware; or crash on someone's couch, after a couple friends moved to the area. All in all, I went the distance, and on a regular basis too.

That mostly ended in the past year or two. Partly because I fell in with friends who got even more consistently excited about shows than I did, until I burnt out. Partly because I started playing shows of my own and onstage goings-on very rapidly lost their mystique. Partly because I went into a prolonged paralytic freak-out that I spent so much time, money, and energy consuming the creative product of others while producing so little of my own, and attempted to reorient my ego through isolation. And, most recently, because I stopped bothering to do things without M.'s company; being single, it was much easier to say to hell with it, let's go nuts, nobody cares when we go to sleep!

Not that I attribute my decline to any kind of imposition from anyone else. The kids at the shows never grew any older or less enthusiastic; it was all internal, it was all me. And I feel more and more that no part of that will ever return. Not even in New York City. It's not just about music. I can't complain; this is real, this is serious, this is what I wanted forever. But something is being lost. And that sense of irretrievably abandoning something I used to embrace gives me pause, all good intentions notwithstanding.