Rock of Aged

I went to a rock concert last week, my first in decades. Crosby, Stills & Nash were playing for one night only at the Sandia Pueblo Casino, and it was something I just couldn't pass up. I last saw that particular group in Chicago, from the last rows in whatever arena it was that the Bulls played in 1974. I was loaded and I'm sure CSN was as well (if on more expensive drugs than the leafy, seedy pot I'd managed to scrounge). I remember that night as a significant part of a sharp left-turn in my life, screeching around a corner to get away from a premature maturity and rejoin my peers in one of their typical venues. I was almost too late, but I made it.

Anyway, we arrived at the casino parking lot last Tuesday two hours before the concert was to begin, and already there were hundreds of cars looking for spaces, and thousands of people with paunches and thinning gray hair wandering around and getting in the way of the cars. Mary remarked that there weren't even any slots in the handicap rows because so many of the arriving fans were old and infirm and used up the allotted spaces. We found a place toward the exit (I have learned SOMETHING from trips to the Santa Fe Opera), and headed for the casino for a hamburger and a Pepsi (yes, times have changed -- it's hard to find a drink on an Indian rez, and anyway I just can't load up the way I used to) before finding our seats in the amphitheater. Of COURSE the place was jammed -- this was Crosby, Stills and Nash, y'all -- and we were joined next to our seats very close to the front by a couple of other reconstructed hippies from our little hamlet on the mesa.

What else has changed? Well, there was no warm up band to pre-deafen us; CSN emerged on the stage just about on time, and they started right off with "Marrakesh Express". It was done pretty well, if a little slower and about a third lower in register than the original recording; Mary (who had an even bigger hole than mine in her cultural upbringing) LOVED that piece and hummed it for days afterwards. It wasn't the first time she'd heard it (or we would truly never have found any reason to know each other), but it was the first time she'd thought of it as musical expression.

(Aside: Mary is gestating a book, and one of its chapters will be entitled "A Nice Middle-Aged White Lady Listens to Hip Hop Music"; in the book she's taking music as a whole and finding really good reasons for all versions it. For my part, being a harmony addict, and having lived for 25 years with a heretofore musical long-hair, have no interest whatsoever in Rap or any of its descendants, but I admire her curiosity and love for the art, however raucous and annoying the expression. Have I told you that Mary is just about the most loving and accepting person I have ever known? That may be why she took me in -- I could be the human version of Rap music, and I don't think I'll explore that little metaphor one second longer.)

Back to the concert. Steven Stills has a serious problem with his knees, or maybe his hips -- he rolls around the stage like a sailor fresh from a two-year cruise; they only let him talk once, and what he said was not exactly clear (sorry, Buffalo Springfield), either in sentence structure or articulation. His sizable stomach was ill-disguised by an aloha shirt that hung off of his narrowed shoulders and draped close to his knees, and his alarmingly sparse hair was sadly combed over (until the wind blew it all over the place). I was at the point of despair until he took up his first guitar lick; gotta say it was as magical as ever. He hasn't lost a moment, a beat, a thought, of skill and beauty on his old, soft-yellow axe. He held on to singing the bass line pretty well, and in any case Graham Nash and David Crosby succeeded in finding their harmonies wherever Steven might have led them.

David Crosby seemed pissed off -- don't think he's ever gotten his ego past that of Stills -- and while he's lucky to be alive, he doesn't seem grateful for it. He glowered and snarled at the audience, he was snide to Sills, he only became animated when he was complaining about the Iraq war, and when that was over he subsided into immobility except for his singing and occasionally playing acoustic guitar (very well, actually). Crosby wore a faded, misshapen old blue tee shirt, also untucked as an attempt to hide HIS stomach, but even with the belly, he does seem a lot less bloated, less dissipated, than in the old days. He's a very fortunate man -- to be alive, to have a friend like Graham Nash and a long-suffering wife, and to have a voice that still, STILL sounds as sweet and true as it ever did.

Graham Nash has maintained himself the best of all of them (including Neil Young, whom we hoped would show but did not). He's still slender with a little bit of a puppy-belly, has a shock of well-cut white hair, and is animated and charming. Nash pretty well ran the show as Stills ambled around, often late getting to his mike, and Crosby pouted. Nash stations himself center stage, insulating the mad geniuses from each other and providing a musical and psychological ground for them. I think he's really the glue for the group, whether Young is with them or not -- Young being perhaps not as crazy, but certainly as weird as both Stills and Crosby -- and Nash is the perfect advertisement for genius residing comfortably and productively in a sane mind.

Most of the faves got played, except for "Suite: Judy Blue Eyes" which they probably couldn't have handled, either for its length or its strenuous tempos and licks, and the group was applauded mightily, producing two encores. Graham made the geniuses come out for a group bow in a row with their (BRILLIANT) side men, and then presumably led them back to their bus and tucked them in, administering whatever panacaeas they might need to quiet their troubled dreams and get some well-earned rest. We were all satisfied, even thrilled to have had one last visit with the intricate harmonies and sweet lyrics of these troubled survivors, and all of us made it home to bed well before midnight. Love among the ruins, indeed.

We bought two tee shirts and a set of DVD's from long ago concerts, edited for content and for who was high on what at the time. I've been enjoying the DVD's, which have replaced the occasional harmonic train-wrecks of the concert, but I would not have, for anything, missed seeing the old guys gasping out "Guinevere" or "Wooden Ships" one more precious time.