The day I left home for college, my
dad drove to work and listened to Neil Young’s “My Boy” on the car stereo. I can see him in my mind, driving east on
I-90, looking into the sunrise, maybe with a tear in his eye, as Neil sings to
his son, “Oh, you'd better take your time / My boy / I thought we had just
begun / Why are you growin' up so fast / My son?”
How do I know this happened? I orchestrated it. The day before, I slipped a copy of Old Ways into the tape deck of his Ford
Taurus, cued it, and left the power knob on so that when he started the car in
the morning the song would be the soundtrack for his commute.
Sixteen years later, on May 18th,
2010, I would take my dad to his first concert ever. Neil Young was coming to Albany , New York
Truth be told, this wasn’t his
first concert. My dad had seen Johnny
Mathis with my mom, and he once took me to a Weird Al show when I was a kid,
but this was his first real
concert. It’s not that my Dad lives
under a rock, it’s just that rock concerts aren’t his thing.
Although he and Neil are close in
age, and they both have similar lumberjack frames, they live in completely
different worlds. My dad is a
conservative baby boomer. He dreamed of
designing cars in Michigan ,
but commitments to family led him to other less-risky endeavors in civil and
environmental engineering. He’s like a
lot of dads, I suppose; he works hard and likes fixing things around the house
while listening to conservative AM-talk radio.
My colleagues at school (I’m a high school English teacher) and my
siblings, who are also relatively conservative (I’m the black sheep of the
family), were shocked to hear that I was taking him to a Neil Young show. The risks were many. There were all sorts of
things that my dad could frown upon. It
might be deafeningly loud. Neil might
play anti-war songs. People might be
belligerent. People might smoke pot.
I was taking my dad into uncharted
territory.
It was the opening show of the Twisted Road tour
so I had no idea what to expect. I
warned my Dad ahead of time: “Neil does his own thing. He could play crowd-pleasers or he could play
new stuff that nobody’s heard before.”
I knew that if Neil played some of
his hits, my Dad would know them because I had shaken the walls of our house
playing them on the stereo or with my overdriven garage-sale guitar. For the
sake of my dad, I was relieved that the show was a perfect mix of old and new.
Before playing the first chords to
“Cortez” Neil responded to a fan’s
request for “Old Man:” “I know, I know… Sixty-four and there’s so much more.” From the third-to-last row my Dad yelled
back, “Sixty-eight and it’s still great!”
I was reassured that my Dad was having a good time.
I was too. Although we were sitting in the third to last
row of the Palace, the show was intimate.
It was like watching what I imagine Neil might do at the ranch: putter
among his toys, moving from tool to tool.
I got to see Neil play Old Black, his Martins, his White Falcon, his
upright piano and pipe organ all in the same show. I love Crazy Horse, but this way I could
really focus on who I came to see.
Having grown up preferring the
crooners to rockers, my dad has always had a tough time discerning lyrics,
especially over an electric guitar. I had
been scribbling the songs down on my ticket stub so that I could go home and
print out the lyrics for him. I wanted
to annotate them with my own liner notes that explained how some of these songs
had been crucial to the soundtrack of my life:
- “Cortez
the Killer” was the first song I played in the car when I got my driver’s
license.
- “Down
by the River” was the song that made me want to learn how to play guitar.
- I
memorized all of the lyrics to Rust
Never Sleeps before I memorized my multiplication tables.
- I sang
“After the Goldrush” and then the rest of Live Rust to my wife on our third date to ease her fear of
bears as we descended
After the show we went down to the
edge of the stage. I couldn’t believe
that Old Black was just sitting there among Neil’s set up of Fender tweeds. I swear it was still resonating.
“That’s Old Black,” I said. “Neil’s
been playing that for longer than I’ve been alive.”
I explained to my dad how rare it
is for a professional musician to rely so heavily on one guitar, and how even
its frets were original. Though my dad
doesn’t play guitar, I knew he would appreciate the war-torn ’53 Les Paul
leaning in front of his equally ragged tweed amps. After all, my dad was the first person to
teach me to be wary of the fast and new, and to appreciate the beauty of the
old. Larry Cragg was standing in the
wings, watching us and looking stressed.
(Neil had experienced some difficulty with his White Falcon earlier in
the show.) I didn’t want to be a
star-fucker, so I just pointed him out to my dad as the ultimate caretaker of
Neil’s guitars.
As we left we walked past the tour
bus. My Dad dug the Buicks that seem to
molt out of the top. “See the ‘Zuma’
license plate?” I asked. “His mom used
to live in Florida .”
I had just finished reading Shakey so I was eager to play the
knowledgeable tour guide to my father, to enhance his evening, and to let him
see how much it meant for me to share this night with him. In a way, I suppose I was still seeking his
approval, like my own son will someday surely say, “Hey dad, look what I can
do. Hey dad, listen to what I know.”
In the quiet of the post-concert city-night,
I became fully aware that I had just spent the evening with the man I admire
most— the first man to teach me to do work I believe in and to do it with
integrity. Together we had spent the
night admiring the craft of a man who, for me, had reinforced the message and
made it beautiful.
My dad pursed his lips as he stared
up at the bus with wanderlust, “Do you want to wait around a little longer…
maybe get a pint?”
I was thrilled to see that my dad
didn’t want the night to end.
Neither did I.
(Originally published in Broken Arrow, for a contest. I came in second place.)
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