Reflections: Soundtrack of Our Lives

The other day while watching the opening round of the Australian Open tennis tournament, I realized that the first live music concert I ever saw took place on the same patch of ground where Novak Djokovic was at that moment making life miserable for his opponent. Today, that ground is occupied by Melbourne’s Rod Laver Arena, where the Australian Open has been played since the stadium was built in 1988. Prior to that, the site was known as the Melbourne Sports & Entertainment Centre, which as the name suggests, served as a venue for live music concerts when it wasn’t hosting sporting events.

The year was 1986 and the concert was by the British band Dire Straits. A friend and I were taken to it by his father—a man I considered one of the “cool” dads, because he did things like taking his kids to rock concerts, something my own father was about as likely to do as he was to sprout antlers. Our seats were in an altitude-sickness-inducing second balcony, so we spent most of the concert squinting to make out the antlike band-members strutting about the distant stage, bathed in a (for 1986) pretty spectacular light show. But even from that great height, the event made a powerful impression on sixteen-year-old me. I was awestruck by the energy and showmanship, and transported by the tide of communal goodwill washing through this sea of sweaty strangers.

[Read more of James Fox-Smith's musings about family members having differing musical tastes here.]

The experience turned me into a concert junkie, and through the rest of my high school and college years I spent much of my meager disposable income on getting closer to that distant stage. As Australia’s second-largest city, Melbourne was a good town for live music: large enough to justify a stopover whenever a big band set out on a world tour. So, in the late eighties and early nineties, I was fortunate enough to see concerts by iconic performers like Pink Floyd, Bruce Springsteen, The Eurythmics, INXS, the B-52’s; and later, as college sent my musical taste down various esoteric rabbit holes, scores of other acts whose names and song catalogs have long since been consigned to the second-hand record bin of history.

But even from that great height, the event made a powerful impression on sixteen-year-old me. I was awestruck by the energy and showmanship, and transported by the tide of communal goodwill washing through this sea of sweaty strangers.

I’m writing this on the verge of flying back to Melbourne to visit my parents—English expats who have called Australia home since a working holiday in 1975 turned into an accidental immigration. Dedicated worshipers of the classical music canon, my parents wore their devotion to the music of the European enlightenment like a shield against the unfamiliar popular culture of the strange new country in which they found themselves. Consequently, they often seemed dismayed by their teenaged son’s musical taste, which my mother was fond of describing as “a man shouting over the roar of heavy machinery.” And while dad’s record collection did stretch to include the occasional album by a jazz heavyweight like Dave Brubeck or Artie Shaw, I couldn’t imagine any scenario in which he would voluntarily attend a concert by Dire Straits, let alone any of the other, more obscure bands in my obsessively curated catalog.

Often the transition from childhood to adulthood seems set to a soundtrack sure to be considered puerile, unintelligible, or morally repugnant by one’s parents. But perhaps that was the point. When you’re young, music plays a vital role in defining your identity, so loving songs that your parents can’t stand is a rite of passage—one with the added benefit of keeping them out of the places where you and the rest of your generation are getting on with the business of becoming adults on your own terms.

Here in Louisiana, though, I’m not sure that conventional wisdom holds true, because so many of our most enduring musical genres unite, rather than divide, audiences across the generations. Last spring I went back to New Orleans Jazz Fest, after a several-year hiatus that was only partially attributable to COVID. It was one of those idyllic late April days—warm and breezy and devoid of the energy-sapping humidity that summer would soon bring. The lineup was classic Jazz Fest: a few big stars, orbited by a constellation of lesser-known but phenomenally talented acts playing zydeco and blues and jazz and gospel and rap and reggae, and mashups of all the above. The music flooded forth from the stages and tents to an ecstatic reception from fans aged eight to eighty. It was joyous and inclusive and, not for the first time during a Jazz Fest afternoon, I found myself wishing my father could be there to see it—certain that he, too, would love this extraordinary demonstration of music’s power to move, regardless of whether or not that music was his own.