Tuesday

So last night Nick gave me a call and said that he had extra tickets to a band called “Lucas Nelson”, my response was “Lucas who? Never heard of him!”

“You’ll like him, he does old fashion rock and roll, and he’s the son of Willy Nelson!” Nick shot back.

My eyes rolled, I hated Willy Nelson and never did listen to him. I’m more into screaming modern rock like Seether, Breaking Benjamin, Blue October or Linkin Park. As my brother calls it “Angry young man music” But still I reluctantly agreed, they were playing in an old movie theater and you could literally get up right next to the stage without being pressed flat like a sardine at a major concert.

My son drove us down and we met up with his wife, Rose and a bunch of other friends of theirs ten years my age. They had a cocktail table set up next to the stage with drinks on it. This was to be a small relaxed concert I could tell. The warm up band soon started and I realized being right next to the stage and of course the sound system was a good way to go deaf in twenty minutes. The silence of the room went from a few decibels to 180dB in under a second with the first guitar cord. My eardrums were reverberating. That’s when I noticed everyone wadding up tissue paper, wetting it and stuffing it in their ears. The sound level dropped in half, but the vibration level was still that of a defibrillator. At least we were right next to the stage, close enough to see the sweat.

The first band, the lead singer actually crawled down from the stage to sing and mingle with the well mannered middle age crowd. They left her plenty of space to perform. If Bono from the band U-2 tried that at one of their concerts, he would have broken ribs from the pressure.

After an hour the main attraction came out, Willy Nelson’s 24 year old son, trained by the master himself since childhood, as well as helped from a few other big names from the previous generation like Eric Clapton. This might have explained why he was able to blast out cords and notes on his guitar like an old pro. In fact the entire band performed like an early 80’s rock band of high stature, being raised around music from birth what else was one to expect.

We had the base player right in front of us and good old Lucas ten feet away. The hormones were flying with the elderly women, reminiscent of the old times with Willy blasting away up on stage. They mouthed the words to each song. The eye candy this time was the two 24 year olds jumping up it the air with the energy of Yorkshire terriers on speed.

The connection to greatness was apparent when they played an older “Rolling Stones” song; most likely as a kid Mick Jagger showed him a few things or to with the guitar. At midnight the show wrapped up and we were able to meet the band members out front. They looked at their watches, at three in the morning their bus left for the next performance that evening in San Diego. They would sleep on the way.