A Foray Into The Youth Culture

Last night I took a walk on the wild side. Not really, it was more like a walk on the mild side . When your youngest is 15 and wants to attend a band concert that’s what happens when you are the parent elected to take the group. And I’m not driving 45 minutes to Louisville to drop my kid off and then returning 3 hours later. So it was that I got to check out the pre-rock-pop culture scene first hand.

It all started when Beave’s best friend got his first “gig” at the Bull Dog Café just up the road in Louisville last summer. They then made several trips up to play. Now the Bull Dog sounds more upscale than what it actually is, which is a hole in the wall burger joint with a mostly plywood Rube-Goldberg built staging area. It is an ideal location for garage bands to get their first taste of playing for an audience, especially since the audience is usually no more than 20-30 people, mainly friends and family, and the cover charge is five bucks, unless like last night, they get a big name, and then it’s ten bucks.

Anyway, last night was my first time at the Bull Dog. Four excited young men rode with me, and that is in itself a glimpse at the life of a teen today. I was pretty quiet on the way up, but in their excitement, they pretty much forgot I was in the car and I got to hear all of the latest buzz. Who knew guys gossip the way girls do?!

I had been forewarned about the Bull Dog so it pretty much met with my lowered expectations, maybe even a bit cleaner than I expected. Remember this is a food joint, not a bar, so it didn’t reek of old beer and cigarettes, so that was a positive sign. But as we were a bit early, I got a clear view of the mostly empty place and I was taken aback by the sight of an elderly woman in a motorized wheelchair in the corner. She was covered with a blanket, but with all of the tubes and an oxygen tank nearby, it certainly appeared she was connected to life support! And some of the wires went straight up to the television mounted above her head. My first impulse was that someone should check for a pulse! The boys must have seen the look on my face, because they smiled and said, “Oh, that’s the owner” as if that was all the explanation I needed.

For the first half hour I was the lone parent in the crowd (if you can say thirty kids is a crowd). But then I was rescued. Another Mom arrived and we sat together; she wasn’t about to leave her 15-year-old daughter who had come to meet our guys. She was an Army spouse too, whose husband had retired. Army spouses always have a lot in common so we spent the next three hours sharing previous assignments and quite a few mutual friends. After the first band played, we moved to my car. It was parked directly in front of the café where we could still see in and remarkably enough, still hear the music(?) quite well.

All in all, not a bad way to pass an evening. We allowed our kids to have a night out, enjoy their music, and even make an observation about it. When I was the Beave's age a lot of the music was pretty innocuous and mostly about love with a few commentaries on culture thrown in. Look at the top 25 songs of 1970 listed below:


1. Bridge Over Troubled Water, Simon and Garfunkel
2. (They Long To Be) Close To You, Carpenters
3. American Woman/No Sugar Tonight, The Guess Who
4. Raindrops Keep Fallin' On My Head, B.J. Thomas
5. War, Edwin Starr
6. Ain't No Mountain High Enough, Diana Ross
7. I'll Be There, Jackson 5
8. Get Ready, Rare Earth
9. Let It Be, The Beatles
10. Band Of Gold, Freda Payne
11. Mama Told Me (Not To Come), Three Dog Night
12. Everything Is Beautiful, Ray Stevens
13. Make It With You, Bread
14. Hitchin' A Ride, Vanity Fair
15. ABC, Jackson 5
16. The Love You Save/I Found That Girl, Jackson 5
17. Cracklin' Rose, Neil Diamond
18. Candida, Dawn
19. Thank You (Fallettin Me Be Mice Elf Again)/Everybody Is A Star, Sly and The Family Stone
20. Spill The Wine, Eric Burdon and War
21. O-o-h Child/Dear Prudence, Five Stairsteps and Cubie
22. Spirit In The Sky, Norman Greenbaum
23. Lay Down (Candles In The Rain), Melanie and The Edwin Hawkins Singers
24. Ball Of Confusion (That's What The World Is Today), Temptations
25. Love On A Two Way Street, Moments

I guess by 1970 the antiwar crowd and counter culture singers were all busy trying to make a living!

Now the songs are innocuously whining about life. Though I couldn’t really understand many of the slurred lyrics, I imagine their being something like this . . . ‘I need a better cell phone, oh yeah, cuz texting is my life, uh huh, my parent’s won’t get me a new IPOD and this one’s really old, la la la. All I wanna do is rant about you, oh yeah!”