The New abNormal

Duran duran live 09
Originally uploaded by anachronologist

Put away your hairspray and blue eyeliner, boys and girls - this ain't your parent's pop band anymore. Well, not really.

As you've likely already heard me say like a thousand times over the past week, I've been trying - and failing - to see Duran Duran in concert for the past 25 or so years. I won't bore you with the details, just... well, it's been one of the things I carried into my adult life as a thing I wish I'd made happen. But anyway.

It was with no small degree of trepidation that I approached the show. My wife already gives me a lot of s**t about having once owned the Duran Duran board game and that euro-mullet I sported for a year or so. The orange hair, the makeup, the all-white clothes and my efforts to prevent a missouri accent from creeping into my speech by affecting a nearly "british" one? Yeah, I'm not entirely raving about those characteristics either, but what're you gonna do? No, Duran Duran was the element of my teenage years that lifted me out of what might otherwise been a fairly vanilla youth, and prepared me for the Ferris Buelleriffic hijinks which were thus to ensue.

Unpacking a box of things my mother had brought out to me a year or two ago and finding that DD board game was kind of rough, though. Had I really been THAT big a fan? Well, yeah. Duran Duran was one of my biggest influences on music, originally, so that alone should've been a giveaway. There were bands I did NOT listen to for a while, simply on the grounds that their singles bumped a current DD song out of the top ten. Yeah, I was really that lame.

I'm not that guy anymore, though - thankfully. But something about this show still felt like something of a high school reunion. My little school I actually graduated from (as opposed to the one I went to for the first two years) had a graduating class of 27 kids; and since I've moved around a lot and gone into the Missouri High School Graduate Program, there's really not much of a chance of them tracking me down even if they DID have a reunion.  And that's not even addressing the question of whether or not I'd go back to Missouri for it if they did.

So, the show.

I have to say, out of all the rock or pop concerts I've been to (and I've been my share of them), this was one of the most fun shows I've been to. Technically or musically, I'd have to go with Oingo Boingo; pure rock energy I'd give to INXS or Joan Jett; quality of venue, I'd hand to the 86 tour of Thompson Twins at the Fox Theater in St Louis. But in all the shows I've seen, I haven't yet felt so much like the show was there for ME.

This was, apparently, the show I've been needing to see. Oh, certainly, I still need to see Sting, and god help me if Yoko Kanno ever does a concert anywhere in America. But this one. Man. I still don't quite have the words to say how much fun I had without totally sounding like a goob.

I sang along, I clapped along, I partied like it was 1985. No, sorry Prince, I'm not going to party like it's 1999 until you come back and party like it's 19-ninety-effing-nine. It was back when Michael Jackson was just kinda wacky, but was still putting out good music. We didn't realize yet that Russian Communism was about to implode and that the Berlin Wall was on its last legs. We were, to nearly the last man, buoyed by the climax of Reagan optimism, and we thought the world was a different place than we've recently come to understand.

But it wasn't like I was 15 again. That's the weirdest bit. I was 40. I didn't set the Wayback Machine, drink the fountain of youth, or whatnot. I was a 40-year-old Ren, singing along with songs that have played their transitional role through various times of my life.

It's remarkable to have a single musical group have that place; I can remember my first introduction to their music - "Is There Something I Should Know?" being on the radio at summer camp, with my older brother telling me it was one of his favorite songs of the moment. Seeing "The Reflex" on the TBS weekend music video show for the first time; watching the band perform at "Live Aid" on MTV with half the young world; hearing the title track from "Notorious" when we were unpacking in our new house in Missouri; seeing the video from "I Don't Want Your Love" the night before going to the Missionary Training Center; picking up their next album the month before coming back from Mexico; and using "Ordinary World" as an EQ template for my own CD. And there's also the recent memories of playing Rock Band with my daughter and some of my friends, blasting out "Hungry Like The Wolf", "Girls on Film" and "Rio".

That's just wild, really. Heh. "Wild Boys." Okay, yes, I could go through and put on little song title or lyric jokes through this whole blog, but I'll try and refrain.

End of it all, I feel just...damn good. I've got a big item checked off my bucket list, and I'm still young enough to know I'll have time for the rest of them. But as for what happens tomorrow? All I want is to just enjoy my little corner of this ordinary world, my new religion being to just hold back the rain and live life in my own way; though I'm tempted to be some kind of wild boy, It's just one of those days - a perfect day, if you will - where I'm still breathing. I'm no drowning man; and I know I'm not lonely in my nightmares; I've just been out of my mind, hallucinating Elvis (but I'm undergoing treatment). But before it's all come undone, I'll just save a prayer and reach up for the sunrise. And even if I'm not the next Big Thing, I'll land on my feet, try and be the last man standing, breath after breath.  Sorry, too much information? Well, to whom it may concern: I'm not so serious. Can you deal with it? Or, is there something I should know?

All right, I'll stop now. Have a good day, everyone.