I’m so grateful to VetTix, the organization that secures and offers admission to events for those with current or prior military service. In the past several years, I’ve enjoyed taking family and friends to such “performances” as Vanderbilt vs. Missouri football, the Ally 400 NASCAR race in Lebanon, Handel’s Messiah, a Grand Ole Opry show, the Lumineers at Bridgestone Arena, and this week, a Jeff Beck/ZZ Top concert at the Graystone Quarry (Middle Tennessee’s limestone version of Red Rocks Amphitheater near Denver). 

On the break between Beck and Top, I did a walk around and was surprised to see this bearded person emerging from the women’s rest room. Even in this transy era, I was taken aback for a moment, just long enough to figure out that this was her dress-up for the night’s band, which was instantly recognizable for their long beards—the musical counterparts to Phil, Willie, Si, and Jase of Duck Dynasty fame. When I asked her for a photo, she happily obliged after assuring me she was a woman and explaining that she’d borrowed the rig from a young relative’s Gandalf Halloween costume. (Playing off Aerosmith, I might say, “Lady looks like a dude.”) 

So, why was I there? And why did I drag a couple of guys from our church with me? (Well, “drag” is not the word; they jumped at the free tickets.) The simple answer is that I’m a fan of classic rock, played loud or soft. We got the loud version that night; I’d enjoyed the soft version that afternoon when I took a nap on the couch to a turned-way-down, music channel on the TV running that fare continuously. Mercifully, the words are often and mostly unintelligible. Rock lyrics are predominantly sub-Christian and inane, and often despicable, but the music can be exhilarating, just as useful as a soundtrack for NFL film highlights. And these fellows (not to mention the two women backing up Beck on bass guitar and drums) delivered.

I may be kidding myself, but I can’t see folks packing out a venue fifty years from now to hear the music of such current Top 40 artists as Post Malone, Nicki Minaj, Lizzo, or Harry Styles. At least not the way I’ve seen them turn out for the septuagenarian Roger Daltrey (formerly of The Who, singing the rock opera Tommy, with accompaniment from the Nashville Symphony) or Bohemian Rapsody, the biopic on Freddie Mercury (born Farrokh Basara in 1946)—or the 78-year-old Jeff Beck, who started with the Yardbirds in 1965, and ZZ Top, who formed up in 1969. Both Beck and ZZ’s Billy Gibbons are ranked as all-time great guitarists by Rolling Stone, and their play is compelling, whether the former’s rendition of the Beatles’ “A Day in the Life” (“I read the news today, oh boy, about a lucky man who made the grade . . .”) or the driving, allegro (c. 140 BPM) of the latter’s “Legs,” beginning “chickachickachickachicka” before the pounding 4/4 beat kicks in. Again, take or leave the words: The music, the rhythm is the thing. A least for our Graystone Quarry crew. Besides, Beck’s work is purely instrumental.

About fifteen years ago, I assigned selected issues of a half-dozen magazines to a Christ-and-Culture class at Southern. I can’t remember which journals of opinion I chose (maybe National Review and The Nation), but for takes on music, they read copies of Gramophone (classical) and Rolling Stone (rock & pop). As we discussed the latter, I expressed puzzlement over the seeming attraction of such scuzzy-lookers as drummer Tommy Lee of Motley Crüe. To help me, a Dutch girl in the class said something to the effect that he was an alpha male in a world where guys were pretty squirrely. He communicated adventure when the male norm was bland and domesticated. (Something of an awkward moment for us men in the class.) But I think she was on to something, and that something was part of the attraction in the Beck/Top event, for it signaled an indifference to pearl clutching, crippling nuance, and the idol of our age, sensitivity. The music wasn’t over-engineered with synthesized, techno-pop features. It cooked. We got old time, hetero, Dick Biondi AM; not smug, nuanced NPR FM. (Or, for a possible Nashville analogy, more Loretta Lynn, less Dixie Chicks). 

Refreshing.