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Community Corner

Carpool Candy: A Kid's First Concert

Concert tours ain't what they used to be.

If you love music as much as I do, you want your first rock concert to be magical. My first was actually not a terrific experience. I was invited to see Rush with some friends when I was in eighth grade. For some crazy reason, my mother let me go to a huge, dark stadium with a weird skunky smell—without parental supervision—to see a band I didn’t really care about. I wasn’t connected to the music and we spent the whole time wandering the stadium halls trying to hook up with friends and avoid the intense crowds. I got it right the second time with a Madonna concert when I was 16. I belted out every word of her songs, faithfully wearing an armload of rubber bracelets, mini skirt and lacy top. It was quintessential '80s pop. I embraced it then and now the memory makes me smile.

That’s why it was so important to me to make sure my oldest son, Jacob, had a first concert that he could remember fondly. In the summer of 2008, we took him to, hopefully, his first of many Bruce Springsteen shows. It was the end of the “Magic” tour at Continental Arena. Being in a crowd of thousands of screaming people surrounded by the loudest noise you’ve ever heard could be very daunting to an eight-year-old. But we had pretty good seats and went with a bunch of adult friends he knew so he felt safe.

I’m not impartial but Bruce was amazing and sang a lot of old hits which made the crowd go wild. Jacob sang, danced, ate a hotdog, bought a T-shirt and fell asleep in my husband’s lap at the end of the three-hour show. He talked about it to his friends for weeks afterwards. We know we created a significant memory and I was thrilled I could give him that gift.

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That’s why I’m OK with the fact that his second rock concert was the “American Idols Tour” at the Prudential Center in Newark last month. Three girlfriends and I took our six kids and endured the usual indignities of the concert experience: $25 parking, terrible, expensive food, and walking eight miles in a giant circle to find our seats.

When the lights went down, deafening, high-pitched  screams filled the stadium. And then Michael Sarver came out. ….Who??? I had forgotten all about that oil rig guy. There he was, doing his best Garth Brooks imitation running all over that huge stage while singing someone else’s song. He was followed by the other top ten finalists. Kooky Megan looked like a Barbie Doll in a tight fuchsia mini-dress and impossibly high heels, and her voice was as mediocre as I remembered. My favorite, Lil Rounds, shook her booty well and belted out her best Beyonce to all the single ladies.

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I liked "Idol" winner Kris Allen’s performance of Kanye West’s “Heartless” but it was really runner-up Adam Lambert who stole the show. Yes, he wore incredibly tight leather pants studded with rhinestones and crazy platform boots. But it was his powerful voice and natural talent that blew everyone else away. When he was on stage, there was no one else to watch and he knew it.

Overall, it was a lot of fun. We knew most of the songs because they are all ripped from the pop hit radio stations. For fans of the show,  it was entertaining to see the old gang back together. But without snarky Simon and daffy Paula to comment afterwards, something was missing.

But the kids had a great time dancing around and mouthing the words. It started at 7 p.m. and didn’t end until after 10 p.m. so it was a long night and we had some crankiness and sleeping on the ride home.

The lights, backdrops, costumes and choreography were all a little cheesy and it’s even a stretch to call it a rock concert. It was more of a pop spectacle. But it is an icon of our times. Season nine of "Idol" starts up in January and doesn’t show any signs of decreasing popularity, especially now with news of new judge Ellen DeGeneres.

Hopefully, Jacob will look back on the Idol concert the way I do about that first Madonna concert in 1985.  All these years later, Madonna’s incredible staying power earned her the second highest grossing tour of all time this summer. Somehow I don’t think Jacob will be seeing any of those Idols still selling out shows every night in the summer of 2033. Either way, he’ll always have Bruce.

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