I never really liked stadium rock concerts, and now I'm glad I'm too old for them

Among my dirty secrets as a trying-to-be-cool kid was that I disdained stadium rock concerts. The band was usually too far away to see and the music was too loud to enjoy. On the bright side, after you went to enough concerts and your eardrums were sandblasted by sound waves into a fruit-leather-like material, this was no longer an issue.

As a social matter, you could never admit to a dislike of concerts, because at age 17 you were judged by your peers by the number and breadth of concert venues you had attended. Or, should I say, the number of socially correct concerts you had attended. Seeing England Dan and John Ford Coley at Merriweather Post Pavilion, for example, did not afford the same social capital as seeing the Clash in New York City.

Concerts disappeared during COVID of course, but this summer they are back and going great guns — and are somehow different now. Culture writer and podcaster Elamin Abdelmahmoud confessed to weeping openly (along with everybody else) at concerts ranging from Taylor Swift to Joni Mitchell.

Part was due to the quality of the show, but part was just a general relief and appreciation to being together again with a common purpose. “Concerts have always been spaces where like-minded fans can gather to discover connection, but now this brand of togetherness has transformed concertgoing into an urgent pilgrimage, drawing the faithful in record numbers and providing near-ecstatic experiences,” he wrote.

In other words, my version of hell.

Granted, age is part of it, but even as a kid I am pretty sure I would have found nothing to sob about while listening to Metallica, and if everyone around me were breaking down like sort of a heavy metal Tammy Faye Bakker, I might have flushed whatever substance I was taking down a stadium toilet.

Concerts are now more interactive too, and not in a good way. Fans are throwing phones, vapes, relatives’ ashes (not kidding) and other sundry chattel at performers, and sometimes connecting.

I guess there’s a fine line between being moved by an artist to the point of tears, and launching a Galaxy Z at their dome.

This is all normal, concert promoters tell us. “It’s from the beginning of rock-and-roll,” Paul Wertheimer of Crowd Management Strategies, a Los Angeles crowd safety consulting service, told the Washington Post. “It’s been going on for decades and decades.”

Do you know what I would say if I were a concert security manager trying to deceitfully cover up and minimize the disturbing and escalating trend of fan violence? I would say something along the lines of “It’s from the beginning of rock-and-roll. It’s been going on for decades and decades.”

Because that really isn’t true, is it? Veterans of the concert wars of yore know that, while fan behavior was often despicable, it was generally limited to fistfights in the parking lot and throwing up on each other — the artists themselves were deserving of more respect.

No one threw a phone at Mick Jagger. All right, partly because back then phones weighed 14 pounds and were connected to the house with a wire, but you get the photo.

What is also different, Abdelmahmoud writes, is the parlor game of throwing something on stage, video recording the artist’s facial reaction and posting it on TikTok.

And in some cases, the artists appear to be complicit in their own abuse, because it gets them a flood of social media and network-news attention. And from the fan’s point of view, the price of concert tickets, which now roughly equal the annual GDP of Guam, give them tacit right to pepper the performer with consumer goods.

A generation that brought you the Pet Rock has no room to criticize its successors for stupidity. Still, I’m glad my age-weakened throwing arm leaves me ineligible for modern-day stadium concerts.

Tim Rowland is a Herald-Mail columnist.

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This article originally appeared on The Herald-Mail: Going to rock shows wasn't fun before; it's even less fun now