Tonight we will be among the old people gathered to listen to (and cheer for) Men at Work, Toto and Christopher Cross

 

Only one of these original members of Men at Work will be onstage this evening at Blossom Music Center.

I have long since passed the age when you fret over the fact that the music you listened to as a teenager is now regularly played on "oldies" stations. That happened years ago.

On the spectrum of musical fandom, I'm at the point where I willingly attend cheesy, nostalgia-laden reunion concerts. I revel in being surrounded by other mid- to late-middle-aged people whose enthusiasm is perhaps muted compared with what it once was but who can still be described as "spirited."

I also make no apologies that the average age of the crowd at the concert I'll be attending tonight (along with my brother Mark and sister Debbie) is likely to be older than 50 and possibly pushing 60.

That's the demographic I expect will turn up at Blossom Music Center in Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, this evening for a triple bill featuring 80s acts Men at Work, Toto and Christopher Cross.

I suspect most in the audience will be there because they're particular fans of one of those three bands. For Mark and me, anyway, the clear headliner is Men at Work.

I have been a pretty ardent MAW fan since 1983, when the first 45 I ever bought was their single "Down Under" and the first cassette I ever purchased was their album "Business as Usual." (Northeast Ohioans will appreciate the fact that I bought both of these items at Zayre's.)

The thing is, as is so often the case when bands tour decades beyond the peak of their popularity, the group performing tonight under the name "Men at Work" only has one original member. That would be lead singer and guitarist Colin Hay.

Mark (along with his son and my nephew Mark) and I have seen Colin perform live several times as a solo artist, and we saw this incarnation of Men at Work play a few years ago. You can say we're fans.

Don't get me wrong, I'm also looking forward to hearing Toto play its hits, notably "Africa" and "Rosanna." And there's no doubting the talent Christopher Cross brings to the stage with his "Sailing," "Ride Like the Wind" and "Arthur's Theme."

But I'm there for the Men, who actually now include two women. One is a wonderful musician named Scheila Gonzalez, who plays saxophone, flute and keyboards in a way that eerily recreates the sound and vibe of the late Greg Ham, Men at Work's original multi-instrumentalist. (NOTE: Since writing this, I've come to find out Scheila won't be there tonight, but is instead touring with Weird Al Yankovic. Darn.)

The other is Cecilia Noël, Colin's wife and a talented singer and performer in her own right.

We'll have a good time, I have no doubt. It will be 2-3 hours of letting the music take me back to when I was much younger and much dumber. And also skinnier. With more hair.

You couldn't pay me to actually go back to that era of my life and live it again, but I don't mind taking a temporary trip back in time. I look forward to the whole thing.

As long as the bands don't play too long, of course. I need to get home and get my sleep, you know.

I'm in that stage of life when the musicians I admire are getting old

While my musical tastes have certainly broadened over the years, the artists at the top of my "Favorite Musicians" list have not.

One look at the most-played songs on my phone will quickly reveal that I am a hardcore fan of essentially three men: Sting, Colin Hay, and Billy Joel.

There are others in there I love, many of which are 80s bands that are still going (somewhat) strong like Duran Duran, The Fixx, and Huey Lewis and the News. And then there are my second-tier singer-songwriters, which include Jim Croce, James Taylor, Bruce Hornsby, David Francey, and so on.

But Messrs. Sting, Hay, and Joel are in the heaviest rotation and have been for decades now.

They are also, respectively, 69, 68, and 72 years old.

I am not sure how this happened.

Well, I know how it happened. Time moves on. We get old and so do those we admire, even if we think they shouldn't.

It recently occurred to me that there will someday very soon be a last Sting album and a last Colin Hay album. You could argue there has already been a last Billy Joel album, as he hasn't put out any new pop/rock material since 1993.

It has always been something of an event for me when one of those men released new work. In the pre-Internet days, I would consult a newspaper or maybe Rolling Stone to see when an album was due, and I would show up at a record store that day to buy it.

Then I would come home, pop it into my stereo (yes, a stereo) and listen intently while following the liner notes.

Now it's a little different. I still get excited when my guys have new material, but rather than me having to go out and get it, it just shows up on Apple Music. It's just...there, all of the sudden.

That doesn't affect my enjoyment of the music itself, of course, but it does take some of the pageantry away from the actual release.

Anyway, I try to appreciate new music from Stingo, Colin, and BJ more because I know they each have only so many more new songs in them. Sting has an album titled "The Bridge" coming out later this year, while Colin recently put out an excellent disc full of covers and has his own new music slated for release in the not-too-distant future.

I will savor every moment of it, knowing it won't be long before each of these guys will need a hearing aid just to listen to his own music.

Don't forget that printers are miracles

Every now and then I'll write a post about the good/bad old days in which we lacked certain technology that is now commonplace, and how none of us should ever take it for granted.

This is one of those posts.

I am of sufficient age to appreciate how amazing it is to have a desktop printer, because I grew up at a time when no one had them.

All of your school reports back then were handwritten or, if you were fancy, produced on a typewriter.

We had a typewriter in my house, and I remember using it to write reports on Theodore Roosevelt (when we had to pick a president to write about), Iceland (when we had to pick a country to write about), and Vermont (when we had to pick a state to write about). This involved setting margins and manual carriage returns, and if God forbid you made a mistake, reaching for the foul-smelling White Out to correct it.

It was cumbersome, but the final product always looked nice.

Like a lot of people, the first printer I owned was of the dot matrix variety, and much like a typewriter, it required changing out the ink ribbon every so often.

It only printed in black and white, of course, but that didn't matter. The fact was, it printed! I would create something on my Commodore 64, and a couple of minutes later, there it was on paper, looking all professional (or so it seemed).

You have to understand, this was a revelation. Then they came out with Print Shop software and you could create banners and flyers and all sorts of things that previously could only be handled by a graphic designer and a printing service.

In retrospect, it all looks pretty bland and cheesy. But to say that is to ignore how transformative portable printers really were. What had before involved a large investment of time and money could now be done in an instant at home. Mind blowing.

The next time I want to complain about my Epson printer, I'm going to stop for a second and appreciate the fact it exists it all.

Note to self: The 'Good Old Days' are right now

My wife and I are in the midst of the Good Old Days.

I'm very aware of this fact. For all the time, energy and money we expend on our children, these are still clearly the Good Old Days. I know that one day we will look back and think, "Wow, those were great times. So much fun."

And we'll be right. These ARE fun times. Of course, by then we'll have blocked out all the unpleasant parts because that's what we, as human beings, do. We zero in on the fun times and mostly forget the bad stuff so that we can look back at a certain period in our lives and think, "That was the perfect time. I wish I could go back to that."

If one day they figure out time travel and we do manage to come back to the year 2012, I'll probably be shocked to remember that:

* Every time I washed the kitchen floor, somebody in the house would immediately manage to spill juice on it. Every. Single. Time.

* No one would ever turn the lights out when they left a room, thus allowing us to set world records for Highest Electric Bill in a Single-Family House.

* Whenever we turned around, there would be yet another school fee to pay. Books, sports, other extracurriculars. Whatever it was, we had to pay for it.

* We spent a lot of time worrying about how we were going to pay for college, when in fact the common sense portion of our brains told us that we would survive the experience no matter how much it seemed like it was going to kill us.

And on and on. Selective memory is a wonderful thing. It's what allows women to have more than one baby, for example. Five times I watched Terry pass small human beings (painfully) out of her body. And each time I thought, "OK, no way she's going to want to go through nine months of that kind of misery plus labor again." And each time I was wrong...until the last time, of course. She would forget about the negative aspects of childbirth and instead focus on the miracle of bringing another life into this world, and boom, two years or so later she would be pregnant again.

I always try to remind myself that for all the trouble of the life we're living now, we're smack dab in the middle of an undeniably awesome experience. We're in that part of life where every week seems to bring a new milestone or accomplishment. After awhile you start to take it for granted.

I take for granted going to watch my kids play soccer or run track. But one day, that will be gone. I take for granted things like school concerts, awards assemblies and first cars. In a few years, they will all just be memories. Of course, there will come a time when I can relive those experiences through grandchildren, and I know that will be great, but I can't imagine it will be quite the same.

So for now I'm pretty much just hanging on and trying to enjoy as much of the ride as I can. Sometimes I do a good job of it and appreciate what God has given me. Other times I get caught up in the whirlwind of activity and let time pass by almost unnoticed.

But either way, the Good Old Days really are good.

(P.S. Happy 80th birthday today to my mom, Kathryn, who I hope looks back on this writer's childhood as her own Good Old Days!)