We weren’t even through the gates yet when we saw the fight. Two guys in baggy shorts and tent-sized white t-shirts seemed to fall inexorably into each other, as if drawn together by the gravitational force of their own beer-bellies. The three of us — myself, The Girlfriend, and our friend Amber — stood there in shock as the battle raged on the other side of the chain-link fence.

Truth be told, it wasn’t much of a battle. The word “battle” implies something epic, and this wasn’t even particularly exciting. It was just two guys bear-hugging each other, turning around and around like fat, drunken binary planets circling a common point in space, grunting and shouting unintelligibly at each other. One of them eventually got the better of his opponent. A nose was broken, blood and tears began to flow, security arrived, and it was over. Two grown men, fast approaching middle age, who were behaving like jackass teenagers and would probably never speak to each other again. It was pathetic. And I found myself wondering if I was, too, attending a Def Leppard concert at my age.

I don’t know if it’s showed in my recent posts, but lately I’ve been feeling… old. Burnt out, ground up, past my prime. Much of the time, I feel like the world has moved on without me, and everything has become unfamiliar and ominous. I’m sure the terrorist scare last week contributed to this sensation. This isn’t the world we were supposed to inherit, and I don’t know which I hate more, the fact that there are people out there who would happily kill me if I happened to step onto the wrong airplane, or that I’ve become so cynical that my first thought was to wonder if the threat was a carefully timed political stunt. But there’s been more to my mood of late than politics and terrorists. Everything has changed drastically in the last fifteen or twenty years, and much of the time I feel that I’m not adapting terribly well to the new paradigms. I still shoot all my photos on film, I don’t own an iPod, and I hate those automated towel dispensers that have taken over all the public restrooms.

Growing up, I used to despise the way my elderly neighbors seemed to be so out of touch, the way they’d go on and on about Big Band music and people I’d never heard of and The Way Things Used to Be. But what is this blog if not a bunch of ruminations on The Way Things Used to Be? I worry that I’m turning into one of those out-of-touch old geezers, clinging desperately to the idea that the things I used to like when I was a kid are still cool.

Those things didn’t seem very cool last Wednesday night as I watched two morons brawl just inside the fence of Usana Amphitheater. I was in a foul mood anyway because, while Usana may be an excellent venue with its permanent concession stands and fabulous view of the valley, it’s a bitch to actually get to. It’s about as far west as you can go without bumping into the Oquirrah mountains, and the two primary access roads that flank it on either side, 5600 South and 4500 South, both run through residential areas in one of the older, more congested parts of the valley. Add in a whole mess of mid-week commuters trying to get home, and you get one very grumpy fan of late-80s pop-metal. Actually, you get a whole bunch of very grumpy fans: while I was creeping along in stop-and-go traffic (90 minutes from the time Anne and I picked up Amber to Usana’s parking lot), I saw more than one driver lose his cool. At one point, the occupants of a stretch-Suburban limo that was trying to pull into the flow — what little flow there was — walked up to the SUV behind me and asked its driver to wait up and let them pull out. The driver refused, and a salvo of “F-bombs” was promptly exchanged. Luckily, that war didn’t escalate beyond the verbal. Unlike whatever was going on between the two fat guys.

The concert was actually a double-header, Def Leppard with another huge ’80s band, Journey, and Journey was already on the stage as the fat guys clinched. The sight of two supposed grown-ups playing pushy-pushy like junior-high kids in the parking lot after school while the group’s current lead singer, Not-Steve-Perry, warbled “Wheel in the Sky,” didn’t seem ironic so much as just plain… sad.

A lot of things made me feel vaguely sad as I waited for the main act to take the stage. Not-Steve-Perry’s singing, for instance; it was inconsistent at best, and served as an inescapable reminder that the band’s star faded out years ago. But it was the audience that really got me down. I saw young girls dressed like Pat Benatar in her heyday, girls who were surely conceived long after that day was over; for them, ’80s fashion isn’t cool, it’s a costume. A lark. Contrast those with the pot-bellied mullet-heads dressed in their vintage concert shirts, faded and tattered by time instead of the artificially distressed versions you can buy at WalMart. For them, the ’80s never ended. Then there were the leathery-faced biker queens and over-the-hill pole-dancers getting all gooey-eyed over “Open Arms,” no doubt remembering their own heydays in the back seat of somebody’s old Nova or Firebird, before the cigarettes and cheap booze took their toll. I couldn’t help but wonder where I fit into this spectrum, if I was just another aging schmuck trying to recapture a moment of my adolescence, or if I never outgrew it to begin with. Neither prospect seemed appealing.

Between bands, I wandered over to the souvenir booth to check out the overpriced t-shirts, and there I bumped into the wife of an old high-school buddy; they were there with their son, who must be around 13 or 14 now. I was amused when she asked me to give him some advice on which shirt was the coolest (“The black one,” I told him, “the one with the most ominous-looking design. Because your mom will love that one”). However, while it’s always good to see old friends, the encounter didn’t do much for my sense of being stuck in time while the rest of the world kept turning.

Then Def Leppard took the stage. They opened their set with “Let’s Get Rocked,” from the album they released after I stopped buying their albums. It’s a dippy song, but it’s fun and catchy, and it got the audience worked up in a hurry. The band members still look good; they’re aging gracefully, keeping in shape and sporting clothes and hairstyles that echo their old ’80s look without appearing dated. More importantly, the band still sounds good, unlike poor Journey. It wasn’t long before I got caught up in the throbbing, insistent beat, just like everybody else. I pulled out my ponytail holder and shook my hair free. I banged my head and played air guitar and beat my fist in the air. I danced and I lusted and I felt… young.
When the band played “Foolin’,” I was fourteen again, staying up too damn late to watch Friday Night Videos, because it was so important to see which vid made number one that week.

When they played “Hysteria,” I was an idealistic college freshman watching the fall leaves blow past the windows of the student union, hoping that one day someone would love me and I’d write bestseller after bestseller.

When they did “Photograph,” I was transported back to my best friend Kurt Stephensen’s dank basement room when the two of us were about fifteen and the most important thing in the world was lookin’ cool and losing that pesky virginity.

And when the nonsense opening words of “Rock of Ages” began — “Gunter glieben glauten globen” — I was… well, I just was. I was rockin’. I was transcendent. Full of adrenaline and testosterone and dreams and hopes, with no frustrations or worries. Just like I used to be before I grew up. Later, the next day, my muscles would remind me that I’m not a kid anymore; my legs ached from the dancing, my forearms from flailing away at that non-existent ax, my neck from the head-banging. But I felt good nonetheless, better than I have in a long time. Like something nasty had been purged out of me and it was okay again to be unabashedly nostalgic.

I think I understand now why my elderly neighbors continued to listen to Big Band music in their dotage. It wasn’t because they were out of touch. They listened to the music of their youth because it made them feel for the briefest of moments like they did when they were kids. And there’s nothing wrong with that.

So I say let’s get rocked once in a while… even if you dang kids think you have to do it on an iPod.