It was billed as “Jeff Lynn’s Electric Light Orchestra”. Yet, it was much more than just another show. To understand what I mean, we must run the calendar backwards 38 years. In the same words Mr. Lynn used nearly four decades earlier, I have a message from another time…
It was October 21, 1981. I had two tickets to see the Electric Light Orchestra on their Time Tour. Nothing was going to stop me, not even the flu that had put me in the infirmary for two days with IVs pumping fluid into me because I was losing it from both ends. A fever of 102, the constant feeling of nausea and a sore throat that rendered me speechless for the next two weeks forced me to hand my car keys to the girl I was dating at the time. All I could do was become unconscious in the passenger seat and fight the urge to urp.
I managed to remain comatose for the trip from then West Georgia College to the Omni in Atlanta. I awoke from the fog of my delirium as we were waiting in traffic to turn into the parking deck at the ole Waffle Iron. Dizziness hit me like a beer truck careening out of control and I lost my battle with nausea. I was forced to save the floormat and open the door to puke on the pavement. I’m sure someone in traffic thought “Great, the guy is already wasted, and he hasn’t even parked yet.” It was not one of my finer moments. But as I stated, nothing was going to keep me from seeing the show. I’m just glad we didn’t have social media then or I would have become a viral meme. Or is that a meme with a virus? I guess they both fit.
I don’t really remember anything after that until we arrived at our seats. We had friends waiting there. Greetings were shared and my condition explained by my date. Remember, I couldn’t talk. Feeling like death would be better than what I was dealing with, I waited for the lights to fade and the music to start.
From the first note until the last, I had no pain. Fever be damned. I no longer felt like a squirrel that’s just discovered tangoing with a transformer is a bad idea.
Now slip behind the wheel of that DeLorean, drive 88 and let’s get back to the future.
July 5, 2019. 38 years after the Time Tour things were different in some respects and exactly the same in others.
This time around I wasn’t sick. While the ticket price was 20 times higher, I could still better afford it than back in my college days. I was married to my date, and no, not the same girl. (She’s married, too, with two children and probably trying to forget the guy who puked on the pavement.)
I am sure the crowd was made up of many of the same people from that 1981 show. What was different was that this time many of them brought their teenage children. There were some wearing their old concert tee shirts not realizing that they had gained 40 pounds since then. Think rubber band on a boiled egg. I almost had another hurl-on-the-pavement moment, especially when I saw the guy in the “Mr. Bubbles” bubble bath tee. That’s proof some people don’t own a mirror.
I actually considered wearing my souvenir shirt from that first show. Not to brag, but it still fits me. But I was afraid of looking dorky. Okay, dorkier than I usually look. I didn’t see another one like it at the show and now kick myself for not wearing it, especially after seeing Mr. Bubbles. Sadly, we dorks are timid creatures at times.
What stayed the same was the transformative power of the show. The music, lights, and staging were incredible. And just like 38 years ago they allowed me to do something I haven’t done in a long while: live in the moment.
There was no regret of yesterday’s things done wrong or left undone. There was no fear of what might go wrong tomorrow. There was no worry about halitosis, hair loss, or how the heck I’m going to afford peanut M&M’s when I’m 85. (I don’t think Medicare covers that, but the way things are going in D.C., who knows?).
I was living one note at a time. The singular salve that is music was healing the scars and scares that come with age, especially when you’ve survived parenthood. The feeling was intensified by the fact that we were all as one, singing and dancing without a care as to who was listening or watching.
And just like in ’81, I was celebrating the moment with Jeff, the guy who loaned me his albums and introduced me to a wider appreciation of ELO. For the duration of the show, we were once again those teenage boys driving too fast in Jeff’s ’69 Firebird (The Green Goblin… yeah, his car had a name. Doesn’t yours?), blasting ELO and singing and laughing and living in the moment.
I drifted off to sleep that night as a restored 18-year-old. the echoes of the evening still rolling through my brain and scenes from the show being projected on the inside of my eyelids. But I woke up in my current skin, wrinkled and splotchy from too much sun. It seemed the evening before had been but a dream, until I realized I had slept in the previous day’s shirt. There, in the pocket, was the ticket. It wasn’t a dream. I keep it as a reminder of that message from another time, a truth discovered when in my youth but forgotten in my haste to grow up: live in the moment be it good, bad or something like hospital Jello. It is a gift not to be wasted by wondering about the next one.
As for the image of the guy in the Mr. Bubbles shirt? Jeff Lynn and ELO said it best, “Can’t Get It Out of My Head.”
