Happy Initiations: Taking my Son to See Noah Kahan

Ours is a family that gives tickets as birthday gifts. My son generally chooses sporting events; my daughter, pop concerts. Sometimes these things reverse, and this year, David announced he wanted to see the pop sensation Noah Kahan. 

On Thursday, I took the boy to the Hollywood Bowl for our first father-son concert date. I horrified him by proposing we walk the entire way (I live in Miracle Mile, about three miles due south of the iconic venue). We did decide to drive, and even I was rather glad as we climbed to our seats near the top of the Bowl. 

The LA Times opened their (paywalled) review thus: There is screaming at concerts, and then there’s the noise that the young crowd was making at Noah Kahan’s show at the Hollywood Bowl on Thursday night. No Vermonter has been greeted with such arena-rock delirium since Bernie Sanders.

When the Times says a “young” crowd, they weren’t kidding. I amused myself by attempting to count my chronological peers among the concertgoers. We would have fit in the proverbial phone booth, itself a meaningless reference to the young. There were parents with children my son’s age, but even these moms and dads were all at least a decade my junior. I finally saw one gray-bearded grandfather in a Tilly hat, accompanying two teen girls.  We made eye contact and shared a conspiratorial grin.

When you are a boy just on the cusp of your teens, as David is, there are few more awe-inspiring occasions than to step into a space filled to the brim with thousands and thousands of pretty young girls. Kahan’s aesthetic isn’t quite country, but a great many of his female fans wore some variation on denim shorts, boots, and crop tops. If you’ve climbed to the top of the Bowl, you know cowboy boots are not a help. If you’ve spent any time in Los Angeles on a June evening, you know the afternoon’s heat gives way fast to the night’s chill. For the young, of course, comfort is a subaltern to fashion. Better to shiver than to shroud the bare shoulders, I suppose.

David sat to my right, with a couple in their early thirties next to him. To my left was a darling brunette in very short shorts; the child was only a little older than Heloise, accompanied by a half-dozen of her friends. I read my son’s face, and just as the show’s opener (a winsome John Vincent III) left the stage, whispered to him an offer to switch seats. The proposal eagerly accepted, David sat – and then stood, because there was no sitting once Kahan took the stage – next to the pretty teen. The girl was tall, and at one point, waving her arms in enthusiasm, smacked my son on the ear. She apologized, and David waved it off with a delighted grin that suggested a repeat offense would not be amiss.

“Kahan got nearly every one of his plaintive lyrics absolutely howled back at him,” reports the Times, and I can say it was so. David, who knows most of Kahan’s songs, added his to the delirious female chorus.  He pogoed in place during the faster songs, and stood solemnly during the slower ones, inhaling the perfume, the hairspray, the sunscreen, the sweat, and the hormones. (As a veteran of the Hollywood Bowl, I can report I have rarely been at a show in recent years where I smelled less weed, despite Kahan’s frequent lyrical references to substance abuse. Perhaps Gen Z sees marijuana as an uncool palliation for their elders? Pretty to think so.)

I restrained myself from making the obvious joke: “Here we are, two handsome single Schwyzer boys, and everyone in sight is far too young for one of us and just a bit too old for the other!”  (I mean, I restrained myself from saying this to my son. I clearly cannot hold it back from my readers.) I remembered being David’s age, squeezed into the back of an enormous Buick Roadmaster filled with teenage cousins and their friends, listening to a half-dozen girls loudly singing along to the Eagles on the radio. I still cannot hear “Take it to the Limit” without remembering being a boy of 12, just experiencing the lash of the outer bands of adolescence, wanting the song and the car ride to last forever. 

Romance is the great theme of popular music, of course. We fall in love with the songs and the lyrics before we’ve had our first kiss or first heartbreak.  For my children, pop music is distraction, but it is also instruction. Above all, it is a kind of initiation into a world where falling in love is the Primary Task to which all other interests and obligations must soon take a back seat.

Perhaps, my son and 10,000 teen girls sang to welcome the promised joy and pain to come. Perhaps, the grandfather in the Tilly hat who also knew the lyrics sang along as I did, to remember.  In any case, as we walked down the hill to the car after the show, I looked at my son’s glowing face and knew, as if there had been any doubt, that he had signed on for the duration.