Do You Know Where You Are? You’re At A Guns N’ Roses Concert

We’ve had a lot of wonderful family experiences since coming to Valencia, but by and large they have been just that – family experiences. That’s great, but we know it’s important to spend time with our kids individually as well. Maybe we’ll try to do more of that intentionally in Year Two, but it’s more of an unintended consequence at present.

Back in March I bought two tickets to see Guns N Roses in Madrid on June 9, thinking Hilary and I would go with some friends of ours. As time went on, people started dropping out, and eventually Hilary decided it wasn’t that interesting to her either. Neither of the kids has listened to enough GNR* to be considered fans, per se, and they both tend to shy away from super loud noises, so I wasn’t exactly sure how the concert would pan out.

*Maybe it’s different in other houses, but one weird offshoot of technological progress is our kids don’t really listen to music the way we did when we were younger. I used to listen to the radio all the time, and when I had my bar mitzvah my big purchase was a stereo system with a five-CD changer. Five whole CDs at once, can you imagine??? Like many other suckers kids I bought into the 11 CDs for a penny offerings (I was a BMG person over Columbia House, personally), so I was constantly discovering new music, even in elementary school. Our kids have every song ever recorded at their fingertips at a moment’s notice, but they spend most of their time playing video games. To each their own.

Jamie made it clear he would really like to go to the concert, and so it was that he and I hopped a train to Madrid (he got to skip school for the day, so already on a path to the Best Day Ever) for the show.

After a fun afternoon getting lunch at the Mercado de San Miguel and a surprise (in the sense that I was pretty floored Jamie voluntarily chose to go to an art museum) visit to Museo del Prado, we began to make our way towards the venue.

As we rode the metro, we shared my AirPods and rocked out to some of GnR’s best. The symmetry was striking to me. Jamie is just finishing up 5th grade, and when I was his age I listened almost exclusively to two albums – Def Leppard’s Hysteria and Guns N Roses’ Appetite For Destruction. Now this was going to be Jamie’s first concert. Amazing.

I was trying to juxtapose Jamie at his first concert experience with my own. I’m not entirely sure what it was, but if I had to guess, I think it might have been seeing Ray Charles in Jackson, MS, which is a story my family loves to tell because we waited for him after the show and as he walked by I extended my hand to shake his, and he naturally walked right past it because he can’t fucking see you idiot.

I don’t remember if my parents told me interesting anecdotes about Ray Charles (or Bonnie Raitt, another early concert I saw) while we were at their shows, and I couldn’t help but giggle thinking about how different those must have been from what I might have shared on this occasion: “You see Jamie, those moaning sounds you hear in the background of Rocket Queen is Axl having sex in the recording booth with drummer Steven Adler’s ex-girlfriend.”

We got to the Metropolitano stadium (erstwhile home of Atletico Madrid futbol club) around 8:30 and did some people-watching while we waited for our friends to arrive. I’ll say this for Guns N Roses – they really captured people’s attention back in the day. So many people we saw going into the stadium were wearing tour apparel from the early ’90s, which is pretty damn impressive. Speaking of merch, I’m usually a miser when it comes to that stuff, but I remember how much I loved the clothing I got at various live events I went to as a kid and didn’t want to deprive Jamie of that, despite the absurd pricing ($45 for a goddamn t-shirt), so we bought matching tees and headed in to have our ears blown out.

The band was supposed to come on at 9:30, and surprisingly enough, they did. In fact, this edition of Guns N’ Roses is much different than I imagine they were in their heydey, which makes sense some three decades later. They were energetic, they were LOUD, but they were professional.

I remember once hearing Paul McCartney talk about his concerts and building them from a framework of, if he were a Paul McCartney fan, what would he want to hear. I would say Guns N’ Roses did the same thing, which again, feels much more mature than how (I’m guessing) they were in the early 90s.

Not only did they play pretty much every song you’d want to hear, but they really gave the audience their money’s worth, playing for over three and a half hours. We ended up making a break for it just before the encore, in part to beat the metro traffic but also because it was already close to 1 am and Jamie was pretty spent.

It was quite an experience! Axl is 61 now, and while he has to work a bit harder to hit some of the primal screams, he’s a lot better than you’d anticipate given the life he’s lived. Meanwhile Slash on the guitar is still an awesome sight to behold, and Jamie was truly taken in by his wizardry. As he explained after the show, “I can’t move my fingers without a guitar as fast as Slash does with one.”

I was glad we got to see them together, and I hope it will be a standout memory of his childhood the way going to Mississippi State basketball games was for me with my dad. I guess with just a little more hearing loss.

Valencia Remains Amazing, But Political Troubles Loom

It’s been nearly a year since we moved to Valencia – in fact in just three weeks we will begin making our way back to the U.S. for the summer as the kids are set to go to summer camp and I’ll be touring around with the show. During our time here I’ve been meaning to address, shall we say, the politics of our decision to move.

When I tell people from the States we moved, fairly often their response will be something along the lines of, “You picked a good time to get out of this craziness.” My stock answer to that is to say, “that’s not the reason we moved…but it’s not not the reason either.”

This is 100% true. I’ve been talking to Hilary about moving abroad to try another cultural experience almost since we got married, so there has always been a desire for adventure, to make the most of our time on the planet, etc. But obviously, our decision was tinged by the mounting problems facing our country, all of which were exacerbated by the devastating pandemic we collectively experienced* that pushed many of us to our breaking points.

*Well, most of us. The fact that I’m even putting an asterisk here is a sad commentary on the current state of shared reality.

Living in Spain has been, in nearly every sense of the world, a breath of fresh air (minus the dog poop). The constant stress we’ve felt over the years living in America has lifted. Life will always have its problems, but I no longer worry about my personal safety, or (especially) that of my children as they go off to school on a daily basis. It’s visceral, the difference.

When I was home in the States for my tour a few weeks back, the random nature of gun violence was rarely far from my mind, whether at Panera getting a sandwich, or at Target buying pretzels and goldfish*, and certainly while performing in a Jewish space.

*The two requests of my children any time I return to the US.

When I got on the plane to return to Spain, as I buckled my seatbelt, I remember very clearly, unprompted by anything specific, exhaling deeply and saying to myself, “I made it.”. Then I immediately thought, “Wow, that’s dark.”

But that’s a bit what it feels like when I’m on American soil these days. I took a train ride from Hartford to Stamford, CT, during my tour, and watched as a man berated an old lady for having the temerity to mistakenly think his seat was available to her. On my last go-round in December, I stood in a rental car line for 45 minutes and watched several heated exchanges between customers and employees. Perhaps these are cherry-picked, but to me a lot of people seem really on edge.

I was relaying all this to a friend of mine recently, and I said to her I wasn’t sure if I was being too hysterical about the state of things, or if I was in fact painting an increasingly accurate picture of life in the U.S. in the year 2023. I honestly don’t know. It feels like the latter to me, but I am also viewing it through my prism of worry and fear.

I bring all of this up because Sunday was an election day here in Valencia, and unlike in America where it is impossible to escape the deluge of political messaging when you’re within, oh, 3 years of an upcoming election, I had no idea it was even happening*. In talking to our Spanish teacher on Monday, we learned that a right-wing party won to form a governing coalition, and within that coalition is a far-right party called Vox, and progressive-type people here are feeling pretty bummed about it.

*This is not my preferred way of living. I’d like to be more informed about what is going on in the community around me, and while I subscribe to a few different websites and social accounts, clearly there is more I can be doing to be in the know. Learning the language better will of course help.

I suppose I’d like to believe the swirling political winds that have fractured the American psyche have been a bit better contained elsewhere in the world, but that’s just my own wishful thinking. It’s certainly worse in some countries than others, but I shouldn’t be surprised to see it pop up anywhere.

How will their ascension to power impact us? I’m honestly not sure, and as an ex-pat, I have to acknowledge my privileged position of some remove. But it sounds very much like a bad day for the LGBTQ+ community, for the expansion of green spaces and other environmentally-conscious directives, and for price controls on public transportation and apartments. In other words, it fucking sucks.

Part of what we love about Spain is how the society seems to take care of each other, and this election flies a little bit in the face of that spirit. It will be interesting to see how it all shakes out.

It’s also a reminder, and a sober one, that there is no place you can go to escape the world’s problems. And here I thought we’d found one.