It's official: I'm a grown-up

Last night I went to a concert. A friend of mine had given me a ticket to go see Lynyrd Skynyrd for Christmas.

I was not really in the mood to go out last night. I was tired from working all day and I would have been happy to have planted my ass on the couch and watched football. But I did not want the ticket to go to waste so I suited up and headed out into the night. The temp outside was about 5 degrees and it was windy, making it feel like it was below zero.

I parked the car and as I was walking to the auditorium I noticed a couple of girls running down the sidewalk. One was wearing only a halter top and the other one was wearing a t-shirt.

The first thing that popped into my head when I saw them was, "What's wrong with those girls? They must be freezing! They should be wearing a jacket."

I watched them run down the sidewalk ahead of me, squeaking about how cold it was and then I did a double take. Wait a minute. I see two chicks running down the street wearing nothing but a thin piece of cotton and the first thing that comes to my head is that they should wear a jacket? Fuck I am officially a grown-up now. When did that happen??

Then, as if that was not evidence enough of my oldness, when I was in the concert, I got up and moved my seat cause it was too close to the speakers and my ears were hurting. Oh man...

The Skynyrd concert was good, but they are certainly a strange band. There's only 2 surviving members of the original band actually left in Skynyrd and it's almost like they are more of a tribute band at this point. Johnny Van Zant sounds almost exactly like his brother Ronnie and all the other members of the band have gotten all the original solos and riffs to the old songs down perfect.

They even play the same style guitars as the deceased, a Gibson Explorer (like Allen Collins used to play) and a Fender Stratocaster (a-la Steve Gaines).

Skynyrd has some out with several new records over the past few years and a lot of the new songs are really good. Just as an example, "The Last Rebel" album, from a few years back, was a great record. There are a bunch of good songs on that album. The funny thing is, Skynyrd doesn't play any of their new songs, they only do the original classic Skynryd songs.

Last night, Skynyrd played one new song. The rest were all songs from the original band's albums from the 70's. Weird. You'd think Skynyrd would get tired of playing all those old songs night after night, and want to play their new stuff, especially the new members of the band. Who wants to play some other guy's solo every single night? I mean it's fun for one or two songs, but if that were me, I'd want to play some of the new stuff that I actually had a hand in creating.

As a final testament to my newly discovered grown-upness, when Skynyrd started into the big, epic solo at the end of 'Freebird', which is always the final song, I got up and left the show before the end of the song because I wanted to beat the traffic and go home to bed. Oy.