For the good times, a jolt of memory at the Virgin Festival

While I waited for The Flaming Lips to start, I became the object of someone's ridicule, and it was the same bit of criticism I'd been wanting to dish about the Virgin Festival. There were forty thousand people there. That's not a shabby number. In fact, any more and I'd have wanted to go crazy. But so maybe my eyes aren't what they used to be, but hearts afire where were the drugs?

It wasn't quite Woodstock, and maybe people were more interested in beer. I smelled fresh marijuana exactly two times, and I knew those long lines for the ATM weren't to get t-shirt money. I saw people stuffing their faces with fries and pizza, the same devoted intensity I recognized as the munchies after a good, fierce bake from a clean joint.

I waved off everyone, who took off to see the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and I sat down a while and watched Wayne Coyne fiddle with equipment onstage. The camera trained on him the whole time, and I saw his dear face and gray grizzled hair taking up the entire large screen over the stage. Because the portable toilets were beyond frightening and my bladder had gone into shock when I went into one, I refrained from drinking liquids and drank enough water to stay hydrated. No beer, no wine ... usually at a concert I can't wait to get totally soused, but I was good this time. But I'd finally found a clean indoor restroom, and so, suitably refreshed, I took out my water bottle and took a long, deep drink.

These two little brat boys pointed at me and said, "What is it with the young people these days, being all healthy and shit? Like eating boca burgers and bean sprouts? What the fuck?" I looked at the kid who said this with quite a raised eyebrow. I could have been his grandma. He was all of twenty-three.

I pulled out a Newport and started smoking. Then the Lips started, and I stared in helpless awe as Wayne Coyne rolled out on stage in a white bubble and surfed over the crowd. Giant white and pink balloons rolled out from backstage and dropped over the crowd, and on the right, a crowd of people dressed in Santa costumes danced around and rang bells. The band started with the opening song from The Soft Bulletin and ran through some more favorites, and all of a sudden it was 9:30 and I had to rush over to the Chili Peppers in fear that Cass would strand me in Baltimore with a near-empty bottle of water and an exploded credit card.

But it was an extremely agreeable festival. It accommodated more healthy choices at the same time that it offered crabcake sandwiches and cheese fries. Did they have boca burgers? I actually love them, though I wouldn't choose them over a good, half-raw slab of cow.

Before the Lips, I caught the tail end of Scissor Sisters, whom I absolutely adore. Before that, I saw The Who. Legendary. First tour since Entwistle died, 2002. I danced in place in my own awkward way, and the frat boy of my dreams tried to woo me by spilling beer all down my pant leg. His pickup line was, "Who did you come here to see the most? I mean, besides me, of course." I said, "The Flaming Lips." He asked, "What do you think of The Who?" And I said, "What do you mean, what do I think of The Who? They're The Who. They're freaking legendary," and my answer was enough that we were best friends forever while Townshend and Daltrey blitzed through "Won't Get Fooled Again" and "Pinball Wizard." Then I sort of forgot he was there, and he left, probably in search of more beer, and when I looked to my left, he was gone, his lunky dance moves, his beery leer. If he'd had a joint instead of watery room-temperature beer, I would have made out with him pressed up against the blue walls of the portable toilets.

But the oldies took the evening, I think. The Who rocked harder and better, with the passion and focus of being the keepers of so many classic songs that sparked instant recognition. The words poured from the crowd with love, there was a solidarity there that you only feel when a group of people are straining toward the same breaking point. We sang along, we danced in place, someone stepped on my toes at least three times during each song.

I had lost them for a while, but even at the height of such trippy, age of Aquarius emoting, singing "See Me, Feel Me," it brought back high school for me in a really clear and delightful way, a good, clean kind of nostalgia that I thought was impossible. The Taco Bell drive-thru and the Dairy Queen, not so much. But The Who, singing along to "I Can't Explain" and "I Can See for Miles," in my car, wishing I were older and smarter and prettier, wishing I were anywhere but here, wishing for so many things that just weren't possible right then, and The Who played in sympathetic accompaniment in the background. Hearing them in high school was like that transcendent moment when Lindsay in the last episode of Freaks and Geeks gets introduced to The Grateful Dead by her dorky hippie counselor, and she can't stop listening to it, over and over again.

I had done the same with The Who, and I had forgotten, until Saturday. Reminded, of all things, of high school. And thinking, if I had to do it over again, I'd do it the same. The same dorky orchestra nerd, always reading biographies of old MGM movie stars and musicians, from Leonard Bernstein to Miles Davis, familiar with Tchaikovsky before U2. Even the childish angst.