Oldest/youngest in the audience

My younger daughter, Marina, complained a few years ago about how hard it was to keep up with all the music. All the hip music, I think she meant. As far as I can tell, she's pretty good at it. Just about every new band I get excited about, and mention to her, she's already bored with.

It's hard not to be nostalgic about the late '60s and early '70s, when rock and roll was expanding at the speed of sound. One other thing to be nostalgic about was that just about everything worthwhile could be discovered in one chronicle: Rolling Stone. It wasn't just an arbiter of taste. It was the source for everything new. A handful of labels controlled the rock and roll market. Every rock critic tried to listen to everything new coming out, and to an extent unfathomable today, they could. I would read Rolling Stone cover to cover, supplement it with Crawdaddy, and I knew as much as anyone about what was happening. And everything was happening. Another thing hard to believe: We all listened to the same music. My friends listened to the Dead, the Beatles, Hendrix, Who, everyone who played at Woodstock, everyone who played at Monterey, the Stones, Bonnie Raitt, Dylan, Emmylou, Earl and Doc, Little Feat, Zappa ... Get it? This was the music on every progressive radio station in America. Sound hadn't splintered into personal taste; it was all explosively new and still expanding, and shared by everyone.

Now you're into electronica, or dub, or rap, or American Idol belting, or whatever, and even if there's some crossover, it's clear from the dress and behavior of an audience that each of the styles has its own full-fledged identity. Hippies were their own tribe, to a certain extent. Now there are many, smaller, quicker-changing tribes.

But it's all music. It's not necessarily all good music, but in each genre and subgenre there's stuff worth hearing. So far I've found that.

As Marina says, "The more music you hear, the more you hear music."

One evening she and I were in Yoshi's on Fillmore seeing Madeleine Peyroux, the jazz singer.

We had seen Peyroux a few months earlier, and after the first set I had an idea. We left Yoshi's, walked three blocks and bought tickets to see Yo La Tengo at the Fillmore. We made it into the hallowed hall five minutes before the band took the stage. She had been the youngest person at the Peyroux concert. I was the oldest at the Yo La Tengo concert. The last time I had seen Yo La Tengo I was in my 30s, when the guitarist Ira Kaplan was the sound guy at Maxwell's in Hoboken, and his wife Georgia Hubler hadn't yet learned to play the drums well. Now she's one of the best.

On the Madeleine Peyroux clip, the second song she sings is from Randy Newman in 1966. Marina learned it from a Dusty Springfield album. Here's Marina's version: Marina sings I Think It's Gonna Rain Today