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

What would Husker Du?

Nostalgia's hard to figure. No matter the timeless beauty of Days, when Ray Davies leans into the microphone to sing it, I'm Marcel Proust flashing back to college, my now dead friends William and Aleta in the car laughing and singing, loving the sincerity in the midst of irony. It's creepy, too. The past creates such static, especially when it's idealized. Being transported back to an illusion of an illusion. Yikes.

The Fillmore has a habit of producing this nostalgia/artistry tension for me. Ray Davies slipped into the nostalgia side, I think because he is intentionally nostalgic, and idealizes past rapture, and so believes that it's OK to appear in his own context. His discomfort with his own living in the past adds emotion to his show. At least he doesn't go so far as Jonathan Richman, who won't let on which side of the joke he's telling -- the gloppy sincere one or the cruel ironic one.

Heading the other night to see Bob Mould, I was thinking about two prior concerts, one from 25 years ago, the other last year. When I saw Husker Du at what turned out to be a famous concert at Irving Plaza or the Ritz, they were on the verge of breaking up. I didn't know that. But I did know that I had seen the second coming of Lennon and McCartney. I could not figure out how Bob Mould could keep so many lines going at once on a single guitar, and for that matter I couldn't figure out how he was making any music with such motionless, clumsy looking fingers. That show shot to second place on my all-time concert list, which had been held for 15 years by the Jefferson Airplane the night that Jorma handed me a joint and Gracie stared at me through the entire concert. I was 16 and very impressionable.

The other show I was thinking about on the way to the Fillmore was last year's Dinosaur Jr. show there. I had braced for the possibility of post-punk nostalgia, and was amazed at the currency of D. Macsis' raging, impossibly loud and intricate guitar work. Now he had set the standard. Those two, Macsis and Mould, broke through the ban on musicality in punk, and set the stage for the watered-down grunge bands. Thrash, and specifically Dinosaur and Husker Du, reopened music from its most treacherous drift into fashion.

What I got with Bob Mould was a different kind of nostalgia. As the concert progressed, I hoped for the sublimity that I remembered from 25 years ago, and when that came in the last half, I felt both rewarded and confused by my own demands of an artist who clearly wants to change on his own terms, not mine. It was funny that he was featuring, in the first half, an early Sugar album that toned down his guitar work, while the brand-new album he featured in the second half met the rave-up thrash expectations of a diehard Husker Du fan like me.