Don't look back in anger

I've reached a stage in my life where I've started to feel old. I have gray hairs. It takes me more than a single orange Gatorade to bounce back from a hangover. The fact that a band calls itself "Panic! At The Disco" and nobody has even the slightest problem with this mystifies me. I also wish those rotten kids would just get off my damn porch already.

But when my buddy sent me this link yesterday with the joking IM accompaniment, "We're changing our New Year's plans," I nearly keeled over. On Dec. 31st, the Mom-rock vehicle Jack FM will host the "Orange County New Year's Eve" concert in southern California. At first I figured it wasn't a big deal, radio stations have Jingle Ball-type soirees all the time during the holiday season. But this concert was different. Surreal, even.

Everclear. Soul Asylum. JR Richards of Dishwalla. A graveyard of 90s alt-rock acts, forgotten and presumed dead since the end of the Clinton administration. The artists that provided the soundtrack of my youth now bunched together with touring 80s washouts like Blondie, Brett Michaels of Poison, Berlin and Thomas Dolby. You're telling me that Dave Pirner -- the same guy who wrote "Runaway Train" AND routinely saw Winona Ryder completely naked -- is performing on a bill with the "She Blinded Me with Science" guy? Really?

There was a time when being a youth of the 90s separated you from the lameness of the 80s teens. You were relevent. They were cheesy. Your music -- your culture -- mattered. They were old, you were young. But now 44-year-old Art Alexakis is playing low-level music festivals to climb out of bankruptcy; singing "Santa Monica" with a group of nameless backing musicians and you're wondering where the time went. "Watch the world die" indeed.

I guess this is the natural progression of things. You don't really appreciate being young and part of the culture that accompanies it until it's gone. One second you're 16, and the next thing you know you're out of college with a crap job, a pile of student loans and credit card bills and you're thinking, "This used to be much less complicated." I grew up in a time where bands like Live, Counting Crows, Oasis, Third Eye Blind, Stone Temple Pilots, Semisonic and the Wallflowers were young and vibrant entities. They sounded great, and more importantly, they meant something to you, no matter how silly that might seem in retrospect.

Now, most of these bands are footnotes in history. Many were dropped by their record labels when buffoons like Fred Durst and Jonathan Davis desecended upon the scene with "nu metal" in the late 90s, taking up so much of the musical landscape with their mindless clatter that nothing was left for the popular culture they displaced.

Some of these groups would catch on with independent labels or put out albums on their own, but the writing was already on the wall. Their time in the spotlight had passed. Faced with the pride-swallowing notion of playing in front of a dozen people in a club less than a decade after playing to thousands in arenas, most bands don't make it. Bands point fingers at themselves, their management, the record labels that won't support them. It's usually just a matter of time before the in-fighting consumes them.

The ones that survive do so at all costs, and that's why events like the Orange County New Year's Eve bash exist. They serve a purpose, and there are just enough loyal fans and nostalgia hounds to make it work on both ends. If you want, you can look at this doggedness not to just quit and move on as sad -- and in a way you may be right. But you can also see it for what it truly is ... bands and individuals who love to play music and are willing to suffer any indignity to do it forever. There's a nobility to that in my opinion.

So a little more than a week from now, the Dishwalla guy will step up to a mic on a small b-stage, plug in his guitar and tell a bunch of Laguna Beach soccer moms all his thoughts on God. I'll be 3,000 miles away, but you can bet your Doc Martens I'll be thinking of my friends from the 1990s as I move on to 2007.

Where have you gone Jakob Dylan? An Alternative Nation turns its lonely eyes to you.