Finding the Ties That Bind Through The Boss

By COLLEEN DISKIN

There’s a moment in every rock concert when you hear a few recognizable drum beats, or the beginning of a legendary guitar riff, and you know it is coming: The song you had prayed the band would play.

My 8- and 10-year-old got to experience that exhilarating moment last week when we took them to see Bruce Springsteen. The Boss had been playing a string of new songs and classic covers – stuff the kids didn’t know. And then came those familiar notes on Roy Bittan’s keyboard. “Badlands.”

Suddenly they were on top of their chairs, mouthing the refrain, pumping the air with their fists.

My husband and I beamed as if they were first learning to walk. And why not? They were learning to rock.

My kids have been exposed to every kind of music from opera to rap, but never been force fed any of it. Except for Springsteen. Our three children have been able to sing the refrains of “Hungry Heart” and “Rosalita” almost from the time they could talk.

Never mind how many vegetables they eat or the number of times they forget to put their dirty clothes in the hamper. Our oldest two know the exact moment in “Born to Run” when the guitar and sax- riffing is coming to a close and they are supposed to throw back their heads and yell “One, two, three! The highway’s jammed with broken heroes on a last-chance power drive!”

And they did it right on cue during the encores at Giants Stadium last week.

The 4-year-old was deemed too young to go (we’re not that crazy). But we are quite proud to say that he can air-guitar his way through “Backstreets” as well as anyone 40 years his senior.

In our view, this means we’ve done our job as parents.

My husband and I have never much worried about G-ratings when it came to music. Our kids went to the toddler music classes and listened to those saccharine and silly songs performed by The Wiggles.

But throughout the preschool years, the CD-changer would switch seamlessly from Elmo and Ernie to Neil Young and The Clash, with our kids at first butchering and then eventually learning the lyrics, and my husband and I relishing in their (in our view) advanced musical education. There have been some unfortunate results to playing our music indiscriminately.

My husband once spent a week rehearsing Johnny Cash’s “Folsom Prison Blues” on the guitar. Later we heard the youngest – then only 3 – belting out the line, “But I shot a man in Reno … just to watch him die.”

I was appropriately horrified. But my husband thought it a stroke of early musical genius that our toddler knew to pause for effect before bringing it home.

Our other two kids have also belted out inappropriate lyrics at young ages, shocking us into questioning whether we should restrict music-playing to the post-bedtime hours, like we do with R-rated cable movies and grown-up conversation subjects.

But we never did turn it down, perhaps because, for us, living without our favorite music would be like be an art lover living in a house with bare white walls. For better or worse, music has always been something we listened to with our hearts instead of our heads.

That’s not to say we would ever play profanity-laced songs about killing cops in front of them. That’s not our kind of music anyway. But somewhere along the line, we just decided not to worry about darker social messages in songs like “Atlantic City” or the sexual innuendo of a lyric like “just wrap your legs ’round these velvet rims.”

I was greeted with some raised eyebrows when I told people we were bringing the older two to a $110-a-ticket concert. I’m sure they thought it was money that could have gone toward a weekend away or a new piece of furniture.

But we never even questioned the expense. This was our family’s thing.

To be honest, while they sang and danced to the songs they knew, my kids didn’t appear to have anything even close to the madness for the music that my husband and I have. My daughter was visibly tired by the end, which came at close to midnight. And at one point, my son gave my enthusiastic dancing in the aisles a sideways glance a look that more than hinted that Mom was embarrassing him.

The teenage years are sure to bring many more of those glances, and my kids’ taste in music will inevitably diverge from ours. The older ones have their own iPods and CD players in their rooms, so already I’m hearing more Miley Cyrus and Jonas Brothers songs than I’d care to.

But for now anyway, music is not the great divide in our home. We are not a house with five different stereos blasting five kinds of music.

Maybe the kids will sadden us by one day deciding their parents’ music is tired and out-of-touch, or worse, maybe they will decide to provoke us someday by taking The Boss’ name in vain.

Or maybe, just maybe, all five of us will always hold onto this common love of Springsteen, and it will become part of the fabric that binds us as a family.

Can it be that the family that rocks together stays together?

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E-mail: motherload@northjersey.com

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