The Kid is Alright

Or Why I Insisted My Son See Picasso's "Guernica" But Not The Who

“I totally messed up,” I said turning to my wife as Pete Townshend struck the first windmill power chord of The Who’s electrifying set in Golden Gate Park.

We were close enough to feel the breeze thanks to the VIP tickets I’d purchased for about a month’s salary. My wife gave me an empathetic look as the chorus to “I Can’t Explain” reverberated around the fairgrounds, a long-lost friend wrapping us in a familiar sonic embrace. “Don’t blame yourself,” she yelled into my already-ringing ear.

At home, no doubt Snapchatting on his new iPhone, was our twelve-year-old son. I’d offered to get him a ticket, but after going back and forth on it for a day or so, he ultimately declined. “I don’t want to be up late the night before camp starts,” he explained.

“Fair enough,” I said, somehow controlling my inner voice which was screaming “Dude, it’s just day camp!” But I let it go, shocked into inaction by my son’s first-ever request for a good night’s sleep.

I could name the feeling washing over me at the concert in one chord: regret, the soul-crushing kind. What was I thinking not requiring his attendance? My wife and I had forced our son to visit countless museums in Spain during our most recent summer vacation; there was never any question that he’d go to the Reina Sofia Museum to gaze upon Picasso’s Guernica, even though his interest in doing so ranked just above practicing for his bar mitzvah.

Yet I didn’t insist on his seeing The Who, a band that in my world view is on the same cultural plane as Picasso. To understand modern art and cubism, one must engage with Picasso’s work; to understand classic rock and the power chord, one must attend a Who concert.

The irreparability of my blunder weighed on me throughout the concert. While my son will have numerous opportunities to see Picasso’s work, the show in Golden Gate Park would likely be the only opportunity in his life to experience the archetypal power chord, to hear it the way it must be heard to internalize its life-affirming call to human sentience. The feeling of aliveness and bliss it transmits as its energy pulsates through one’s body at 120 decibels, akin to that of sex, cannot be conveyed by streaming through a smart phone at a highly-compressed 96 kilobits per second.

But even putting aside the cultural dimension, I felt I had failed my son because he actually likes rock music, and The Who in particular. When he was nine years old, he drafted a document entitled, “My Altime Favrite Top Ten Songs” (his spelling has since improved), and written in chicken scratch at number three was The Who’s “Baba O’Riley.” On the rare occasions I cede control over the music played in our car, my son will routinely put on the band’s Who’s Next album. He's been to several rock concerts already in his young life, including the Rolling Stones and Bruce Springsteen, both of which left him energized for days. All he needed from me was a slight nudge and surely he’d have decided to join us.

So why did I withhold that nudge?

I spent several days pondering that question which enveloped me like a hair shirt. I initially told myself it was because I was hesitant to impose my musical taste on my son. But I quickly laughed off that explanation. Quite literally from the day he was born I’ve tried to hone my son’s musical taste. For two weeks after his arrival, I secluded myself in the attic putting together fifteen mixed CDs for my wife’s middle-of-the-night feeding sessions. Like The Simpsons episode where Homer falls asleep listening to an instructional French tape and wakes up fluent, I hoped through my son’s late-night listening I could subliminally give him a foundation in classic rock and immunize him against pop. I loaded up those CDs with Dylan, Springsteen, the Allman Brothers, the Grateful Dead and the Velvet Underground. When my wife reported back that some of Dylan’s harmonica work caused the boy to twitch and fuss, I was gravely concerned, wondering if he might be oblivious to the dark beauty of those piercing, high-pitched wailings.

Clearly, I needed to dig deeper to understand my failure around The Who concert. Might I secretly wish for my son to pursue a career in music, and might I recoil against the slightest expression of that desire, not wanting to devolve into the clichéd dad trying to fulfill his unrealized dreams through his son?

Although my therapist might applaud such a theory, I don’t think it bears out. It’s true I’m still haunted at times by my upbringing among the Manhattan professional classes and my attendant failure to view music as anything more than a potential hobby. But like most über-proud parents, I believe my son has the intellectual and emotional capabilities to be whatever he wants and that he should be open to everything that interests him. Even if that means indulging his current occupational fascination: golf course architect.

No, after much reflection, I realized I didn’t insist he attend The Who concert because I sense his enjoyment of music might be waning and I didn’t want to be confronted with that new truth about him. He now spends long car rides playing video games rather than donning his headphones to listen to playlists I’ve carefully curated for him. He has less tolerance for piano lessons, an activity he used to really enjoy. And he actually considered skipping Springsteen on Broadway during a visit to New York City in favor of a fancy dinner out with his grandmother. With all due respect to my mother—seriously?

Might he complain The Who played too loud? Or too long? Might he have a meltdown similar to the one he had at the last music festival we attended together? Granted that festival was in Concepción, Chile, (where we lived for a year when my son was ten) and his meltdown was in reaction to hearing the first song played by Cangaceiro, a local band that combined traditional native music with death metal. If Black Sabbath had a flautist, it would still sound nothing like Cangaceiro, but it might begin to convey the musical aesthetic. “This makes no sense!” my son screamed, utterly appalled. I had to agree the improbable interlacing of gentle flute fills with distortion-infused guitar riffs made little sense, and so I acceded to his demand that we leave the premises immediately.

I wasn’t sure how The Who concert would be received. But the possibility my son might not find Pete Townshend’s power chords transcendent scared me. Music is where I’ve always gone to restore myself, to feel protected, alive, and at peace. I want my son to have such a place. Unlikely as it might’ve been, if he’d had a Cangaceiro-style reaction, I would’ve been devastated, thinking I’d failed him. So I pushed him away ever so slightly.

It was a silly reaction, really. Of course, every child needs to find their own source of emotional sustenance. Just because my son may believe he can live a full and enriching life without experiencing a Pete Townshend power chord at 120 decibels doesn’t mean I’ve failed him as a parent. If he feels alive and at peace walking a golf course, that’s pretty great, too.

The morning after the show, my son, well-rested and awake long before he needed to get up for camp, crawled into bed with me and asked how it was. My ears still ringing, my heart still racing, I tried gingerly to explain it was incredible, that I felt I’d failed him by not encouraging him to come.

He looked up at me. “Did they play ‘Baba O’Riley’”? he asked.

“Yes,” I replied.

He lay his head on my shoulder and sighed. “Yeah, I should’ve gone.”

_______

AUGUST 2025

This essay was originally published in the October 2018 issue of the literary journal Under The Gum Tree.

So, it’s now seven years later and I couldn’t have been more off-base thinking my son had lost his passion for music! At 20, he’s now a much more accomplished guitar player than me (admittedly, a low bar), still plays piano, and had his first gig recently with some college buddies. When he’s not playing music, he’s listening to it.

So I return to the question posed by the essay: why didn’t I insist that he come to The Who concert with me?

I now think it’s in part because I’d already internalized the advice of Esther Joy Goetz, aka, the creator of the Esther Goetz (Moms of Bigs) Substack, who suggests that if we parents want a closer relationship with our kids, the secret sauce is, “Invite, don’t demand.” I must’ve had an inkling that that was the right approach in the moment.

But then why did I (along with my wife) “demand” that our son see Guernica”? Why doesn’t the “invite, don’t demand” edict hold for that? Or does it? Should we have let him take a pass on the museum so he could sit in his Madrid hotel room and play video games? Hell, no!

And what to make of his expressed regret at having missed out on The Who concert? Doesn’t that suggest I should’ve “demanded” he attend—for his own sense of well-being?

True, Goetz applies the “invite, don’t demand” adage to teenagers. But does that mean that if my son had been 15 instead of 12, we should’ve allowed him to take a pass on Picasso? And by that logic, shouldn’t I have demanded he attend The Who concert given he wasn’t yet a teenager?

I’m certainly no parenting guru, but I can hazard a guess that knowing when to demand and when to invite depends on a multiplicity of factors, including the importance of the issue, the type of relationship you have, and the kid’s maturity level.

I have to say, though, re-reading this essay now it pains me all over again that my son feels he missed out on seeing The Who.

Perhaps there’s a middle ground between inviting and demanding—a space where a gentle nudge is the appropriate response. Which is where I landed in the essay.

All these years later, I still feel like that would’ve been the right approach.

Because all these years later, when I hear “Baba O’Riley,” I still think of the nudge I didn’t give—and the power chord he never got to feel.