Taryn Gee/The Globe and Mail
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Music festival season is here, so I'm expecting a call from my elderly mother asking whether I've bought our tickets. Mum is 79, with soft, snow-white hair and the birdlike fragility of the elderly, but she still walks everywhere and rides her bike. She only recently quit playing hockey, and she loves music – almost all types of music.
For me, like most children of the 1960s and 1970s, the playlists from those years became the soundtrack to my relationship with my mother. Hearing her listening alone to Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen long into the night was like the opening strains to my parents' divorce. The Rolling Stones and T. Rex ushered in my teenage years. When I hear the Electric Light Orchestra, I still hear the sound of Mum's sharp knock on the door of my boyfriend's house, and her pleading with me to come home, while we cranked the volume.
Music played constantly at our house. It was the shared language we could agree upon when bare words were like fuel to a fire.
Thirty-five years later, and the reason we began attending music festivals together is pure happenstance. I live in Pemberton, B.C., a small town north of Whistler, where in 2008 Live Nation showed up with 40,000 fans and headliners including Jay-Z and Coldplay. The first year of the Pemberton Music Festival, I didn't even consider inviting Mum. It would be too hot, too long, too dusty, too loud: She wouldn't want to come.
"I love the Flaming Lips," she told me, however, so along with most of her grandchildren we went – and had a fantastic time, barely stopping between shows for food, and riding our bikes home at 2 a.m. Problems with traffic, garbage and land zoning made that festival seem like a one-off, and part of me hoped it would be. But last year the festival was back under new promoters. Once again, I resisted inviting Mum.
"You don't know half of the bands this time. I don't know half of the bands," I told her. "You won't want to be there." But it was obvious from the silence on the other end of the phone line that her mind was made up.
"Your mum sounds amazing; you're so lucky," everyone tells me. And of course she is, and I am. So, how do I explain the conflicting emotions I feel about going to a festival with my mother? Last year, a social-media campaign offering discounted tickets for parents with small children included a cartoon drawing of a scowling old woman with a red X stamped across her face. But Mick Jagger, Paul McCartney, Dolly Parton – they're practically contemporaries of my mother, and they still headline massive festivals. So when are we "too old" to attend as fans?
Of course, I understand that pop music is, and always has been, the domain of the young. The target audience of music festivals around the world is probably 16- to 25-year-olds. With the addition of water slides, skateboard parks and comedy tents, they've become like Disney World for twentysomethings. Why Mum would want to go is perhaps a better question. And for that matter, why do I?
It's not simple nostalgia. Last year we watched Blondie strut through songs that defined the 1970s. It was fun singing along, but that alone wouldn't draw me back. We are there for the same reason most of the fans are: for the pure joy of listening to live music among friends and family in a spectacular mountain setting. "Everybody's smiling," Mum said after our first festival. The sound reverberated like a tribal drum so loud that the ground shook and you felt it in your bones. I watched Mum push deeper and deeper into the crowds and stand transfixed, like an explorer happening upon wild animals in their habitat, as if she could reach out and touch youth, energy, life.
"Motherfucker," said one particularly articulate young man who turned to see her standing beside him as Outkast played. In the crowd I saw several people in fuzzy animal costumes, plus three women wearing only nipple tape. Still, they gaped at mum in her neat khaki capris and white blouse with a Justin Trudeau pin. They draped sweaty arms around her and asked to take photos. What's the big deal, I wanted to ask after a while. She's no different from you. With any luck you, too, will be old one day. But what a buzzkill it would be to say that.
And maybe that's the dilemma. We're always told you're as young as you feel, but it's a lie. Seeing her there, white tufts of Kleenex poking from her ears to protect them from the decibels, it's impossible not to feel the gulf between who we are and who we think we are.
Last year, Mum and I wandered over to a stage featuring Empire of the Sun, a band neither of us knew. We waited with zero expectation until they arrived on stage dressed like messengers from another planet. The sun cracked through the clouds and the crowd's hands rose in unison as the band started playing: "Loving every minute 'cause you make me feel so alive, alive."
Our hands were held high, tears streamed down my face and Mum and I were dancing. Alive. Alive.
Yes, Mum. I've got your ticket.
Hillary Downing lives in Pemberton, B.C.