The 1 Thing Rockers Weren't Allowed to Do as Kids

When I was a kid, we'd ride our dinosaurs to cave school and read from etched stone tablets.

Okay, I'm not that old. I actually think I'm a perfect age. I am just a half a year older than Brad Pitt, which makes me about a year older than the guys in Metallica. (Yeah, I would have bought them beer back in the day if they lived in my neighborhood.) More importantly, I was a teen when the harder rock that we still love today hit a serious high.

The years 1974 to about 1978 brought us so many landmark albums that to name even a small percentage of them would be ridiculous, but I need to mention a few. Those were the years that brought us Thin Lizzy, KISS, The Ramones, Blue Oyster Cult, Van Halen, Black Sabbath, AC/DC, Led Zeppelin...okay, I'll stop.

With those albums came some amazing tour stops, and that meant concert programs (which are no longer a thing) and concert t-shirts. This is what I'm getting to: 14 to 17-year-old boys are already too full of testosterone and are mean little s***s, but if you give them a reason to punch you, they will.

In my neighborhood, with my clique, if you wore a concert shirt from a concert you didn't go to, you would catch a beating. I'm not kidding. It was considered the biggest sin in the world of rock to be a poseur.

There was none of that 'hey, get me a t-shirt' nonsense, and you didn't even think about wearing your big brother's concert t-shirt or you'd get a double ass-whippin'.

I have loosened my personal standards just a bit in that I will wear an artist shirt if I've seen that artist at some other time. I have one artist shirt that I know of for an artist I didn't see live and I have a real problem wearing it.

It really seems odd that showing support for a band could get you called out. Nowadays, you can get Nirvana t-shirts at Walmart. I don't really think it's a bad thing, but I just can't.