Time Is on My Side . . . (Yes It Is)

Southern California is a famously wicked place to raise a family, no matter where you nest. Last weekend, some friends at a Bel-Air wedding reported overhearing a child’s voice say, “Man, was I wasted.” The voice turned out to belong to the flower girl.

These are the kinds of stories that make a person want to run like a bat out of hell from this metropolis, grab the babies and get out while the gettin’ is good. And yet, L.A. has its wholesome side. For instance, this is probably the only place in America where an evening with Mick Jagger and Keith Richards is viewed as a family affair.

We took our teenager to Dodger Stadium to see the Rolling Stones. In some cities, this would have qualified as child abuse. The world tour of rock ‘n’ roll’s “bad boys” has taken place to a chorus of such shameless yuppie chin-stroking that, by this point, it’s enough to embarrass the average adolescent to the brink of death.

But Los Angeles is different. Here, nobody gets to own the music, however much they’d like to. Rock ‘n’ roll is community property. Someone starts blubbering about how they used to play air guitar and now they wear bifocals and drive a Taurus, we hand them a Beck CD and tell ‘em to can it. The Stones aren’t a metaphor in Los Angeles. They’re kinfolk. Mick comes to town, you swing by and bring the kids.

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As we headed toward our seats, a clutch of supermodels parted for what appeared to be a grade-school soccer team in chevron formation behind a man in a Windbreaker that said “Balboa Park AYSO.” Not far away--beyond an entourage of Saudis, three Japanese women in leopard skin and a menopausal Marianne Faithfull type with a tambourine--a family of four made for the backstage VIP entrance in matching duck-yellow Eddie Bauer rain gear.

The place swarmed with fans of every conceivable generation, like some dysfunctional family reunion to which every far-flung branch had dispatched a few delegates. At one point, we asked the teenager and the friend she brought with her whether they were excited.

The teenager gave us a look. “I mean, come on,” she burst out laughing, finally. “This was, like, my first music. It’s The Stones.”

If California, as Wallace Stegner said, is “America, only more so,” that goes double for California kids. Whatever the nation’s adolescents are into, they were into it here first. The Backstreet Boys--this month’s pop sensation--played an assembly at our teenager’s middle school when she was in sixth grade. It has ever been thus. My husband, who grew up here, saw the Doors at the La Habra High School auditorium. The principal called off the concert when Jim Morrison dropped his pants.

Even so, it’s never easy to know what to infer from the hodgepodge you’ll get when you talk to a Southern California adolescent, assuming, of course, you can get the kid to talk back. I tried to eavesdrop on the teenager and her pal, dressed like delegates from their own far-flung tribe, in matching Doc Martens and ground-scraping bell-bottoms and wool ski caps.

“Check it out,” one said to the other. “Count the guys with Sammy Hagar haircuts.” And later, when the stadium speakers issued forth a snippet of Van Morrison: “Omygod, listen! It’s the edited version of ‘Brown-Eyed Girl.’ ”

Then they squinched up their mouths and bugged out their eyes in what I was sure was an impersonation of the latest heavy metal act. “What are you doing?” I asked.

“Oh, this dude we know got his tongue pierced? And now he can’t use it for three days? And we’re wondering how he’s going to be able to kiss.”

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What do you make of that? You look at your teenager, dressed in that wool cap like some alpine transient, and all you can think of is the way she looked as a little girl, the way her mouth would make a little pink O like a Cheerio when she fell asleep in the car. Once you heard her back there singing a Christmas song in a weird, reedy, nasal voice, and when you asked what she was doing, she said, “I’m singing ‘Frosty the Snowman’ like Bob Dylan would.”

You think what a miracle it is for someone to grow up original and wholesome in this jaded rock ‘n’ roll metropolis. You wonder for a split second why they care about the kissing habits of this dude with the (ow!) pierced tongue.

Then it becomes moot, because the whole place goes black. And now there is the squeal of feedback, and now the crack of fireworks, and now that physical shock of that awesome jolt of sound. And then the opening bars of “Satisfaction,” so familiar, yet so shocking. And you leap to your feet and dance, and you’re all in this together, you and Mick and the teenagers and this wicked metropolis of Los Angeles, all of you prancing and pointing, all of you raised on rock ‘n’ roll.

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Shawn Hubler’s e-mail address is [email protected]