I was channel surfing the other night on the tube and I came across a rock concert on AXS TV, my new favorite channel on TV’s great wasteland.  It was an AC/DC concert.  For those of you unfamiliar with AC/DC, they are a high voltage rock ‘n’ roll band that has been consistently selling-out concert tours for over 40 years now with global sales totaling more than 200 million albums.

I was surprised to see an audience full of young people following this group because the group looks “old.”  The rock and roll, drug induced, no sleep lifestyle unfortunately does not produce baby faces and ever-young images.

The kids in the audience were having a ball though, and I was glad to see that groups like the Stones, Metallica and AC/DC were still happinin’ and appreciated.  After all, these are the guys that had a large hand in creating rock and roll to begin with.

The stage was replete with today’s necessary light show, fireworks and other pyrotechnic effects, and number after number went by projecting basically the same theme over and over – Hell, fire and brimstone, the devil and all things dark and spitting from the center of the earth.

Probably the typical message of many bands preaching to teenagers revolting from too much parentally enforced Sunday School.

As I watched, enjoying the power of the music, I began to tire of the same theme over and over.  They had given out little red devil’s horns for everyone in the audience to wear and even some of the musicians in the band wore them  — actually rather dopey and goofy looking …

I began to wonder, “What is this really all about?”  Devil worship?  Revolution from the good old straight and narrow?  Even worse, some sort of pagan ritual played out on a Saturday night?

The band, and especially the lead singer, screamed constantly the same message and the stage effects backed it all up, but then I began to look deeper at the whole scene.  The audience was simply having fun.  They were smiling, joyful, singing along, all standing throughout — they in their little red devil horns were one of the happiest groups of 20,000 I’d seen in a long time.

That’s when I saw that it was all a game.  These weren’t devil worshipers; these were Jerry and Tommy and Martha from down the street.  They were good kids just out rockin’ to the music, havin’ a blast and actually laughing in the face of the devil.  There was no voodoo fear of evil in this audience.  It was far more comic book than the poison scrolls of Sodom.

There was no devil present – only the joy of music and dancing, humanity together out havin’ fun and celebrating the energies of life.

Oh to quibble, perhaps the subject matter might have been more wholesome or even a bit deeper in content.  But it was certainly a lot better that the rest of television and its murder, mayhem and blatant and consequently boring sexuality.  The concert was not boring, whereas most of TV is with its toilet humor, 1000 killings a night and repetitious plot.

OK, you get the idea.

Anyway, I moved on past the concert after a while because it too finally became boring in its repetition, but I felt a lot better about our American culture.

When I first turned on to the concert one of my first thoughts watching it all was, “No wonder we’re so hated by the people in the Middle East and other parts of the world.?  If they showed this in Iran, I could see that we, as a people, could definitely be misunderstood.  Then I saw through the Halloween mask into the happy faces of the kids out on a Saturday night laughin’ at the devil.  It was all so innocent.

I surfed on, smiling …