Hello, friends. All the talk of Beyoncé’s countrified album has me reflecting on the role of outlaw country in my Kansas youth. Here’s a story about my first concert and its aftermath.
All My Rowdy Friends: My First Concert and Its Aftermath
I couldn’t take my eyes off my friend’s Dad. His newspaper was open across the steering wheel. He was reading it as he drove the busy highway to the concert in Wichita.
“He commutes like this every day,” my friend Dawn assured me.
I accepted his reading-while-driving practice as part of the strange new world of concert-going. It was the summer of 1986. Dawn and I were 13 and headed to our first unchaperoned concert, a Hank Williams Jr. show. I sweated in a long-sleeved checked shirt, brand new fall school clothes that I couldn’t resist wearing. My jeans were tucked into cowboy boots.
Dawn’s Dad dropped us at the concert with no instructions or warnings whatsoever. We ducked and wove our way up to the front of the crowd. Most guys at the show were wearing Hank Jr. t-shirts and loudly referring to him as Bocephus, his nickname, as if this were esoteric information. The kind of girls Hank Jr. really, really, really, really, really, really liked were whooping it up in cowboy hats, bikini tops, jean shorts and boots. I was overdressed.
There Hank Jr. was onstage, shades and beard covering his accident scars, outrageous as ever, his swagger alone sanctioning every hedonistic impulse we’d ever have. For country kids back then, Hank Jr. was Dionysus himself. We worshipped his country rock and hard-driving blues, finding ecstatic release in his music. Unlike older country’s stories of truth and consequences, sin and redemption, Hank Jr.’s hits mostly promised eternal parties, an ideal message for the self-absorbed 80s, when the worst thing that might happen was your rowdy friends settling down (I’d discover his depths as a songwriter later). We knew, of course, about Hank Jr.’s issues with his iconic Dad and his break with Hank Sr.’s musical legacy. But 80s country radio hadn’t discovered culture wars or true divisiveness yet. Our local stations played both traditional and outlaw country. We loved it all.
While I sang along to “A Country Boy Can Survive” at the concert, a boy pressed his hip hard into mine. He had a light mustache and seemed older, maybe college-aged. Almost as tall as me. I moved a couple of inches away from him.
“How old are you?” he asked.
“Seventeen,” I lied.
“Me too!” he lied. “I’m Keith.”
Dawn raised her eyebrows at me. Keith handed us a bottle of Wild Turkey. We took a few swigs of the burning stuff. We were close enough to the stage to catch any crazy antics—Hank Jr. might shoot a gun, we’d heard. Being near the action meant standing next to giant speakers and their distorted sound. Part of me longed for those afternoons in the school practice room when my friend Kelli and I played piano and sang together. A small window refracted light into rainbows on the practice room wall, and sometimes we’d make up chords to match the shifting colors.
By the time Hank Jr.’s concert ended, my ears were done with overamplified sound and I was as buzzed on Wild Turkey as I was on the music. Somehow I’d started holding Keith’s hand.
“We better go,” Dawn said. “My Dad’s waiting.”
Keith grabbed me by the shoulders and kissed me. It wasn’t my first kiss. It was the deepest and hardest, his tongue laying claim to my mouth and making other demands. I didn’t love the kiss but was too curious about its insistence to stop.
“Come on, Michelle!” Dawn yelled. She grabbed my wrist, pulling me away from Keith and out to the parking lot.
My friend’s Dad sat in the car as if nothing had changed, as if an older boy-man hadn’t given us whiskey and kissed me, as if Dawn and I hadn’t surfed waves of Dionysian energy, as if the whole world hadn’t shifted on its axis in the two totally awesome hours we’d been at the concert. We collapsed into the back seat. It was too dark to read the newspaper, so Dawn’s Dad chain-smoked all the way home.
The car pulled into the driveway like a shark sliding into a baby pool. We rarely had unexpected visitors to our farm, which was eight miles from town. The souped-up, blue-and-white 1959 Dodge Coronet was so flashy in our country setting that it seemed predatory. I stood in the yard with my younger siblings and felt like one of our slow-witted dairy cows as I turned my head to follow the car, attempting to take it all in.
The car stopped. Out stepped Keith, the boy-man I’d kissed at the Hank Williams Jr. show two nights before—and had lied to about my age. At the concert he’d mentioned living in Haysville, thirty miles away. In rural Kansas’s pre-internet age, Keith might as well have come from another galaxy.
“How did you find me?!” I asked.
He’d known only that I was Michelle from Conway Springs and thought I was 17. So he drove to our town’s high school. In a move that defies all good sense, the school’s office personnel gave him the address of a seventeen-year-old Michelle in town. Keith went to her house and discovered the frankly hotter and more eligible Michelle Helm. “She has a boyfriend,” Keith informed me. Undeterred, he returned to the high school, where he paced the front hall and contemplated his next move. That’s when my friend Dawn happened to wander out of volleyball practice for a drink at the water fountain. They recognized each other from the concert, and she gave him directions to our farm.
While Keith and I talked, my Dad emerged from the machine shed with a look on his face I’d never seen before.
“Dad, this is Keith,” I said. “We met at the Hank Williams Jr. concert.”
“Quite a car,” Dad said. “How old are you?”
“Seventeen, sir,” Keith said, flashing a grin. He didn’t seem at all intimidated by my Dad.
“You can stay for just a minute,” Dad told him. “Don’t go anywhere in that car,” he ordered me.
Keith and I wandered toward the machine shed. His presence felt electric, as if he’d brought the Hank Jr. concert with him to the farm. His pursuit of me was a thrill. At the same time, I wondered why exactly he’d tracked me down. We’d barely spoken during the show. I’d never considered finding him. Also, he seemed shorter than he had at the concert.
“What’s that smell?” he asked, wrinkling his nose.
“Cow manure,” I said.
When we reached the far side of the machine shed, Keith leaned in to kiss me. My little sister and brother jumped out from behind a tractor, howling with laughter. My parents had put them on spy duty.
We walked to the tree swing in the front yard. Keith pushed me on the swing, holding me by my hips too long before he let go, his middle fingers pressing toward my crotch. Lines were being crossed and I felt myself pulled toward the forbidden. My Mom appeared.
“Keith, we could get out the croquet set and you two could play with the younger kids,” she said.
“No, thank you,” Keith said.
“If you’re only interested in, um, private activities, maybe it’s time to go,” Mom said.
Her knowing humor undermined my sense of transgression. Dad would tease me even harder at dinner. “A little short for you, isn’t he?” Dad would say. When I’d object, he’d add, “Yeah, but see, at your young age you’re not done growing, and at his advanced age he probably is.”
It was time for Keith to go. We walked to his car.
“How old are you really?” Keith whispered.
“I’m 13. How old are you?”
“I’m already 18. Are you a virgin?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “I want to take you out.” He gestured to his car with its white leather seats.
“I don’t think they’ll let me,” I said. This was true, but I was happy to have my parents as an excuse to avoid that car. I turned back to see my Mom and younger siblings leaning on the fence, watching us like a TV soap opera.
“We could bring your little brother,” Keith said. “Give him candy. Maybe he’ll fall asleep and we can pick up where we left off the other night.”
I shook my head no. He opened the car door.
“Okay, maybe I’ll see you at the next Bocephus show,” Keith said.
That was the spirit. Our Hank Jr. fandom gave us personalities, at least.
At my first concert, I’d somehow made this boy-man so infatuated or horny that he’d persevered through all the difficulties my fake age and the pre-internet era tossed his way. Persistent pursuit was supposed to be a flattering storyline for a girl. So why did I feel small, like I had to shrink down within myself to stay in character with him? I didn’t yet understand that the plot was hackneyed, my role constrained by passivity. I did already sense that this story was worth experiencing exactly once.
“Maybe,” I said to Keith, knowing I’d never see him again. He drove away. I went to my bedroom and slid a Hank Jr. Greatest Hits cassette tape into my stereo. I lay on my bed staring at the purple roses in the wallpaper while I played the lead character in wild daydreams of the future.
I felt shocked and scared for 13-year-old Michelle as I read this suspenseful memoir. I'm so glad your parents were there! Thank you for writing it.
Great story....and great storytelling. Really enjoying your writing!