I posted my review of Ozzfest at Blogcritics and Tom Johnson posted this curious reply in the comments:

How old is your son, TDavid? Just curious - I don’t know too many parents that wouldn’t mind their kids listening to Slayer! (But that’s cool - my parents never said a word about any of the weird stuff I brought home and listened to ravenously, and I’m very thankful of it because I was very free to explore music and really decide for myself what was good and what was not. I learned pretty quick that a lot of things were popular with kids simply because their parents forbid them listening to it.)

Strangely, “back in the day” I never really got too into Priest (this would be the Turbo era,) but today I find my interest in them incredibly high. I keep checking for used copies of those remasters, hoping some of the really old stuff will turn up cheap. One of these days, I suppose …

I started to reply over there and the response got really long so I decided to turn it into a full blog entry here. Here’s my response:

Hi Tom - He’s 14 and an honor roll student with a 3.51 G.P.A (which is several points better than I ever did when I was in school) and he was elected by his class to be the Vice President this coming year. Yes, we’re proud of him.

He’s also going to be co-hosting a brand new weekly web radio show with me where I teach him how to build a website step-by-step starting next month. The show will be geared toward new webmasters age 13 and older. Those who want to learn how to build, maintain and market a website having zero knowledge.

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At Ozzfest I also took him past the red Trojan tent a couple times and made sure that he knew that I thought it was a good idea that they were passing out free trojans aplenty at Ozzfest.

As it sounds like you’d agree, Tom, parents can’t turn a blind eye to this stuff and act like their children are never going to be exposed to this stuff.

It’s my wife and my opinion that we might as well be with our children so we can help them understand what’s going on and that we too were once teens that had to deal with the same kinds of things: sex, drugs, alcohol, and profanity-laced rock and roll.

I think it was the first time that I actually didn’t mind that he could join in with the crowd yelling the F word in it. He was quiet and reserved about it though and didn’t get too much into these parts of the concert.

I guess that our perspective is that they have to grow up someday. It might as well be with their parent’s blessing instead of ignorance. And I’d be a total hypocrite if I said I wasn’t involved in many of these things when I was his age.

Neither my wife or I smoke and we rarely ever drink (and it’s even more rare that we drink to any kind of excess — in fact I don’t think our children have ever seen either of us drunk), so about the worse vices we have as parents that they are exposed to is that we like to recreationally visit rock concerts and casinos.

As for Slayer? Well, there was a couple other parents there with even younger children waiting in the same line to get Kerry King’s autograph. One mother (?) was next to her young son who had a mohawk and painted face.

My son is pretty much into the same bands/music as me. I can tell the concert had a similar impression on him because yesterday he was listening to Judas Priest Live on his CD player and playing a baseball game on his PS2 with his little brother. He told me yesterday that he didn’t much care for the double-live Slayer CD. He said something like: “I liked Slayer better live.”

He mentioned an interest in going to Thin Lizzy, Deep Purple and Joe Satriani concert that’s coming up. I told him that I saw Deep Purple before and they were incredible. Who knows, maybe we’ll hit that concert too.

Lastly, the Priest Turbo era has probably been my least favorite Priest music era to date (yes, even more than the Ripper Owens era). I didn’t much care for the commercialism of some of those songs (Private Property, yech!), but I didn’t go all crazy like some Priest fans over the keyboard usage nor did I think they were selling out. In my opinion, they were at the top of their game from Unleashed in the East (live Japan) to Defenders of the Faith

Did this post make you go hmm?

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