Crank up my imagination and I see cave men and women sitting around a fire, drinking Buds, banging sticks on rocks, and delighting in an old-fashioned jam session.

Music has been around forever. Being an expression of emotion, music can weave to and fro between ballad, classical, hard rock, and funeral dirge, oftentimes with such subtlety that were unaware of melodies entertaining our ears.

Oftentimes such sounds bring joy, but not always.

David was pretty jazzed when he and his men brought the Ark back to Jerusalem. However, wife Michal felt his songs and gyrations a bit eccentric and chewed him for expressing more joy than a man of such social stature should display.

On one occasion, jukebox selections indirectly landed me in jail, though it was my bad. In the early 1980s days after an aborted terrorist heist landed in Malta and an Egyptian swat team jumped the gun and guaranteed the flaming deaths of nearly all passengers, crew, and hijackers I blithely hopped off a plane from L.A. that landed on the same airstrip.

The entire nation was on alert because one hijacker had been captured and his buddies planned to visit that island nation and kill him before he talked. Any foreigner, a group I easily qualified for, was on the suspect list, and what cover I might have had evaporated when I cued up three Bob Seger songs at a downtown pub.

I was pretty young when Elvis shocked the world by flapping his knees on the Ed Sullivan Show. That didnt do much for me, but it was an historic moment.

The same thing with The Beatles and, again, Ed Sullivan. I was a trifle young and Id guess my sister, sitting in the same room, got more out of the show than I did.

Concerts have consistently been a source of joy for me.

My favorite, as anyone who knows me knows, was Bruce Springsteen. Maybe thats why I went back to see him perform five times. His style of music touches me, and yet its his incredible display of energy thats so awe-inspiring. At one concert in Portland, Springsteen put on an amazing show, came back for five encores, and likely would have come back for more had we in the audience not run out of energy to keep clapping.

Bob Dylan was pretty elderly when I saw him, but it was one of those once in a lifetime experiences mandated by life. To be honest, I got more listening pleasure from the performer on stage before him, John Cougar, but wrapping the two in one package during an evening under the stars was cool.

One special concert came maybe three years ago when I saw ZZ Top. Those two guitar-playing guys with long beards plus drummer began playing in 1969 (aka 45 years ago,) and their accumulative dance taps, at best, were mere rocks back and forth, but oh-h, the quality of the sound.

How shows are packaged, if done right, can add much pleasure to the experience of attending a concert.

The best light show Ive witnessed live accompanied a concert by The Newsboys. Still, from television clips Ive seen, light shows put on at Pink Floyd concerts are staged at an even higher level.

There was no light show that night, but I remember maybe in high school when the Kingsmen came to Enterprise and performed a new song called Louie Louie.

Appreciation of music comes from the human soul, whether young or old, and there are no age or race barriers restricting ones competence.

Jabberwock II columnist Rocky Wilson is a reporter for the Chieftain.