The music that we love in our teens is the music we’ll love forever.

I didn’t make that up. I paraphrased it from an article by Farhad Manjoo on Salon.com (9/5/06). But it’s also in a book by a brain doctor.

In This is Your Brain on Music, neuroscientist Daniel Levitin says that because we’re hyper-emotional in our teens, “we tend to remember things that have an emotional component because our amygdala and neurotransmitters act in concert to 'tag' the memories as something important.” As further evidence, Manjoo says that our brains are “undergoing massive changes up until the teen years – after that, the brain structure becomes more fixed.”

“Consequently, it’s in our teens that we’re most receptive to new kinds of music.”

It’s not that we won’t embrace new music as we age, just that we won’t have the same emotional attachment to it.

The upcoming Ross/Alhambra 80s Scene Reunion Show offers no evidence to the contrary. For the third year in a row, the freaks and geeks of Evansville’s ‘80s alternative music scene will gather to worship at the altar of our misspent youths and shake our booties to the music that defined it.

The show will be held Saturday, November 3 at the Art Colony Gallery (formerly Synchronicity), 56 Adams Avenue, next to the Alhambra Theatre. Tickets are $8 and benefit the Bill Johns Punifula Scholarship for a Bright and Deserving Nontraditional USI Art Major.

After a few songs (and a few drinks…and if we close our eyes…) we can almost forget that those days were more than 20 years ago.

In the last two years we’ve been revisited by the Ghosts of All Ages Shows Past such as the Disciples of Decadence, Dogglethuraxxe, and the Inverted Nipples.
This year – I can hardly contain myself at the news – Matinee Idol (yes really!) featuring the Aarstad Brothers will start the show.

Matinee Idol will be followed by Stop the Car, a band without which (as far as I’m concerned) no ‘80s scene reunion would be complete. Bless ‘em and thank ‘em for resurrecting the reunion for another year, and for getting Matinee Idol on board.
Bands from the current music scene have been welcomed back again this year as well. The old folks will be followed by the more vim-and-vigorous Kentucky Prophet and Dang Heathens.

For those familiar with the bands of ages past – STC and Matinee Idol – an introduction to their alternatively danceable/groove-able/sometimes-gloomily melodic but altogether fun music is entirely unnecessary. But the young bucks at the reunion show perhaps do. Kentucky Prophet is in fact one of the most clever, hilarious, poetic rappers in the Midwest. And he has the ass-motivating beats to back up his lyrical wisdom.

And the Dang Heathens, well, in their own words, “We’re so bad, we kick our own ass twice a day.” The Heathens fill whatever room they’re playing with a sardonic punk attitude mixed with original songs, acoustic guitars, superb arrangements and a ton of empty beer cans. Both the Prophet and the Heathens are on late, so please, by all means, stick around for fresh stuff that’ll give you guys from the old Ross/Alhambra days faith in the future of DIY music…

Got that, folks? Matinee Idol and STC are playing first, so you 30 to 50-somethings should get there promptly at 8 p.m.

You only get to be 20 years younger once a year.