I took my fourteen-year-old son to see Radiohead the other night. He really likes the band, though maybe not as much as I do. He had never been to a concert at Madison Square Garden. I’ve been to my share, through the years. The first was the Rolling Stones, in 1981, when I was twelve. I got the tickets via mail-in lottery and went with my father, whose Stones albums I’d been wearing out for more than a year. I remember them opening with “Under My Thumb,” my standing perilously on a folding seat, and his wanting to leave early. Never! (I had yet to tire of “Satisfaction.”)

There followed decades of Garden gigs, one band after another, mostly white guys, preening or skulking under the lights at the arena’s Eighth Avenue end. J. Geils, the Kinks, Bowie, Rush, Van Halen, the Allman Brothers, Springsteen, Dylan, Neil Young, U2, and more Dead shows than I care to count. What we now call Dad Rock, in its myriad forms, earnestly attended and sincerely, if selectively, beloved. Still, very few of these were ecstatic experiences. I look at that list and realize that, save for a few of the earlier, better Dead shows, where the dancing crowd, in its fervor, sometimes got the building bouncing (literally—the Garden has some kind of hydraulic suspension system), very few of those shows achieved the live-music ideal of sweat-soaked Dionysian abandon that you might experience with hungrier acts in smaller halls—or that many of these same acts legendarily whipped up in their feral phases, in the great firetraps of yesteryear. At the Garden, the bands presented their music, with power and guile, and the audiences took it in, appraisingly, or obliviously, now and then truly swept up, but more often than not merely enacting the rituals of rock-and-roll tribute: hands in the air, sing along on command, let out a roar when the singer says “New York,” and, once they got smartphones, shoot the selfie and the bootleg vid. Look where I am! I’m at the show! To borrow from Damone, the ticket scalper in “Fast Times at Ridgemont High”: Act like wherever you are, that’s the place to be.

No one will ever mistake a twenty-first-century arena rock concert—where the tickets are dear and the people who can afford them are old—with the Allmans at the Fillmore East or Bad Brains at 9:30 Club. But if you’re old and a band you like is playing in a hockey rink, you try to go. Sometimes I have to cup my hands to my ears, to boost the sound. It can be hard, amid the distractible masses, to give oneself over to the music. Still, I keep going to shows, in venues big and small, in pursuit of rapture. I want another taste of the Pentecostal frenzy that I remember, accurately or not, from the hot non-arena shows of my youth. I crave the well-directed madness of crowds. Every time, as the music kicks in, as the people around me proclaim its awesomeness or enumerate its shortcomings, or else shout-talk about their weekends or beer runs, it dawns on me anew how fruitless this pursuit can seem. The musicians may be masterly, the music a wonder, but we will not achieve lift-off, after all. We aren’t kids; we are customers, and critics.

This is not to say I am the Eeyore of the floor: I can still bounce around, spill beer, and shake my hair. I don’t always say no. At an LCD Soundsystem show on Randall’s Island last weekend, my little cohort of dads and moms danced ourselves clean. Still, we all knew, as per our m.c., James Murphy, that if we ever had an edge, we’d lost it long ago. Murphy, like Thom Yorke, the Radiohead singer, is our age, the age the Stones were when they did their “Steel Wheels” (a.k.a. “Steel Wheelchairs”) tour, in 1989. Farley Katz, the New Yorker cartoonist, was apparently at LCD, too, and filed a follow-up to his hilarious dispatch from the Governor’s Ball last year, in which the maturing concertgoer, now in his thirties, quails before the puke and folly of the addled festival teens. But can there be bliss without barf?

So, Radiohead. The lights went down. The crowd, trickling in late, was oddly subdued. The pot smoke bloomed. Dad frets. The band started with five songs from its new album: great material executed beautifully, but it was moody and apparently, to many, unfamiliar. Around us, people chattered and laughed. A big guy nearby cheered on the Greenwoods (Colin, on bass, and Jonny, on guitar) as though they were the Rangers. I saw Radiohead at the Garden in 2001, after the album “Kid A” came out. On that night, I was blown away by the rhythm section; Radiohead had become a dance band. It was one of the best concerts I’ve ever seen. It occurred to me now, as I tried cupping my hands to my ears, that I had perhaps oversold this memory to my son. (Come to think of it, he was at that show, too, albeit in utero.) “It’s not really loud enough,” he said. I found myself checking my phone for updates from the Democratic National Convention. “Biden is killing it,” a friend texted me. “So is Radiohead,” I wrote back. I sent along a video snippet. The place to be.

But then, by gum, the sound began to assert itself, and the band unfurled a run of favorites (“Weird Fishes,” “Everything in Its Right Place,” “Idioteque,” “There There”), and suddenly we were in its thrall. Not sweaty, slam-dancing, or borne aloft on a cerulean carpet but, still, in a state of sonic captivation. Thom Yorke’s falsetto! My son, standing motionless, regarded, for the first time in his life, the sight of a darkened arena full of bodies caught in a whirl of song. I wondered whether, in thirty years, when he’s my age and cupping his hands behind his ears, there will even be rock bands that can play the Garden, and fans numerous enough to care.