Save Your Soul Patch

Why is wounded-guy rock music of the mid-'90s resurgent in the year 2023? A religious experience involving Toad the Wet Sprocket offers a clue.

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AGING BRINGS WITH IT A NUMBER OF STARtling indignities and difficult internal monologues, and while we have our elders, decades of American literature, and countless two-guystalkin' podcasts to help guide us, there are some things each of us has to face alone.

What I am saying is that I did not expect to be the guy who rocked a little too hard at the Toad the Wet Sprocket show.

I wasn't the only one. There is something in the air about that medium-mope, wounded-dude mid-'90s music moment: Counting Crows, Collective Soul, Soul Asylum. Somehow I'm hearing it more now than in 1996, my glory days of wearing a Kangol hat backward and trying to use hype as an adjective. The soul-patched soundtrack of alternative radio, a revolution that was ignited at least partly by our disdain for classic rock, has become our new classic rock.

It's IPA-core-soothing, warming, heavy but not too-and it might be our last classic rock.

TOAD THE WET SPROCKET WAS PLAYING the Greek Theatre in Los Angeles last summer, with Gin Blossoms and Barenaked Ladies, a package tour so solidly middle-aged it could have been sponsored by Maybe Signing Up for a 10K This Year, a scene that with a few tiny adjustments could have been identified by the word megachurch. We were all doing it, and we were all surprised: sincere, blissful, plastic-pint-glass in-the-air howling. Deep, diaphragmatic whoos, even a yessss. Flesh becomes water, wood becomes bone? You're goddamn right it does, Toad. Here we are now, entertain us-and get us home at a sensible hour.