It starts in middle school. One day you're listening to bouncy pop, and the next it's The Rolling Stones. Someone somewhere played "Satisfaction," and there was no going back. Nothing else in life could compare to the full-body electrification that came from a perfectly struck power chord.

You move on to harder stuff. Early ZZ Top. AC/DC. Led Zeppelin. The Ramones. The Clash. Rush. Van Halen. Your jeans get holes in the knees and you don't care.

That's how it was in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Rock and roll was still vibrant and rebellious. To us kids, it meant something, or we thought it did, even if the lyrics were just about girls. At that age, the emotional charge from a high-adrenaline rock song was about as good as it got. Girls were inaccessible. The music, blared at "10" on any decent boom box or from a cheap turntable, was our greatest stimulus.

And so we bought the albums and asked our parents if we could go to the concerts. They usually said no. We would have to wait until we were old enough to stay out until midnight on a school night -- and drive ourselves to the city and back.

We waited and waited. While we passed the time buying rock magazines and every new record we could afford, the bands changed. Some went soft. Some broke up. Some musicians died. We went to college, where we were free to see whatever concerts we could get to. A 16-hour road trip? Sure! But what was on the summer concert schedule? Grunge, rap, and bubble-gum pop. While we were waiting, the world had changed.

When you see middle-aged men in rock and roll T-shirts, shuffling in ill-fitting black jeans across Elm Street to the arena to see some metal band that hasn't had a hit in decades, or some rock-pop hybrid band that was huge in 1982, there's a story behind each and every one of them.

Sure, there are the guys who never grew out of adolescence. But there are also the ones who fell in love with that one song or that one album, but who never got to hear it live. There are the ones who were inspired to learn guitar the first time they heard Jimmy Page or Angus Young or Eddie Van Halen. There are the ones who had their first kiss while some sappy guitar ballad played on the cassette deck or turntable. There are the ones who made life-long friendships because they happened to start up a conversation about some great new album with the guy sitting beside them in English class. The stories are endless, and there is an emotional hook in each one that ties the guy to the band in an inseparable bond.

Every time you see some graying guy heading into the Verizon to see a nostalgia band, that bond is being reconnected. And what's so remarkable is that the connection can be made right here, just down the street. Those bands that sent us on multi-state road trips come to us now. They can't do split-kicks on stage or hit the high notes or fill football stadiums anymore, but they can do something even better. They can send us back in time. And we don't even have to drive to Boston for the privilege. They come to this little time machine by the Merrimack and give us the show we missed back in 1978 or 1984. If the performance is not as electric as it was when the bandmates were closer to draft age than retirement age, who cares? For a couple of hours, we can be teenage boys again. Eighty bucks for a ticket when the original concert cost only $20? Worth every penny. Just bring enough extra cash to buy a T-shirt for your son.