My friends invited me to ride with them to Fargo last Sunday to hear the Eagles, a rock band that flourished back in the 1970s. I said yes, not because I am an Eagles fan, but because I wanted to see what a concert of aging rockers singing to aging boomers would signify.

At eight o'clock sharp, bandleader Glenn Frey welcomed us all to the "Assisted Living Tour" of the legendary Eagles. "We are the ancient ones, the ones that wouldn't die," he said. We, the ancient ones in the crowd, roared our approval, throwing our backs out in the process.

I've only been to a handful of rock concerts in the course of my life, decades ago, and my memory was of a miasma of blue haze in the arena, perfectly appalling loudness, widespread wastedness, the sweet aroma of marijuana wafting about from various directions, and the dazed ecstatic audience silhouetted like a stoned Milky Way of glowing cigarettes, joints and Bic lighters.

Alas. Sometime between 1973 and 2009 the world changed, and I apparently was asleep as usual.

For three hours, the Eagles, represented by lead singers Frey and Don Henley, lead guitarist Joe Walsh, and Timothy B. Schmit on bass, played a live "best of the Eagles" concert, interspersed with a handful of new songs from their 2007 "Long Road Out of Eden" album. The new songs were surprisingly good, but the audience was there not to hear contemporary creative artists actively exploring the world around them through music. No, we were there to open a time capsule of a period of American life that has faded almost to the vanishing point.

We were there to hear ghosts from our past. We were there to relive for one night the lost golden decade of our adolescence. We attended church services in the morning and an Eagles concert in the evening, and worked on our taxes in between. Was it live or was it Memorex?

The Fargodome's ushers were everywhere, and they were intrusive. They lessened the pleasure of the concert for everyone and ruined it for many. They were stern and graceless, professional killjoys, about as relaxed as presidential Secret Service men at an outdoor rally.

They kept everyone at their seats, in fact, in their seats, and they gave hushed stern lectures to anyone who let the music liberate their animal spirits. Is this a rock concert or the philharmonic, I wondered, as I watched grim security personnel do everything in their power to prevent a rock concert from being … well, a rock concert. It was like being at a Kiwanis convention with light after-dinner entertainment by an Eagles knockoff band.

Rock 'n' roll is a form of anarchy. It is meant to be transgressive, to violate the "square" codes of the diurnal community, to liberate in everyone in the arena energies that we know are an important element in our being but which don't get out much.

We are meant to relax our self-control and let something out of the cage of civilization that we are a little sheepish about the following morning. Rock concerts are only rock concerts when otherwise responsible people boogie and air guitar and hip bang and high five and hug strangers or semi-strangers in a "We're all just one people, man!" sort of way.

Rock is unapologetically sexual. That's why, for a while, it freaked out our parents and childhood preachers. But it's a healthy, social sexuality that declares, at the top of our lungs and with bodies that literally cannot stand still, "We are animals, we're lusty and we're profoundly alive, and there are subterranean rhythms that we must loose into the world to remain authentic."

The music was loud but never deafening. The four Eagles themselves looked a little mottled as I observed them through my binoculars from the 10th row. At times they looked stiff and uncertain of just how to behave on stage, as if they were the retired parents of rock stars suddenly handed guitars in the middle of a charity concert.

Only when Walsh played guitar solos did the concert awaken those primal energies that are the heart of rock. When he wound himself up that the old magic was still there. He grimaced and frowned and contorted his frame and fingered his guitar and thrust it experimentally about the space in front of him in search of some elusive final ecstasy.

These are facial expressions and gesticulations that occur only in rock 'n' roll, some athletic activities and the bedroom. The crowd in the Fargodome was with Walsh twang by strum by grimace, many in uninhibited pantomime, and for a few glorious moments it might have been 1972.

A few rows in front of us was a group of six couples, all in their late 50s. They were handsome well-fed children of the 1960s, now clearly upstanding citizens. They were wonderfully expressive and light-hearted, wanting nothing more than to shrug off middle age for a night and revisit the all-but-forgotten freedom of adolescence. I enjoyed watching them as much as the concert.

The ushers browbeat these innocent citizens as if they were about to rush the stage with box cutters. One woman among them, the one most relaxed in the groove of memory, was so offended by the puritan usher that I thought she was going to pull up her shirt and flash him. It was not the exposure of cleavage that stopped her, I think, but the fear of midriff.

As we listened to "Take it to the Limit" and "Lyin' Eyes," I think everyone in that arena felt the percolation of the same set of questions. Where did our lives go? Why has everything since that time in American history been so much less marked by intensity and possibility? If we were that then, who are we now? Who would have thought I would ever cross the line into the realm of Social Security? How do we sort the mythology of our lives from the way we have actually chosen to live them? When will the last Beatle die, and what will it portend?

We filed out a little somberly, puzzling the echo of the last song the Eagles sang Sunday night in Fargo: "Desperado,you ain't gettin' no younger/Your pain and your hunger, they're drivin' you home … you'd better let somebody love you, before it's too late."

(Clay Jenkinson is the Director of the Dakota Institute, a Distinguished Visiting Humanities Scholar at BSC, and the lead scholar of the Theodore Roosevelt Center at Dickinson State University. You can reach him at Jeffysage@aol.com.)