Denton may be the only city in the world in which a researcher commenting on the economic impact of a rock ’n’ roll festival is also a member of a participating band.

Is this a great town or what?

Michael Seman, a research associate at the University of North Texas Center for Economic Development and Research, was interviewed by the Record-Chronicle’s Candace Carlisle at the close of the first North by 35 music festival, a four-day, nine-venue event that brought 124 area bands to town for performances and informal conferences on music and the business of music. From an economic standpoint, Seman said, the festival had “a significant and positive” effect on the community.

In addition to his gig with UNT, Seman is a member of Shiny Around the Edges, a band that participated in the festival. This happy combination of art and commerce happens all the time around Denton, and we wish it were more common elsewhere. We cannot prove it, but we suspect that the American economy might be in much better shape if Alan Greenspan had once been a bass player for Radiohead.

We were around at the birth of rock ’n’ roll. We thrilled to such giants like Little Walter and musical midgets like Dickie Doo and the Don’ts. We loved them all, good and bad, because whatever else rock ’n’ roll is, it is the music of the young, written and performed by the young for the young, inherently incomprehensible to earlier generations.

We grasped this immutable fact about the same time that rock musicians began destroying their instruments onstage, and have since been content to watch the passing rock ’n’ roll parade from an upper-story window, with earplugs. But we have never lost our respect for the young people who play it, and love it so passionately. The blood of Bo Diddly runs through the veins of the Foo Fighters.

Denton is one of the few places we know of that recognizes that truth. Perhaps because of UNT’s towering musical reputation, it is a city that respects and reveres its musicians as few others do. We turn out in the rain for the Denton Arts & Jazz Festival. We dance the Chicken Dance in the cold when Brave Combo ushers in the Christmas season. We pack the house when the U.S. Navy Band comes to town, and we thrill at the sound of UNT’s magnificent Richard Ardoin-Paul Voertman Concert Organ.

We revere Pops Carter.

So, while there are many of us who are generationally precluded from fully embracing the sounds of the first North by 35, we can still appreciate the talent and the passion that went into the event. We wish it a long and happy life in Denton.