Lusting for Live

I was sixteen the first time that I ever went to a real concert. It was Aerosmith at the Wayland High School gymnasium in Massachusetts. It was a fancy gym for the time, a bubble that for this event could hold over three thousand fans packed in to see the emerging band who would go on to be a Boston icon. It was electric, exponentially superior to the joys of radio or turntable, a kinetic shared experience. One that for the time being has been stripped from our lives by the coronavirus.

It was the first of thousands of times I have entered a venue to bob my head, dance in place, raptly stare, or laugh like a loon. From a small bar in Hot Springs, South Dakota to the Super Bowl, I have seen every manner of show that you can, and every one has had its joys. From the heights of seeing Mark Knopfler tear through the lead in “Sultans of Swing”, to watching a comedian bomb in a tiny club, there is a story every time, most of them far on the positive side.

I’m a sucker for live entertainment, and that hardly makes me unique. Even the smallest communities have a couple of spots where musicians with a dream, or just a passion they can’t let go, perform even if there are just a handful of people there, and the tangible compensation sits in a jar at their feet. Maybe the person you see will go from a dive bar to a fancy one, to a outdoor festival, to a theater, and to an arena. Maybe they will never perform for thousands, but it won’t matter.

Seeing a favorite band or a superstar act has its immense joys, but there is something remarkable about finding a band or performer that basically no one has heard of, and maybe never will, or perhaps will be a story to tell. Like the time that a group of us in the media were handed some free tickets to see a country act playing BEFORE the line dancing began at an Oklahoma City club in 1998. They were tremendous, and they were The Dixie Chicks (as of this week The Chicks).

But most of the time, you see somebody, and soak in that one experience, and that will be it, and that will be fine. Maybe you will hang around afterwards and pick up a CD, and that will take you back to that place, but most of the time the memory will be in enough. Like in New Orleans on a Tuesday night before the Final Four, when I wandered down toward Bourbon Street. It was very quiet, most people hadn’t arrived for the week. A couple of blocks shy of where most of the bars and restaurants were, three musicians were playing a European sounding mix of jazz and waltzes on the sidewalk. An accordion, a violin, and a vocalist singing in French. I stayed for about forty five minutes, and I was the only person watching them. The were called The Salt Wives, and I am looking right now at the hand painted paper sleeve that holds the CD I bought. It might be the oddest one I own, and its a treasure, both musically, and as a chronicle of a moment in time.

I have been fortunate to have many of those, a lot of them in a five year span in the early 2000’s when my children lived in Nashville. I would have the kids on Fridays and Saturdays about once a month, and stay at a hotel, and would visit them at school on Monday before flying out, but they stayed at their own home on Sunday nights. So at least fifty times I went out on Sunday night , and picked a venue. One place called The Bourbon Street Blues and Boogie Bar was a cool treasure with some sweet seats above the stage, maybe thirty feet from the performers. Another club whose name escapes me would host a live show that played on the local NPR station. Normally featured were singer-songwriters, many of whom had penned songs for more famous acts. One woman actually had written a few songs for the Dixie Chicks “Wide Open Spaces” album.

But the commonplace occurrence that was quite cool, was the fact that routinely the performer would introduce the musicians sitting in that night, many prominent studio musicians, but also often presented in this fashion. “Tonight sitting in on guitar is Vince Gill”, or “on piano tonight, so and so, from Bob Dylan’s band. “ Pretty neat stuff. But the town was obviously teeming with musicians coming to make their mark, and so many in fact that even the people running karaoke at little bars were outstanding.

A couple of tales from Austin, a city with a music scene very similar to Nashville. My wife and I visited there on a 2009 weekend that coincided with the Super Bowl. Saturday evening my wife wasn’t feeling great, and she decided to get some extra rest with Super Sunday looming. She suggested I go off on my own. I left about five o’clock and headed down to Sixth Street. Since it was early, the cover charges hadn’t kicked in yet, so for the price of eight or nine beers, I saw eight or nine fine bands, in eight or nine different clubs. Yes, I took a cab.

The next day with the game slated for 5:30, we went out for late lunch and ate in a bar where a band was about to start a pre-Super Bowl set. They were all fortyish, and they were REALLY, REALLY good. But there was the tinge of melancholy you sometimes get in these settings. This band was easily good enough to have been big time, and their front man was a killer. He was also very drunk at three o’clock in the afternoon, and it was easy to imagine that he wasn’t content with where his dream had taken him. It was palpable enough that we left early even though the music was excellent.

I could tell a thousand musical tales, but those kind of give an idea of what we are missing right now. And its not just music. I love going to see stand up comedy. I have seen a few famous comedians in large venues, but I don’t do it any more. The shows are expensive, and short, and the material can be enjoyed in many other ways, and the difference between a live show, or watching or listening to recorded material, is not nearly as expansive as in music, at least in my view.

But going to to small club, especially in a big city, is amazing. And if music is ultra-competitive with many amazing performers who never reach a mass audience, comedy may even worse. Most of my consumption of comedy the past few years has come at a small club just off Times Square. It has three different venues, one with maybe twenty five seats. I have seen some of the funniest people you can ever imagine play this spot and kill it, hoping that this Saturday night after a week of working a regular job, someone will discover them. I am pretty embarrassing to be around at a comedy show. While I consider myself discerning, if someone is good, I will laugh like a nut, and have literally fallen out of my seat on more than one occasion.

Perhaps the most surprising entertainment passion I ever would have imagined well into adulthood, is my affection for Broadway musicals. I absolutely love them. I first saw one in 2000. It was “Chicago” and I very much enjoyed it. But starting in around 2010, my wife and I began having the unbelievable privilege of being able to use a condominium two blocks from Times Square, that was the second residence of friends of hers. So it made close to annual trips to the Big Apple far more feasible. If we stayed for five days, I wanted three shows. The talent level of these performers is staggering, the venues are relatively small, so the seats are always good and sometimes great. As much as I crave seeing bands and funny people, maybe the musical is what I would pick for the first post-pandemic event.

But perhaps more likely, and fingers-crossed hopefully, September 26th will provide the first major return to performance normalcy. That is the rescheduled date for The Mavericks at Knuckleheads. When the lockdown began in mid-March, it still seemed as if the May 9th show was viable. How wrong that proved to be, and now I am even dubious about the late September date. But we can hope. The Mavericks may not be the greatest live shows I have witnessed, and I have seen them five times now, but they are the most fun. Mark Knopfler is my favorite, and leads the way with seven shows, and there is a long list of truly stunning big name concerts I have seen from Tom Petty to Dave Matthews to Bruce Springsteen to The Killers, and on an on. But nobody throws a party like Raul Malo, Eddie Perez and the boys.

It’s a party I am craving., because the parties from tiny to mammoth that live performances have provided have been close to the greatest treasures of my life. They make you laugh, and sing, and dance, and stare in amazement, and most importantly, they make stories and memories you can harken back to with a smile, or wistful small grin.

I need it. We need it. Soon.