It won’t seem the same without the dust.
As I write this, the 77s are playing in the Backthird Audio
live room, cranking out magic for an intimate crowd of two dozen people.
They’re squeezing in a few more tour dates on their way to
Cornerstone Festival, the dusty town
of tents and generators on west Illinois farmland that more than 20,000 music fans call home for one week every year. I
spent seven summers there. But this year, I’m not going.
I’ve got some great excuses – playing gigs, for one. I’m
doing music for a living, and I’m – slooowly – getting somewhere with it. Every
time I miss a chance to hear live music, though, I feel a tinge of guilt. Live
music’s too important. I want to support it, so it never goes away.
Is that a danger? Tough to say – the oracles are giving us mixed
messages these days. On the one hand, we’re being told live music is the future
– you give
your recordings away for free, then charge for shows (and T-shirts) so you
can (replace with and) still make a living. Hotshots like Madonna and Jay-Z
aren’t signing with record labels; they’re signing with Live Nation.
Then again, hotshots like Madonna and Jay-Z are going away
too. Run down a list of the highest-grossing tours of the last two years, and you
discover “heritage acts” – old-timers like Billy Joel, Rod Stewart and the
Rolling Stones – are the ones making all the money. Those acts were built on
radio and on the record label system, and the labels aren’t investing in new
artists like they once did. When Madonna hangs up her cone-shaped bra, there
may be no
one to replace her.
What I’m sure won’t go away, though, is smaller concerts. Even
if it’s a performance for two dozen people in the live room of a recording
studio, live performances will happen. Some folks say it’s about the music.
Hardly. Recordings are about music –
songs and collections of songs, envisioned and executed in their ideal form,
removed from any social context and ground onto a plastic disc. But live shows
are the opposite. Live shows are all social context – how high David Lee Roth
can jump, how much eyeshadow Green Day wears, how tall the guy is who stands in
front of you on the club floor. Concerts are about people.
I learned a new word this week: ephemeral. It means “gone in a day,” and it’s what makes live music
so great – it doesn’t last. It’s here for just a moment, and you have to seize
it and suck all the marrow from it while you can and make it count. It’d be a
little corny to point out that’s also true of human lives. But it’d be true.
My favorite moment of live music was at my first dusty Cornerstone,
when I heard Over the Rhine for the
first time. Karin Bergquist took the stage with just an organ backing her, and
the soul and glory in her voice laid on the growl of that Hammond B3 and sent
shivers down my spine for four straight minutes. I knew I was on the cusp of
greatness. This was something I would carry with me.
That’s my favorite live-music moment. What’s yours?
