Griping about the behavior of concert crowds is a losing proposition.
So let’s engage in it.
Get a guide to the region’s booming music scene
Subscribe to the St. Louis Music newsletter to discover upcoming concerts, local artists to watch, and more across an eclectic playlist of genres.
Here are a couple vignettes from a couple of shows, both taking place over one week in very different environments.
The first: Sigur Ros at the Peabody Opera House. Walking up to the venue, I plunked down $50 for a view from the upper deck, requesting only a row-end seat. Got one, and it came with a nice, central placement. The folks next to me, a couple, were a mixed bag: she, sitting two seats away, seemed to enjoy the first set; he, sitting next to me, was less-than-transfixed by the Icelandic band’s sound, and damned the group with the faint praise of “interesting.” Their passive-aggressive debate took place at whisper-level volume. So today’s gripe is not with them.
Moving down to the lower bowl at intermission, where plenty of open seats remained, I joined friends, who, bless them, were engaging in something that I struggle with almost any large, name-brand show today: the non-stop, ubiquitous presence of phones. Sigur Ros present a stunning stage show, with a host of lighting and prop tricks giving the stage a truly unique feel of added height, depth, grandiosity. Combined with the group’s huge sound—even when played by the group’s original, stripped-down trio on this tour—the show is a sight to behold, to experience in full immersion.
At some point during the night’s second set, seven people (and, yes, I counted) within my immediate field of vision were locked into the event through their phones, including the couple one row in front of me and both neighbors; despite my conscious attempts to look past them, my eyes kept being drawn into the little screens around me, instead of the grandeur taking place about 75 feet away. It was a strange moment, as a band that only comes through town every couple years was offering up a world-class presentation of sight/sound, but a decent percentage of the crowd couldn’t fully engage without their own stamp on it, that need to tell the world that they were there and to capture incomplete mini-documents. Weird.
Since we’re playing the role of Grandpa Simpson, shaking his fist at the clouds, let’s go to example two…
A week later, on Sunday night: we were at Joe’s Cafe and the band showed up late, traveling a good distance from the night prior’s gig. When the Dave King Trucking Company finally arrived, they took a nice, long break for, let’s call it “refreshment,” before taking the stage. So it was a good, hour and change later than the 8 p.m. start time when co-presenter Jeremy Miller of Dead Wax introduced the band; as he left the stage and walked away, he gave one last instruction, which paraphrased was: “I know you won’t talk, but if you do: don’t.”
It only took a few minutes for a pair of folks in the mezzanine to start loudly talking and laughing. If you’ve been to Joe’s, you know the low ceilings on that mezz level, and the fact that sound carries strangely in the room. As this pair of ladies were probably just a dozen feet from the lip of the stage, their loud laughs and general enthusiasm, maybe fueled by wine and the night’s late start, carried in every direction. Eyes from around the room kept peering up. If daggers, those looks would’ve killed, but that’s just a writerly conceit, so no one died on the evening. But people were annoyed. (And you know one of those people.)
As the band, a phenomenal, rangy five-piece (pretty much erroneously-tagged as a “free jazz” ensemble in this space last week), took a mid-evening break for a second, half-hour “refreshment” break, it was time to leave. Instead of talking about the show on the way home, the first 10 minutes were a general download session about how people struggle to act right in public. Of late, I’m finding myself having that conversation more and more.
And probably will continue to have it more and more. Will be bringing a compact mirror to gigs from here-on-out, to self-check concert etiquette violations. Please join me.
Lo-Fi Uploads, uploaded: A few weeks back, we hinted at updates of the Lo-Fi Cherokee videos, promising to keep a running tab of new videos. Welp, we missed a week. Here are the last few; click on the song title to see/hear each at YouTube.
Steven Deeds, “The Wildfire,” recorded at Angel Boutique Resale Shop
Aiko Tsuchida, “Black Mold,” recorded at Mariscos El Gato
Mt. Thelonious, “Sleep,” recorded at Bluefield Process Safety
Sights & Sounds: Last week, we noted the existence of a new project, Smidley, from Conor Murphy of Foxing. Perhaps not surprisingly, an early fan is Pitchfork, which opines that “On his solo debut, the frontman of emo band Foxing offers a mix of bubble-grunge, jangly power-pop, and breezy balladry. It manages to be as heavy and compelling as his main group.”
Kelly Wells, who heads up community radio station KDHX, was recently interviewed by No Depression, about her show “Steam-Powered Radio,” of which she says in the piece “I think of my show as this big umbrella labeled FOLK, and every song I play falls into that very broad category in some way. I search out good music with a roots connection that’s got some grit. I can’t always define why some music fits into my self-defined idea of “good” and some doesn’t, but I know it when I hear it.”
