I live in a city, Austin, Texas, that decided back in the 1990s to call itself “The Live Music Capital of the World.” It was back then a place where live music did thrive and enjoy a sizable local audience that loved going out to hear largely original music performed in person, so the somewhat (to me) off-putting brag was at least justified in spirit.
At the same time, I also got a chuckle at how Branson, Mo., also used the same tagline to describe a very different musical entertainment community. Yet, there’s a significant subtext to this: Live music of many sorts and styles is vital to the human soul.
At least that’s how I hear it, made rather obvious by how little live music I’ve dared to go see over the previous two years and then some of the COVID-19 pandemic. It’s not been easy to live without it.
I still remember fondly my first time hearing a live rock band on 1967 at age 13, I snuck out of the house on a hot summer night to go to a teen dance in a hotel ballroom in my hometown of Binghamton, NY. The atmosphere was sweaty and crowded, and the music from a top local cover band was truly alluring. I wanted more. And the frequent teen dances throughout my adolescence stoked that urge. A great live music show offered an experience beyond the pleasures of recorded music – an energy loop that energized my soul.
Not long after I saw my first national touring band, The Box Tops, whose singer Alex Chilton I came to know in New York City in the mid 1970s. The next big act I caught was the legendary Butterfield Blues Band at the local college, Friends of mine had met the band before the concert; after the show I got to spend some time with them. Again, it was intimations of a future I didn’t yet even know yet that I would enjoy as an adult.
By my mid-teens my friends and I were promoting our own teen dances, In college I worked on our concert committee my senior year. Then on moving to New York City I started writing about music working in the business. I was out seeing live music many nights a week, and for free, no less.
I was reminded of that first taste of live music in ‘67 some dozen or so years later when I went to see the band X at the punk/new wave iteration of the Peppermint Lounge. From the late 1950s to the mid ‘60s, ‘The Pep,” as we shorthanded its name in later years, was where the “Twist” dance craze was born, and The Beatles hit the town during their first NYC visit, it was a literal cocktail lounge on the ground floor of the Knickerbocker Hotel on West 45th Street, just off Times Square, and had a national rep as a trendy hotspot. It was also an early Manhattan nightlife haven for gays back when homosexuality was still illegal in New York City.
The joint was revived in late 1980 as a punk/new wave nightspot. The original lounge was the club’s bar and featured smaller local music shows. The lobby of the shuttered hotel was converted into the main music room. And where I went on, again, a hot and humid summer night to see the seminal Los Angeles punk group X.
It was so humid, in fact, that the room’s walls were all drenched with moisture. The band played a mighty show that left me stunned. Despite the heat and humidity, I loved being in the crowd and the vital energy passing from the band to the crowd and then back to the performers. It was almost as if we were all connected to an electric current feeding its energy to us.
Not long ago, at a brunch held by a friend, I talked with X’s singer, bassist and songwriter John Doe, who now lives in Austin, and mentioned how magical that night felt to me. I was gratified to learn from him that it was also a special night for the band. As a great live music show should be.
My health and wellbeing during the pandemic mandated that I stay home and not go see live music for these two years. As local infection rates declined, and I’d gotten my second booster vaccine shot, I braved going out to see two live music shows, sans any mask. Luckily I avoided a COVID infection and got to savor one of my major joys, As the summer begins as I write this and another surge is predicted, so I’ll be hunkering down further at home for the foreseeable future. But I patiently await getting rocked again by a live band some summer night to come.
Album: “Lightnin’ in a Bottle: The Official Live Album” by The Georgia Satellites – The happiest and proudest moments as a music publicist was working with this band, who, as this concert recording demonstrates, could rival the Rolling Stones for the World’s Greatest Rock’n’Roll Band.
Album: “Outsider” by Jackie Bristow – The gem of a singer-songwriter from New Zealand, most recently perched here in America in Nashville, is a potent ameliorative for cynicism and negativity (a big job these days) with her piquant Americana-inflected chamber pop-rock laced with lyrical heart and naturalistic landscapes. Be ready to be charmed.
Rob Patterson is a music and entertainment writer in Austin, Texas. Email robpatterson054@gmail.com.
From The Progressive Populist, September 15, 2022
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