This is what sets a great concert apart from a great album. You might catch something similar in Boston next week, but it won't be exactly what happened in D.C. Not necessarily made up on the spot - although that's never a bad idea - but improvised to some degree. (It is) born of something heartfelt and in some important way spontaneous. The thing that's driving me crazy now is that nobody seems to care.Īnyway, Segal goes to talk about one of the reasons we should care, and why it is we're willing to deal with all this: what he calls "The great Live Concert Moment." Actually, that was the thing that originally drove me crazy. This is the thing that's driving me crazy lately.
U2 does, though a U2 concert is essentially the same thing, night after night, right down to the encore. Broadway's "Mamma Mia!" never pretends to be free-forming it every night. I have nothing against musical theater, but when you're expecting a concert, it seems silly and very much against the impulsive, unruly spirit of the genre. Everything is choreographed, even the parts that seem unchoreographed, and there is no room for unplanned derring-do. That's the way pop concerts are these days, especially large ones. There was probably a trapeze roadie, with instructions that read "9:15, hand Perry an Aquafina. The whole trapeze thing was almost surely dreamed up before the band strummed the first note on the tour. It's fair to assume that Tyler rode the same trapeze in the same spot during the same song at every concert that summer, Nissan included. He talks about an Aerosmith concert, in which Steven Tyler wowed the crowed by swinging on a trapeze over the first few rows: Segal starts off with what's wrong (in my mind, at least), with live music today, and that's the fact that so much of it seems no different at all from what you might see on Broadway. Gwydion touched on this in an earlier post, but I think Segal's story really gets to the heart of why some of us are still willing to deal with all of that, and why we were willing to all along, to see a little of the old "rock and roll magic." It's a good question, especially as we, ahem, grow older and less inclined to work through hangovers and miles of traffic and teenyboppers and dudes in cut-off jean shorts and mullets. There was a great article in the Sunday Washington Post magazine by former Post music writer David Segal - unfortunately titled " Memoirs of a Music Man" - in which he talks about his time as a music critic and ruminates on what exactly is it that makes us go see music performed live.
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