I Rock(ed)

Apparently last weekend was the Weekend of the Rock Show. Somehow I missed it and no one bothered to tell me. But, in the interest of honesty, my weekend wouldn’t have looked any different had I been in the know, so it doesn’t really matter. Friday night rolled around and all I wanted to do was go to bed early. As I sat on the couch, too tired to drag myself to bed, I scrolled through my Facebook newsfeed. An astonishing number of people were at Key Arena seeing Journey, Foreigner and Night Ranger; some were enjoying Ryan Adams at Benaroya Hall and still others were gearing up for Death Cab for Cutie on Saturday. Heck, someone’s ten year old daughter was rocking out at a Taylor Swift show. Me? I really wanted to stay up and watch the premiere of Pearl Jam Twenty, Cameron Crowe’s new documentary with never-before-seen archival footage on PBS. Sadly, I didn’t want to stay up and watch it nearly as much as I wanted to go to bed. I know. I rock.

     

I wasn’t always so lame when it comes to rock shows. In fact, I’ve spent far more than my fair share of time experiencing live music . . . in dark clubs with sticky floors, in stadiums with terrible acoustics and at festivals with Honey Buckets and lemon-fights. (Does anyone else remember the Frankfurter lemonade lemon-fights that were de rigueur at Seattle area outdoor rock festivals in the mid-nineties?) I moved to Seattle at a great time in the storied Seattle music scene. I arrived two and a half months after the death of Kurt Cobain, so I was a little late for the grunge explosion, but there were still plenty of fantastic things happening, especially for a girl who had spent the previous four years in sleepy Corvallis, Oregon. During my early and mid-twenties, I practically lived at Seattle’s best music venues of the era: the Crocodile Café, RCKCNDY, The Off Ramp, Moe’s Mo’ Rockin’ Cafe and the OK Hotel.

It used to be that I wouldn’t miss a great rock show. (Well, except for that time I foolishly decided to stay in my dorm room and study for a midterm instead of seeing Nirvana at a small venue right after the release of Nevermind. That was some fantastic decision-making right there.) I drove ten hours, round-trip, through the night to see Morrissey. I stood in line for three hours in the snow (no kidding) to get tickets for Smashing Pumpkins at the Moore Theater in the days when they could have sold out the Key Arena. I devoted hours to studying the Bumbershoot line-up each year and spent all day, every day at Seattle’s famous music festival. (Keep in mind that this was back when Bumbershoot lasted a full four days, not the measly, wimpy three days that it currently spans.) I never missed a Lollapalooza or an Endfest, and I made regular trips to the Gorge, fighting horrendous traffic and exerting super-human effort to stay awake on the drive home.

Ah, those were the days. Time has passed (as it does) and things have changed (as they do). These days, I can’t even get motivated to give up a couple of hours of sleep to watch a rock documentary while seated comfortably on my own couch. What has happened to rocker Ronda? I attribute my descent into live music apathy to three factors: 1) I am old, 2) I got burned out, and 3) I give at the office.

Number one: I am old

“I am old” put more accurately is “I am in a phase of life where I have significant responsibilities that do not happily coexist with a rock and roll life style.” Among my responsibilities are a demanding job that requires me to work late nights regularly (see number three below) and a demanding young child who requires me to wake up early in the morning. Are you seeing the pattern that makes staying out late at a rock show, stumbling home in the wee hours and waking up with a hangover and ringing ears a problem? It works when you’re in your 20’s and don’t have a kid or a job where the buck stops with you; not so much when you’re in your late 30’s and have both. Like I said, I’m old.

Number two: I got burned out

As my equally live-show-apathetic husband said recently, “I’ve been there and done that, and not just a little bit – I’ve done a lot of it. In fact, I did so much of it, for so long, I was beginning to lose my dignity.” I don’t know if he was losing his dignity, but he has seen quite a few rock concerts. He set the bar high with his first – The Rolling Stones, “Some Girls” tour at Chicago’s Soldier Field in 1978 when he was barely 15. That’s a tough one to beat. (I sent him a text asking what year it was and which tour. Two simple questions and I got an instantaneous, enthusiastic and lengthy reply claiming it was, and I quote, “the best day of my teenage life,” citing the exact day – July 8 – and providing me with the set list. In case you’re wondering: Let It Rock, Honky Tonk Women, Lies, All Down the Line, Starfucker, When the Whip Comes Down, Tumbling Dice, Beast of Burden, Just My Imagination, Shattered, Respectable, Far Away Eyes, Love in Vain, Happy, Sweet Little Sixteen, Brown Sugar and Jumping Jack Flash.) As if his first concert wasn’t enough to be jealous of, he was in attendance at Pearl Jam’s famed 1992 concert at the Moore Theater - the one in the Even Flow video. The list goes on like that for many years and many concerts.

While my rock show resume is nothing like Matt’s, I’ve also been there and done that quite a bit. My first show was INXS on the “X” tour in 1991. Not the Rolling Stones, but certainly a solid first concert. At a particularly amazing Violent Femmes concert in 1992, I didn’t notice or bother to care that I was getting squished against the barrier at the front of the stage so hard that I woke up the next morning in excruciating pain with a giant black bruise across my hips and belly. I’ve seen great shows and bad shows. I cherished every time (and there were many) that I watched Alice in Chains’ Layne Staley sing from his precarious perch atop a monitor – each time thinking it would be the last. I saw Sonic Youth at their worst – Thurston Moore so wasted he couldn’t stand up, much less play – and at their best – the extended noise jams for which they are so well known. I saw Jane’s Addiction play a small venue in Salem, Oregon, where the show lasted maybe 20 minutes because Perry Farrell kept yelling insults at the audience before storming off stage. I’ve seen Pearl Jam and Peter Gabriel more times than I can count. I’ve seen unbelievably amazing shows like David Byrne and unbelievably awful shows like Bush opening for No Doubt at the Tacoma Dome (the ticket was free, in my defense). Anyway, the point is, after many years of rock concert-going, I realized I could only crowd surf and mosh and have bloody tampons flung at me from stage (yes, it actually happened at an L7 concert) so many times before it all started to blend together and lose its luster.

Number three: I give at the office

I’m a performing arts presenter. Putting on shows is what I do, day in and day out. Now granted, the shows I’m doing aren’t Alice in Chains at the Off Ramp or REM at the Gorge, but I do see and hear a lot of music. I’m accustomed to listening to demos for about two minutes tops or watching live showcases at conferences that last twelve minutes, so it’s no surprise that when I’m an hour into a show as an audience member my mind starts wandering. All I can think about is whether the band is easy to work with or if they are a pain-in-the-ass. I find myself wondering what their hospitality rider entailed. Did they request all raw, organic, local foods or did they insist on fried chicken? Did they demand one hundred pre-cut orange slices or did they want their fruit whole, uncut and unpeeled? Did they need obscure British throat lozenges? Were they adamant that they needed access to the venue from 11 p.m. to 3 a.m. the night before the show? Did they accuse the presenter of being racist because he or she foolishly forgot to provide properly sized dinner plates? Yes, each and every one of these scenarios has, in fact, happened to me. As a result of my experience as a presenter, I have both a short live music attention span and a lot of show-related baggage.

Now, lest I come across as completely jaded and lame, I’m happy to report that I do still occasionally get out to concerts for leisure, and sometimes I even surprise myself by having a great time. It was just two years ago in Boise, Idaho (of all places) where I saw a Gogol Bordello show that completely blew my mind. I danced and drank (PBRs no less) excessively. I left sweat-drenched, with my ears ringing and a smile on my face, thinking “Now THAT’S a rock concert!” I see Neko Case any chance I get. Her poetic lyrics and gorgeous voice (I read a great review somewhere that said she sounds like the tortured ghost of Patsy Cline) never fail to leave me practically weeping over the beauty of it all. While I do go out and see shows for fun, these days most of my amazing music moments happen at the shows I present – seeing Suzanne Vega perform “Tom’s Diner” for a group of high school students so transfixed you could have heard a pin drop, watching Al Stewart sing “Year of the Cat” or Arlo Guthrie do “This Land is Your Land” in my tiny little venue, witnessing the Blind Boys of Alabama bring an audience to their feet in joyful dancing – these moments fill my heart with hope and happiness that live music still speaks to my soul.

More often than not though, even at a show that’s really great, when I get past the twelve minutes of a typical showcase, my feeling is “Yep, I’ve got it. I came, I saw, I rocked. Can I go home and go to bed now?”