I don't go see live music. Its one of the things I really don't like about myself. I see an act coming to town and I just think about traffic and parking and the money and Jesus it all seems like a hassle. And also live music bums me out -- the ephemera of it. I get stressed out trying to remember things and it’s hard to enjoy a show the way every one else in the world does.
But tonight, I saw Thomas Dolby. He came to the Rex Theater on the South Side, where there is no parking at all. I put off buying a ticket all week while I talked myself into going. It was going to be alone, because no one digs Dolby like I do. It was Thursday before I put a ticket in Will Call.
All day today I was nervous. I was looking forward to the show, but my system doesn't differentiate between the stuff I'm looking forward to and the stuff I dread. I was also having reservations about going alone. That's a complicated thing for me.
I like going to shows alone. Its more immersive and I don't like thinking about what I should say to the person next to me while I'm into whatever happens on the stage or screen. At least that's what its been like most of the time. Like I said, I don't get out much.
I was curious to see who showed up. I wanted to see if I could see a common thread among the fans. But there was nothing conspicuous. Everyone was thirty-five to fifty-five. There was some odd hair. Women with spikes, a couple of men who have held on to an artsy look for a decade too long... There were a lot of older men in pairs. I would suppose they were gay, but it may be that at a certain age, guys just couple up and see live music acts. I guess calling 'gay' on these guys would be judgmental.
There were also a lot of guys with what I can only describe as mad scientist hair. Let you imagination run with that description. You won't be off by much.
I walked up to the will call guy and told him my last name. He looked at his list and asked "you here by yourself?"
"Yes I am."
He crossed my name off his list. "Have a good time, Gregg."
I loved going to the Rex. It made me feel underground again. It was creepy and foreign. I haven't been there since I saw Bakshi's Heavy Metal with Dwight back when he was an undergraduate. They’ve taken all of the chairs out. We were sitting on folding chairs. What's with folding chairs?
But out comes Dolby and he walks over to his rig. He plays a mellow, haunting riff that none of us recognize. Then he sings these words: "Strange how the scale forms.." and everyone applauds. And then it hits me. I'm in a room with a couple hundred people who know Airwaves, this song that has made my heart ache for almost twenty-five years. No one I know cares or knows anything about this song. My experience, in that moment, went from being utterly solitary to being profoundly communal.
By the way. He did the long version -- with the awful bridge. But still.
Then he played Flat Earth, which was beautiful. He mixed in samples of Martin Luther King. I don't get the connection, but it was stirring and evocative.
While building the rhythm track for Flat Earth, one of his triggers was mapped to a sample of an agogo or something -- some super annoying and blatantly wrong sound. When the song moved to the b section, before the chorus, we'd get eight bars of this pinging sound on 2 and 4. After the number. TD hit the trigger again and shook his head. I loved seeing little things go wrong. It felt like we had some common ground.
In the eighties, when MIDI was creeping into the gear, there was this sense that now any untalented person could make really polished music. And that's never really been true. I think that it opened music to people with a different set of talents, but mastering the technology is a discipline that ought to be compared to mastering composition and performance. Hell. Performance that relies on even a modest amount of networked gear is at least as difficult as hammering out Rhapsody in Blue thirty thousand times in some sort of regimented practice schedule.
But back to the show. He did Europa. He started it with the six-note snare drum riff just by reaching over to a trigger pad and tapping it out in real time. I had this weird feeling. That was THE guy playing HIS sample. It was like seeing Willie Nelson play Trigger or Eddie Van Halen with the old Strat copy he recorded Eruption with. I'm probably the only one who feels that way.
Then he announced that he was planning on doing One of our Submarines. But when he loaded the configuration, he got a pop up message letting him know that his demo copy of Moog Five plugin had expired. And since he didn't have an Ethernet connection to his G5, there wasn't anyway to get around it or to just pay for the software. He assured us that it wasn't a money issue. But it felt like even more common ground.
He said he sort of liked the way Submarines sounded without the bass and snare, and he played it for us that way. It was fantastic.
I loved the chatting. He told a great story about Kevin Federline, who was using a sample of his illegally (and badly). He told the story of meeting these three horn players, the Jazz Mafia Horns, working two clubs at one during Mardi Gras. They were marching back and forth in the street between the two and getting paid by each.
The horns were great. They were these three kind of scummy-looking kids in their twenties; a trumpet, a trombone and a sax. Each of them was a great soloist and they were very tight as an ensemble. Bringing them on halfway through the show added this whole new dimension. Whereas the first set was one guy using machines to create amazingly unrobotic music, now there were three honest to god acoustic instruments up there. And the music became something else, less introspective and more celebratory. They played tunes from the Aliens album and everything became brand new. Key To Her Ferrari has never been cooler than it is with real horns.
They did a new song which was very nice. You wouldn't think this was a new music kind of crowd, but when it ended, people applauded as much as they did for the old tunes and talked about how much they like it. It was a great little song.
He rewarded our warm indulgence with Hyperactive, which was riddled with technical problems. He was building the rhythm track very slowly, making a lot of adjustments on the fly. It was funny to hear him paging through percussion sounds and create that random cacophony that is so familiar to music geeks (bonk thump ping clap boop ting vvveerrrmmm bip cherck).
The trombone player couldn't find the downbeat when TD was ready for him, so he had to count him in. The horns knocked that one out of the park, ending with just the three of them.
When it was done, Dolby asked the audience to excuse him for a minute while he fixed something because he wouldn't remember what to change if he waited a night. So we watched him rebuild the track. When he was done, we applauded politely. Someone toward the back of the room yelled "So? What was it?" I laughed really hard at that. We would have all loved to hear him explain the glitch in detail.
I can't express how much I loved this show. Dolby was the first musician I really liked as an adolescent -- when I could distinguish between artistry and fame. He changed and grew and frustrated me by becoming something larger than the category I put him in.
In the past twenty-five years, I've gotten to do a lot of the stuff I'd wanted to do with music. I got write and record songs, manipulate and create sounds with ridiculously complicated machines, stumble around poorly lit stages strewn with cables and try to fix a technical problem with one hand and play presentable music with the other in front of drunk people in some dive... I've gotten to sit in front of a CRT with headphones on and three manuals in my lap trying to figure out why some piece of equipment isn't talking to another... And I've shocked myself badly while disassembling old electronics to get my hands on a flywheel or a factory-set potentiometer. And I've done all of those things because the thirteen-year-old kid inside of me was entranced by how dirty and organic-sounding all of this supposedly sterile pristine music was.
But tonight, I saw Thomas Dolby. He came to the Rex Theater on the South Side, where there is no parking at all. I put off buying a ticket all week while I talked myself into going. It was going to be alone, because no one digs Dolby like I do. It was Thursday before I put a ticket in Will Call.
All day today I was nervous. I was looking forward to the show, but my system doesn't differentiate between the stuff I'm looking forward to and the stuff I dread. I was also having reservations about going alone. That's a complicated thing for me.
I like going to shows alone. Its more immersive and I don't like thinking about what I should say to the person next to me while I'm into whatever happens on the stage or screen. At least that's what its been like most of the time. Like I said, I don't get out much.
I was curious to see who showed up. I wanted to see if I could see a common thread among the fans. But there was nothing conspicuous. Everyone was thirty-five to fifty-five. There was some odd hair. Women with spikes, a couple of men who have held on to an artsy look for a decade too long... There were a lot of older men in pairs. I would suppose they were gay, but it may be that at a certain age, guys just couple up and see live music acts. I guess calling 'gay' on these guys would be judgmental.
There were also a lot of guys with what I can only describe as mad scientist hair. Let you imagination run with that description. You won't be off by much.
I walked up to the will call guy and told him my last name. He looked at his list and asked "you here by yourself?"
"Yes I am."
He crossed my name off his list. "Have a good time, Gregg."
I loved going to the Rex. It made me feel underground again. It was creepy and foreign. I haven't been there since I saw Bakshi's Heavy Metal with Dwight back when he was an undergraduate. They’ve taken all of the chairs out. We were sitting on folding chairs. What's with folding chairs?
But out comes Dolby and he walks over to his rig. He plays a mellow, haunting riff that none of us recognize. Then he sings these words: "Strange how the scale forms.." and everyone applauds. And then it hits me. I'm in a room with a couple hundred people who know Airwaves, this song that has made my heart ache for almost twenty-five years. No one I know cares or knows anything about this song. My experience, in that moment, went from being utterly solitary to being profoundly communal.
By the way. He did the long version -- with the awful bridge. But still.
Then he played Flat Earth, which was beautiful. He mixed in samples of Martin Luther King. I don't get the connection, but it was stirring and evocative.
While building the rhythm track for Flat Earth, one of his triggers was mapped to a sample of an agogo or something -- some super annoying and blatantly wrong sound. When the song moved to the b section, before the chorus, we'd get eight bars of this pinging sound on 2 and 4. After the number. TD hit the trigger again and shook his head. I loved seeing little things go wrong. It felt like we had some common ground.
In the eighties, when MIDI was creeping into the gear, there was this sense that now any untalented person could make really polished music. And that's never really been true. I think that it opened music to people with a different set of talents, but mastering the technology is a discipline that ought to be compared to mastering composition and performance. Hell. Performance that relies on even a modest amount of networked gear is at least as difficult as hammering out Rhapsody in Blue thirty thousand times in some sort of regimented practice schedule.
But back to the show. He did Europa. He started it with the six-note snare drum riff just by reaching over to a trigger pad and tapping it out in real time. I had this weird feeling. That was THE guy playing HIS sample. It was like seeing Willie Nelson play Trigger or Eddie Van Halen with the old Strat copy he recorded Eruption with. I'm probably the only one who feels that way.
Then he announced that he was planning on doing One of our Submarines. But when he loaded the configuration, he got a pop up message letting him know that his demo copy of Moog Five plugin had expired. And since he didn't have an Ethernet connection to his G5, there wasn't anyway to get around it or to just pay for the software. He assured us that it wasn't a money issue. But it felt like even more common ground.
He said he sort of liked the way Submarines sounded without the bass and snare, and he played it for us that way. It was fantastic.
I loved the chatting. He told a great story about Kevin Federline, who was using a sample of his illegally (and badly). He told the story of meeting these three horn players, the Jazz Mafia Horns, working two clubs at one during Mardi Gras. They were marching back and forth in the street between the two and getting paid by each.
The horns were great. They were these three kind of scummy-looking kids in their twenties; a trumpet, a trombone and a sax. Each of them was a great soloist and they were very tight as an ensemble. Bringing them on halfway through the show added this whole new dimension. Whereas the first set was one guy using machines to create amazingly unrobotic music, now there were three honest to god acoustic instruments up there. And the music became something else, less introspective and more celebratory. They played tunes from the Aliens album and everything became brand new. Key To Her Ferrari has never been cooler than it is with real horns.
They did a new song which was very nice. You wouldn't think this was a new music kind of crowd, but when it ended, people applauded as much as they did for the old tunes and talked about how much they like it. It was a great little song.
He rewarded our warm indulgence with Hyperactive, which was riddled with technical problems. He was building the rhythm track very slowly, making a lot of adjustments on the fly. It was funny to hear him paging through percussion sounds and create that random cacophony that is so familiar to music geeks (bonk thump ping clap boop ting vvveerrrmmm bip cherck).
The trombone player couldn't find the downbeat when TD was ready for him, so he had to count him in. The horns knocked that one out of the park, ending with just the three of them.
When it was done, Dolby asked the audience to excuse him for a minute while he fixed something because he wouldn't remember what to change if he waited a night. So we watched him rebuild the track. When he was done, we applauded politely. Someone toward the back of the room yelled "So? What was it?" I laughed really hard at that. We would have all loved to hear him explain the glitch in detail.
I can't express how much I loved this show. Dolby was the first musician I really liked as an adolescent -- when I could distinguish between artistry and fame. He changed and grew and frustrated me by becoming something larger than the category I put him in.
In the past twenty-five years, I've gotten to do a lot of the stuff I'd wanted to do with music. I got write and record songs, manipulate and create sounds with ridiculously complicated machines, stumble around poorly lit stages strewn with cables and try to fix a technical problem with one hand and play presentable music with the other in front of drunk people in some dive... I've gotten to sit in front of a CRT with headphones on and three manuals in my lap trying to figure out why some piece of equipment isn't talking to another... And I've shocked myself badly while disassembling old electronics to get my hands on a flywheel or a factory-set potentiometer. And I've done all of those things because the thirteen-year-old kid inside of me was entranced by how dirty and organic-sounding all of this supposedly sterile pristine music was.
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