Mt Goats good, audience stupid

[mrissa]

Dear Mr. John Darnielle:

Thank you for a lovely concert. Are you sure you weren't one of my lab students 10-12 years ago? You don't look like any particular one of them, just a representative of the type. In any case, well done. Thanks also to your band.

Fondly,
mrissa

Dear audience at the concert of Mr. John Darnielle:

Okay, look. I know some of you are apparently new. I know that in the cave in which you were raised, all entertainment came with mute, pause, and fast-forward buttons. But here in adultland, we have this thing called live shows where both the performers and the fellow audience members are fellow human beings. This time even the opening act qualified as a fellow human being! It's astonishing! What does this mean? It means:

If the venue has a very small number of seats off to one side, approaching those seats to ask, "Are these reserved/taken?" is quite reasonable (and thanks to the vast majority of people who handled that as polite members of society). Sneering, "Are these for special people?" at the people already seated in them is not quite the same thing. It is already such a special experience to require assistance to get into the concert at all, to worry whether one's needed accommodations will be handled gracefully despite one's calling in advance (they were), and to have one's particular special condition exacerbated by the decadent overindulgence of sitting in dark halls two nights in a row. What I really need to make the experience complete is your open resentment that I have been permitted something so flagrantly self-indulgent as a chair. Then when we indicate that it's because of disability, what I need even more is for you to recoil as though I have whipped out graphic pictures of some surgery or internal organ. Thanks ever so.

Do not answer your damn cell phone. If it rings during a quiet moment in the music, your course of action is to look extremely sheepish and mute it or turn it off, as you should have done at the start of the show. If they call for which you are waiting is truly life and death important, please stand close to the doors so you can duck out into the lobby to answer it.

If you are taking pictures, do not turn your flash up to "everybody take your iodine, there's been a nuclear event" level. I live with one photographer and see quite a bit of some others socially, and so I am pretty sure that this is not necessary. And if it was necessary, it might be a sign that you should just not try to get that picture.

This is a rock show. One of the things that means is dynamic variation. You can pretty well guarantee that there will be a loud bit at some point, and then there is a loud bit, you can say things to your companion in a loudish conversational voice. You can rummage around in the purse you have apparently filled entirely with cellophane. You can make impatient little noises with your water bottle. What you should not do is to perform these irritating little acts compulsively when the music is having quiet, contemplative/emotional moments. If something in your purse is that important and takes two full songs to find, perhaps you should go out to the lobby, where there is better lighting. Or perhaps you should stand closer to the individuals in one of the paragraphs adjacent to you, as they were augmenting the lighting on a fairly regular basis.

If you must light up and stay lit up for the entire concert (which, frankly, I doubt is quite as imperative as you seemed to find it), do us all a favor and spring for the good pot. "But Mris," you may be saying, "you do not smoke pot. How do you know which is the good pot?" I have said this before, but since some people are, as I said, apparently new, I will repeat it. In fact, this is general advice from Auntie mrissa, applicable to sweaters and roommates and cupcakes and quarter-scale reproductions of the SF-MoMA porcelain statue of Michael Jackson and his chimp as well as to weed: things that smell like burning unwashed ass are bad. You do not want them.

If you wish to be in full control of which songs you hear at which times, I have some wonderful news for you! It is now possible to purchase a number of devices that facilitate this behavior. You can, for example, use a CD player. You can use a music player on your computer or on a portable device. You can even, should you be inclined, make cassette tapes and fast-forward or rewind them as you desire. If that is not retro enough for you, some bars feature machines into which you may feed money for this purpose. However, this is not the jukebox option. That being the case, will you please permit the performers to perform more than one song before you begin shouting the names of their one or two most popular pieces? (Or any others. But especially those.) They arrived for this event aware that their engagement in this venue was for the purposes of providing music. They have therefore given some thought to music they know or might remember some of, and if they don't say, "So what d'you want to hear?" or otherwise seem to be flailing, let them play. If the show appears to be winding down, you may then express your enthusiasm for the performers' one or two most popular songs if those have not been played, and if you feel that they may be unaware of which pieces catch your particular individual fancy and the particular individual fancy of every other person who has ever heard of this band. But give the poor musicians at least a few minutes to get settled in onstage before you shatter their illusion that you might be here for more than just the one three-minute song.

I'm so glad we've cleared all that up.

Sternly,
mrissa

Comments

[cathshaffer.livejournal.com]

And on the other hand, I recently attended a performance of the Detroit symphony orchestra completely filled with Detroit-area school groups of children between the ages of 9 and 14 who behaved with utterly perfect comportment, enjoyed the show greatly, and showed appropriate enthusiasm at appropriate times. (And at least one of them took a nap.) Your seat neighbors could have learned a thing or two.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Oh yes, the audience of Bert and Ernie Goodnight! was far, far superior. No contest.

(I expect your kid probably feels he is too old for B&EG, but if it comes to A^2 you should totally kidnap someone else's child and go.)

[fidelioscabinet.livejournal.com]

Or perhaps you should stand closer to the individuals in one of the paragraphs adjacent to you

<3!

No, that's not quite it.

<3!


That's a little better.


I'm truly torn between wishing I had been able to hear this rant's original in person, and being glad I didn't, as my edges might be slightly crisped, even had I behaved very well during the entire show.

[magentamn.livejournal.com]

To the pot smokers in that audience:
If you believe the newspapers, pot smells like that. This shows you have been smoking oregano. It should not smell like burning leaves; that's why you have to keep smoking it to get any kind of buzz, which is probably why you are smoking during the whole concert.
Signed,
an old hippie
(/snark)

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I disapprove of people smoking oregano. Oregano is useful for spaghetti sauce, which I enjoy.

Burning leaves would have been a large step up from burning unwashed ass, I'm afraid.

[tournevis.livejournal.com]

I truly love you.

When I teach/public speak and a cell goes off, I usually stop talking and go "dring, dring, dring" until the student/audience member turns off the phone says sorry.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I was riding in the car with my aunt and uncle once, and my uncle was getting frustrated at the driving skills of the person in front of him. My aunt laid her hand on his arm and gently, with a twinkle in her eye, said, "Don't bother him, dear, he's on the phone." Oh, the fireworks. Good times.

[tournevis.livejournal.com]

teehee.

[nihilistic-kid.livejournal.com]

I snatched the phone out of someone's hand once and conducted a brief interview with the person on the other end. It happened to be the audience member's mother.

[guppiecat]

There is a well reported incident within the IT Security instruction community where someone's cell phone went off in class. The instructor walked up to him and held out his hand. The offender (a CIO) sheepishly handed him the phone. The instructor then walked up to the front of the class and dropped the phone in the pitcher of ice water on the front table.

The class then began discussing business ethics, the risks inherent with trusting those in authority and the importance of maintaining control and backups of mobile devices. :)

[marydell.livejournal.com]

*applause*

[cakmpls.livejournal.com]

Oh my.

Well done.

[mamculuna.livejournal.com]

I definitely know of some people who should get this letter--just don't know their names.

And there's another few pieces of advice for people who come to outdoor concerts,especially of classical music, and keep right on talking and laughing out loud when the music has started, apparently having paid all that money just to sit on the lawn and drink with their friends and not hear music at all, unlike the rest of us.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

When this is at free outdoor concerts, the trend seems to be even worse, and instead of wondering why they paid that money, I wonder why they are taking up space this near the concert when they could go away in the park somewhere and have the faint background music strains and also sit on the lawn and drink with their friends and also leave me alone.

[pameladean]

Eric and I went to hear Ani Difranco at First Avenue, and there was a constant stream of people passing to and fro behind us, talking loudly about boring topics, greeting their friends, laughing raucously, and generally inviting others to murder them. They had paid thirty-five dollars to do these things; it's not even as if they had just wandered into the wrong bar by mistake and failed to notice that there was a live performer up there who had not been to the Twin Cities in a affordable venue for years and years.

I also hate the audiences at Great Big Sea concerts, who yell at random during every single song.

P.

[carbonel]

What I hated about the audience at the one Great Big Sea concert I went to was that I was given the option of standing through most of the concert or not having any chance of seeing them.

This was a theatre-type venue; if they'd had place for people to stand and dance and another for people to sit and enjoy the music, I would have enjoyed the concert much more.

It probably means that I'm the one who's out of joint, but I don't think I'll be going to any more of their concerts.

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

We didn't have to stand to see from the balcony.

[pameladean]

One very definite benefit of those crampy seats. Because now that you mention it, people were indeed bouncing up and down a lot.

P.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

There's a lot of that these days. Venues like the Varsity that formerly had bunches of chairs now have only a few around the edges, making sure that you can only have one if you showed up very early, and only if you never want a glimpse of the band. Sure, you can pack more people in if it's standing-room only. But I really do prefer concerts that have seating and/or a mix of accommodation, and I did even before the seating became crucial for me instead of just pleasant.

[zelda888.livejournal.com]

Outdoors and *acoustic* is awful for this. At RenFairs, where amplification is out of the question, the people behind me are generally a little closer to me than the performers are, which of course means I can hear them better than I can the music. I have almost turned around and delivered lectures on the inverse square rule. Partly because I am ticked at the rudeness, partly because some small sympathetic piece of me realizes that they may genuinely not understand the phenomenon.

(And, umm, hi. I keep seeing you around several places where I read, and have started lurking here.)

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Hi! Lurkers welcome.

And the awful thing about being put in a position to contemplate delivering that lecture is that if you start the lecture, there are two people talking closer to the person next to you than the person next to you is to the musicians. And sometimes the wordless death glare gives them the impression that you object to them discussing their grandmother's bunions in public rather than that you object to them having a discussion in that context at all. Sigh.

[zelda888.livejournal.com]

Well, I'd do it between numbers, of course. I can deliver a very concise lecture when necessary.

[sksperry.livejournal.com]

Good points, all.

*Being a former rock star, I'd just like to inform you that the band is probably totally oblivious to 99% of what's going on in the audience. I was so blinded by the lights most nights I wasn't even sure if there was and audience.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Sadly, from the way the guy flinched when the flash went off, I think the photographer timed at least one of her holycrudflash photos to hit exactly the wrong point of "I am getting down off the stage" for his eyes to adjust. And the venue was small enough that the yelling of suggestions interfered directly with the segues the front man was trying to make between songs. But that fairly clearly meant that it was at least as much of an annoyance to him as it was to me. Of course I don't blame the band for this. Totally not the band's fault. Not even the venue's fault--the Cedar is usually a good place for shows. Just the specific audience last night, I guess.

[sksperry.livejournal.com]

Yes, that would suck. It's funny though, we usually liked to play the smaller venues because of the audience interaction. I guess audiences were just more polite back then.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Other audience interaction at the Cedar has been great. The other audiences we've been part of at the Cedar have ranged from 4-5 to 20 years greater average age of audience member than this one, but I'm not sure that's what skewed the behavior--the college set at previous Cedar shows has been much more polite, too. And that's "previous" as in "earlier this year," not "previous" as in "when Iiiiii was your age, ya whippersnapper."

I guess every venue has just the wrong crowd once in awhile.

[sksperry.livejournal.com]

True, and let's face it, it only takes 4 or 5 determined morons in any crowd to ruin it for everyone. (I wrote "mormons" first, but that's a whole other dynamic)

[buymeaclue.livejournal.com]

Former?

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Exactly. Steve is always a rock star to us.

Other people not relevant, of course.

[nihilistic-kid.livejournal.com]

I just sniffed my Jackson Bubbles statue...I've been took! They told me it was totally worth $49.99 and and it smells like unwashed aaasssss

*BURSTS into tears*

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Well, at least it still has its sentimental value for you.

[stillnotbored.livejournal.com]

No one rants the way you rant.

I can only hope that you have less reason to rant in the future.

[reveritas.livejournal.com]

How awful. Sounds like what I might expect at like, The Killers, or Blink 182, but not the poor Mountain Goat(s).

[themagdalen.livejournal.com]

<3.

[haddayr.livejournal.com]

This post first made me tsk in solidarity and then roar with sustained laughter so long and loud that I now have a headache.

I do not care; it was worth it.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Love the icon.

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

Oh dear. I'm so sorry it was the wrong crowd; it sounds a pretty bad wrong crowd.

(The worst wrong crowd I've ever been in was the They Might Be Giants concert which developed-- no lie-- a mosh pit. John Linnell broke off in the middle of Exquisite Dead Guy to say, in horrified fascination, 'What are you people doing out there?', and they played most of the set backed up as much to the rear of the stage as they could get. I had a perfectly good sweater basically shredded and wound up going to a different later TMBG show in the same tour so that I would feel like I had actually seen them.)

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

See, the worst wrong crowd I've been to at a They Might Be Giants concert was just sort of limp. It was late in the tour, and I think the band was exhausted, but the crowd was a dead fish of a crowd. The things that Flansburgh usually does to fire up the crowd felt sort of like last ditch resuscitation attempts. I have since been to a much better TMBG show, much to my relief.

[buymeaclue.livejournal.com]

It is now possible to purchase a number of devices that facilitate this behavior...You can use a music player on your computer or on a portable device.

They were talking on "Wait, Wait" the other day about a combined MP3 player and taser. I was assuming the taser portion was meant for, say, defending the musical taste of the person listening to the MP3 player. It now occurs to me that it might be useful in the other direction, too.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

"You have now listened to 'Linger' eight times in a row. BZZZZT!"

[dichroic.livejournal.com]

This is completely irrelevan but .... just in case you have someone who knits and wants to make you something, I thought I'd mention that the issue of Twist Collective online magazine due out next Sunday apparently has a pattern called Orvokki. It seems to be a hat / mittens set.

(I know because the knitting site Ravelry already has their page up for the new issue, and I peeked. No pictures yet, though.)

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Heh. Neat.

[pixelfish.livejournal.com]

I purely purely hate people who smoke pot at indoor shows. I've had a few concerts ruined that way....it doesn't get me high, incidentally, all that second hand smoke. It gives me a major debilitating headache.

...

re: TMBG - they had my vote for best concert evar until I saw The Living End and the Aquabats at Slim's in SF. But I mightily enjoyed both times I've seen them, and I will be seeing them again tomorrow. (And sent my lil' sis and her friends to see them last Friday in SLC.) But I've had decent crowds for all those shows and nobody crazy.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Yah, I am in the "major nasty headache" category, and also in the "come here so I can puke on your shoes" category when it comes to second-hand smoke at concerts.

Have a good concert! Is it another of their Flood concerts?

[pixelfish.livejournal.com]

Yes! It is a Flood concert. (Apparently the SLC concert was a Flood concert as well, although it was not labelled as such by Ticketmaster, while the Seattle one was.)