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

[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.