Warning: I’m going to use some mild rock & roll terminology here, not enough to keep this rant from being posted, but hopefully enough to make my point on a few different levels of meaning.
“I saw Steely Dan last night at the [insert dirty dive bar name here], baby.”
I went to a Steely Dan concert a few weeks ago. In the ‘70s, in the heyday of the band Steely Dan, you might hear the above quotation slurringly dripping out of the mouth of a heroin-addled Greenwich Village novelist/hipster/short-order cook at an all-night diner, as he’s talking to his equally-as-drugged-up, off-off-Broadway actress/singer/elbow-model girlfriend, while you’re standing behind them on a Brooklyn subway platform pretending to read “The Village Voice,” but actually eavesdropping and day dreaming. He’d tell her about the set list, as much of it as he can remember. She’d act and/or be jealous. You’d listen with voyeuristic envy and just a faint hint of a feeling of superiority. Rock concerts used to have something to do with rebellion. Now, they’re mainly corporate garbage masquerading as art.
Find out what's happening in Athenswith free, real-time updates from Patch.
Even the Steely Dan show was lame by rock concert standards. Not the band. The band was great! They were great enough to deserve that exclamation point. Steely Dan is really just an extremely talented artistic duo who has at times surrounded themselves with a revolving door of outstanding studio musicians. They played mostly their beloved, kick-#@$ old hits with only a few new songs, so the rock ratio of a band that old and that cherished was as it should be. One of the two actual members of the band was clearly on some illegal substance, and still made great music, in his fifties, which IS rock & roll in all its debauchery and glory. The other one played most of the show with his head lolling back and to the side at around a 45 degree angle, as if he were blind, which he’s not. That, too, is rock & roll.
What wasn't rock & roll was the concert experience itself. Any concert with any band that is popular enough to play gigs at stadiums is, these days, almost guaranteed to suck on some level, probably multiple levels. I’m not dissing Steely Dan. Those guys are musical geniuses and it was a once-in-a-lifetime experience getting to hear “Josie” and “Deacon Blues” live. But even a band that good has had to fall prey to the lunacy of what we’ve turned popular music into just to be able to continue to do what they do best. That aspect of the concert was so pathetic that I would've laughed (I did laugh at it a few times), if I wasn't enjoying the moment, or trying desperately to, so d%&m much.
Find out what's happening in Athenswith free, real-time updates from Patch.
It was in The Verizon Wireless Amphitheater. That ain’t rock & roll. That’s about as easy listening as you can get. Even among the long list of sad-a@^ corporate sponsorship names, The Verizon Wireless Amphitheater wins the prize for lamest venue name. It’s up there with the Chick-fil-A Bowl for lunatic name theorizing.
[[[For the sake of full disclosure, I should admit that I hate Verizon with an abiding passion. For the 365 days that I, regrettably, owned one of their pathetic excuses for a product, I was constantly angry with: 1--the fact that they made me sign a contract (how insecure can modern phone companies be?), 2---the equally as maddening fact that their in-store customer service consisted of a mini-mall cube full of teenagers who had the same amount of real power to affect my phone plan as your average dead possum on the side of the road, and about as much personality, and 3---these soulless b@(*%>&s tried, early on in their advertising career, to steal the peace sign for themselves and make it their symbol. Seriously, they thought that America would be fine with a mobile phone company using the peace sign to hawk poor cell coverage (yes, I know that the peace sign was co-opted from the post WWII victory sign, but that makes sense, since after a war usually comes peace, not AT&T) at a ludicrously high mark-up. Maybe I’m the only one who remembers it, but I’m not even close to letting that one go.]]]
Admittedly, even before entering the well-guarded gates of the theatre, I was set to be angry at the fact that I was financially supporting a company I already hate, even if it was indirectly. Still, it was Steely freaking Dan! This is a crew who named their band after a literary reference to an, ahem, adult pleasure aid device. That’s rock & roll. Tailgating out of the back of a Lexus SUV in brand-new folding Adirondack travel chairs on TV trays, eating Gouda squares, Melba Toast and pairing them with a well-aged, oak-barrel-fermented Cabernet is less rock & roll. But, again, I have to concede the opposing point of view. They’re an old band, most of whose fans are now, by any definition, adults, and so, a slightly lower than average amount of no-holds-barred, let’s-get-wasted-and-break-stuff concert experience was something I expected. Talking to the kindly sixtyish couple behind me in line about the relationship between the suburban housing market and recent trends in Georgia state politics was not something I expected. It’s was weird, like Steely Dan, and interesting, also like Steely Dan, but not particularly rebellious.
The orderly ordeal of parking was an experience just this side of an airport Park & Ride lot. 20-something-aged guys in orange vests and an unnecessarily large contingent of Atlanta’s finest led us all through multiple checkpoints and into designated, well-coordinated parking spots in a field that could easily have doubled as an 8-year-old soccer league practice facility. No one raised any objection to their parking assignment. Everyone just did as they were told. Early on in the concert night I sensed that something was amiss and not all that rockish, but the night was young, so I decided to reserve my judgment until after the show. I should've trusted my intuition. Gut instinct is usually right on the money.
Before I, and my fellow highly ironically respectful of the rules rock concert-going friends, could even enter the castle-like gates of the Verizon Wireless Amphitheater and ask someone why they kept the word “wireless” in the title since they don’t sell land lines, all of us semi-or-former-rock-&-rollers were herded into lines outside of the venue. It wasn't one wavy line outside of a dank night-club where I could share a flask with the happy Egyptian guy behind me. It was much more like an airport security experience. The security personnel, vendors, and sales people (most of whom were wearing matching solid-color outfits) scurried around inside the amphitheater, readying it for a consumer extravaganza. As heinous and as un-rock & roll as it is, at this point I fully expect to pay ten bucks for a beer at a concert. What I don’t expect is to go to a concert where travel agencies set up booths next to the tee-shirt stand displaying the wonders of Caribbean Sandals resorts and selling all-inclusive packages that come with an optional Swedish massage feature. Again, I was bewildered and disappointed, or, to put it in as close to rock speak as possible, I was #^”)*/$ angry, really #^”)*/$ angry.
The merchandise was ludicrously overpriced. Again, that’s something we’'e all come to expect at any venue, be it sports, music, circus-related, or political. We shouldn't pay $45 for a tee-shirt, no one should. Then again, we shouldn't pay $45 for a tank of gas, but we do. I know that merchandise is where venues make their money, and, despite the subject matter of this rant, I’m not against concert halls making money. I worked with a professional clown who used to tour with Ringling Brothers and he told me that the mark-up on merchandise is the only way that circuses stay in business. So, the next time that you find yourself shelling out ten dollars to buy your kid a bag of food-coloring-laden cotton candy that cost the company 15 cents to make, think about that fact before you complain. Once again, it was less the fact that the merchandise was grossly overpriced that made me mad as it was the levels to which rational capitalistic rules are now being stretched. $20 for a mini-pizza? $8.50 for a soft pretzel? Mini-pizzas are the culinary rock & roll equivalent of Happy Meal toys at fancy restaurants. They don’t belong there. Soft pretzels, sure. There are always soft pretzels at large crowd type events. They’re comforting. Rock salt isn't the most rock & roll topping, but it is slightly more rebellious than sea bass, which I saw people eating at their luxury car pre-show tailgate.
No one was out of control. No one. No one vomited. At least no one that I saw. The men’s room etiquette defied rock logic. No one pushed anyone. No one peed outside of the designated area. There was a cop in the bathroom (probably not the most popular law enforcement assignment). No one drunkenly slurred any rehashed pop-culture-infused vaguely Buddhist wisdom at me at the urinal. Yet again, it reminded me of an airport.
I had a serious discussion about currency exchange rates while I was in the beer line. Come on rock & roll, you can do better than that.
All '70s bands who are still touring (even those who have gotten back together twenty years after breaking up over a drunken fight over who got to wear the gold eye-liner on-stage that night) are going to have an element of parents introducing their children to good music. That’s OK. I like that. Most new music is awful, in large part because of the corporate influenced, de-humanizing-and-de-rockifying infusion of massive amounts of money into the artist experience. I saw Bob Dylan a decade ago, and I’d say that ¾ of the crowd was fathers bringing their sons and daughters to see good live music and try and wean them off of grunge metal, gangsta rap or whatever watered-down pretend art they were listening to at the time. Seeing that made me happy. Dylan is one of America’s greatest poets. He’s up there with Walt Whitman and Robert Frost. And that show was equally as family-friendly, but even as recently as ten years ago, I didn't have to see it in a venue named after a phone company. Can you honestly picture the Beatles playing at Ma Bell Arena? Would you even want to hear Billie Holiday croon wistfully at the Rural Electrification Agency Bar? What I’m trying to say is that it’s not the family aspect of the term “family-friendly” that makes everything so lame. It’s the fear of something going wrong and someone missing out on the chance to soak some consumer on over-priced recycled chicken pieces.
Steely Dan came back out for an encore, one that they previewed on Facebook. The encore lasted for exactly one song, the one that they had promised to play. Their entire set list was available for perusal on their website and they didn't deviate from it. Do I really need to point out how un-rock & roll those two facts are?
After the show ended, the concert-goers politely filed out to their cars, and we were all herded out of the parking lot
I have a three-year-old nephew, so, even though I hate them, I understand the importance of having family-friendly options for entertainment, culinary, musical, theatrical, or other. What I don’t understand is the impulse to make EVERYTHING family-friendly. It’s destructive. It’s soul-sucking, mind-numbing, the-opposite-of-inspirational (despirational?), hollow, thoughtless nonsense best left to the Burger Kings, the Nickelodeons, and the Pixars of the world. Actually, Pixar is pretty good, but I couldn't bring myself to, on any level, praise the company of he of the giant black mouse ears (He’s so greedy that he stole Star Wars, although I blame George Lucas for that one and even that corporation that shall not be named probably can’t decimate a beloved movie franchise as badly as Jar Jar Binks and the annoying child actor who played Anakin in “The Phantom Menace.”). I get it that parents need places to drag their little kids, places free from desensitizing violence, foul language, actual thought-provoking ideas, and danger. I get that. I just don’t see why we would WANT to make almost everywhere like that.
Whether or not they themselves took their own advice, many wise men of the past have said, in a variety of ways and languages, that moderation in all things is one of the keys to happiness. In a country that counts among its unalienable rights “the Pursuit of Happiness,” we need a little debauchery. In a country whose colonies were “…absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown” by a feisty group of rebels, we need to retain a sense of rebellion. If we can’t rebel at a rock concert, then where the h*## can we?
