About rock concerts

When you go to a classical music concert, you know what you are going to get. You know from the programme what pieces are going to be played. If it’s a piece you’re familiar with from a recording you will hear all the same notes, as the whole point is that the composer wrote them all down for the performers to play them all back to you. You know what the instruments will sound like, as their sound reaches you directly without having to be amplified and mixed. Performances do actually differ at the margins on points of interpretation, intonation, timing etc. In the main you get the music you expected only it sounds better than on the recording because it is fuller in the flesh and certainly with an orchestra you hear more detail.

When you go to a rock concert, you don’t know what you wil get. You’re gambling on the set-list being a reasonable choice of material you’re going to recognize. Then you don’t know what version it will be served up in, even if you do know it. I appreciate that with studio multi-track recording techniques often quite simply there are not enough musicians on stage to reproduce all the sounds you’re familiar with from the recorded version. Let me reassure you: I am quite happy to enjoy a simplified, indeed different version of a song that still gives you its essence with perhaps a few good solos added. Indeed, a degree of improvisation and spontaneity is the soul of this kind of music. Sadly though, to be frank, the musicianship of some bands is rather aproximative, the ability of certain stars actually to sing in tune limited and the sound engineers’ idea of what is a balanced mix frequently deficient, with the interesting instruments and voices drowned out by over-miked drum-kits.

Musically then, a rock concert is a bit of a pig in a poke, and often a very expensive one. Incidentally, quite why it shoud cost more to see a handful of musicians in a huge crowd than to see a hundred playing a symphony to a smaller audience has always mystified me. Maybe the electricity bill is big; or maybe some of these guys are just overpaid for what they actually do. I suppose in the end, it’s all about supply and demand and what the punters are ready to pay for. I have read that in this age of cheap or (illegally) free downloads of music off the internet, rock musicians now have to make their real money by touring. That can only be good news, as music is really about performing not recording. However, I suspect that most people go to a concert because they like the recorded music, not because they know the band plays well live.

I guess the reason I continue to go occasionally to big rock concerts is curiosity to see what the great and good are up to live: can they (still) cut it ? Ultimately it’s worth it because I believe that live music has always got something over recorded music: you go for the excitement of the direct human contact, albeit mediated by huge amplification systems and, in the worst extreme of stadium concerts, cinema size TV screens, but you’re still participating in a transient shared event, and that is an essential dimension to music that you ignore at your peril. It’s the encouragement of the audience that makes the musicians want to play better and put more into their music, which in turn leads the appreciative crowd to encourage them more, and so on in a virtuous circle So it may be rough and ready, but it grabs you and thrills you. However, if it is rough and ready and doesn’t actually move you, then it makes for a pretty boring evening, where the only plus point is the kudos of being able to say “yeah, I saw so and so the other night”.

We went to see Bob Dylan the other week.  It must be thirty years since I saw him last.  We were somewhat disappointed, not least because of the sound mix.  I go to a Dylan concert to listen to the words, and if I can't hear them that rather diminishes the experience, because to be honest instrumentally there are better rock bands out there.  Still one goes to pay homage to the great man, and I suppose at his age, pace Johnson, it's not that he does it well but that he does it at all.  
Having said that, two years ago, at the first night of their tour concert at Werchter, I thought the Rolling Stones really rocked, and last year Paul Simon produced a really entertaining evening, whereas old Bob was strictly average.  So we played spot the song, and without the benefits of the occasionally recognizable lyrics we certainly wouldn’t have realized it was "It's all over now Baby Blue" or "Blowing in the wind" from the tune (?) actually you get the melody more from the harmonica than the voice.  I guess I'm not helped by being unfamiliar with his more recent material.  Still if I could have made out the words I might have warmed to it.  Interestingly enough he did four songs from "Highway 61" which in a way I personally regard as his best album.

So whose concerts have I rated over the years?

The first rock concert I went to was by Pink Floyd in about 1974. It was in a theatre in Liverpool and I had to persuade my parents to drive me there and back. In a first set they played previously unheard work-in-progress that would eventually emerge on “Animals”, in a second set all of “Dark Side of the Moon” with accompanying images and in an encore the whole of “Echoes” which in many ways is my favourite piece by them and in which they ingeniously used Dick Parry’s saxophone to do one of the solos which is done on the record by double tracking the guitar. It was generous and good and in the first set was still in keeping with their early method of working out pieces live before recording them.

In the sixth form I often went to see bands at Leeds University Students’ Union and remember enjoying the Electric Light Orchestra complete with electric violins.
I’m not sure if it counts strictly as a rock concert , but the best concert I saw as a student in Oxford was by Weather Report, which featured several quite outstanding jazz musicians (Joe Zawinul, Wayne Shorter, Jaco Pastorius) playing accessible music you could bop to.
During my year off in Germany I managed to see Bob Marley in a large hall in Dortmund: a really feel good concert, where given the amount of weed being smoked even passive smokers were high.
In Cologne I saw an amazing doube bill of Santana and then Frank Zappa. Santana was a bit hit and miss, whereas Zappa was immensely professional as a musician; his band was so tight. But he did a cruel thing: he got his band to play a typical Santana two chord riff and then parodied a Santana solo before doing his own take on it which just blew Santana away. For all his quirky sense of humour, Zappa was an incredibly good guitarist and a total musician.

As my interest in music turned more to classical music, I didn’t go to any rock concerts by famous names for years. It was when Julia and Thomas were teenagers and needed accompanying/driving to them that I started to go again.
The thing that struck me most was that in 25 years or so nothing had really changed. The essence was still lead and rhythm guitar, bass and drums playing in 4/4 rhythm very loud with distortion through variations on the twelve bar blues. I think we can speak of an art form which has as many conventions as classical sonata form or Indian ragas. So I actually found a lot of what they wanted to go and listen to perfectly accessible and, as always, found that some bands played really well live while others were rather average.
The one act I saw twice with them that I would really rate is the Red Hot Chilli Peppers. They are mainly in their 40’s with a lot of experience and are very good musicians. They record their music in a fairly simple way which transfers well to live performance, and they play well live, so you really get good rock stripped down to its essence.

In many ways, as rock (however we define the contemporary popular music of the West) is a relatively simple form of music that can be mastered easily by amateurs, many of the most enjoyable rock concerts I have been to have been by unknown bands in bars. Being close up to musicians who play well and are clearly enjoying themselves and generating energy that you want to get up and move to, is really what it’s all about. In this way, over recent years I have always enjoyed the concerts given by my friend Alex and his band About Time Two.
This kind of rock concert is a direct, pretension-free, low-expectation but high-satisfaction happening that probably will never be repeated: a far cry from the experience at a distance which is the famous band in a stadium circus that so often disappoints. I should also mention here the three gigs given by my children’s now defunct band, Mostly Harmless.
I often find that non-commercial rock music for fun is just more rewarding as a musical and human experience.

Having said that, we really enjoyed a great entertaining evening of music by Crosby, Stills and Nash this week. Yet another outing of past it sixty-year-olds you may have thought, but no actually it was an unpretentious concert by experienced professional musicians. We were fairly close to the stage and didn’t need binoculars to see them. The sound mix was ideal: you could hear first and foremost the voices and guitars of the three, with the backing musicians precisely that - discreet in the background. They played two sets in the old way, with a proper break for a beer and a pee in the middle. The first set was more acoustic, the second more electric. Their harmony singing is still exquisite and guitar playing excellent. There were plenty of familiar songs including some by others (eg “Ruby Tueday”), and the audience was even invited to join in (eg on “Teach your children”). There was constant variety in pace and instrumentation that kept you interested. After all, big name rock concerts can be good in the right circumstances.

In short this is all you want from a rock concert: good live music in a good atmosphere.

ps 18.12.2009

I saw Paul McCartney last week. He was on stage for two and a half hours with a small tight band who played well and could all sing harmony. He played 35 songs, 22 of which were old Beatles numbers. I guess that's the closest you can get to hearing the Beatles live these days, and let's not forget that they never performed their late material live. So I must admit that hearing McCartney sing these songs that I know and love so well (partly from playing them myself) was a really moving experience for me.