Artists in Life Imitating Artists in Art
Sep. 21st, 2023 04:29 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
captainsblogIn hindsight, I have to admit I've been through a bit of bad karma trying to see one of my favorite bands.
First attempt: circa summer 1996, right after Natalie Merchant left the Maniacs. I took Emily, then all of about four, with me to hear the band for the first time ever. That didn't happen, and wouldn't for another 22 years, since their guitarist Rob Buck was too ill to go on (he would sadly pass away a few years later). John and Mary, they of the recent album find, came out for a duo set but the full band did not play on.
Finally saw: October 2018, a fundraiser for a Blue Congressional candidate in a beet-red MAGA district in New York's Southern Tier. The show was wonderful, the merch and autographs on the merch still memorable, but Tracy lost her election the following month to a soon-to-be-disgraced Republican incumbent in a district that no longer even exists.
Next outing: October 2021, Town Ballroom in downtown B-lo. Great songs, including my singular Mary favorite, but I had to bail early to get home for an online connection to a suddenly lost dear friend's memorial service on the other side of the planet.
The big event: May 2022, aka That Weekend. By far my favorite show of theirs I've seen, also by far the most miles I've traveled to get there, meet their bassist on a walking tour of their haunts, hear them perform, and finally get home with fewer keys than I left with.
The non-event: October 2022, the first stop of their continued 40th anniversary tour, which ended before it began. Full ticket price refunded. The beginning of a long hiatus that ended this summer with the group announcing Mary's retirement from the mike and strings and their youngest member's departure from Rob's former guitar slot at the same time.
Soon thereafter, the band announced that the voice and guitar replacements would both came from the Maniac-contemporary folk band Sixpence None The Richer, Leigh Nash and Matt Slocum. Best known for the 1999 hit single "Kiss Me," Leigh and Matt came north and prepared for a resumption of touring this fall. Several dates were announced but the first night's date, announced somewhat later, turned out to be last night, in the Jamestown Community College theater I first saw the full Mary-led group at almost five years earlier.
(Bassist and social media maven Steve Gufstafson explained the timing of the announcement toward the end of last night's show: an on-campus theater group had the stage booked for setup and rehearsal all fall for a November production of Something Rotten, but the cast and crew graciously let the band share the auditorium for rehearsals and tech setup for the tour. He encouraged us to buy tickets to it.)
I, meanwhile, had bought tickets online to their debut last night with the new lineup. Tickets, plural. This will be important later. There'd been quite a bit of chatter about it among band members I've befriended as well as on a fan group I belong to. So I knew that last night was the night in question- but I didn't put my ticket copies on my laptop's main screen like I usually do. Just as I was starting to root around for when I made the purchase weeks ago, I got an email from the venue:
Just a friendly reminder that you have tickets to the 10,000 Maniacs with Leigh Nash and Matt Slocum concert on September 30 at 7:30. As a reminder, the show starts at 7:30 and the doors will open at 6:30. Please arrive early so you can get your tickets and find your seat. Thank you for your support!
Well, that explained not having the printed ticket link, but, um, 30th? That was quickly corrected in a followup email from the venue. Eleanor was pretty wiped out from painting work in the garage, and living in hardware stores buying and returning things for it, but we did spend Tuesday night with the latest installment of Steve MartinShort's thriller-comedy Only Murders in the Building. This season's mystery involves a musical play-within-the-play directed by Martin Short's character and starring Steve's, and the episode title was a theater term I'd never heard before:
It seemed only fitting, then, that when I arrived inside the Jamestown Community College auditorium, I would post a picture of the musicians taking their first licks at their instruments with words and would use that same little piece of German as my caption....
....except I forgot to account for the plotline in Only Murders where the star of the play-within-a-play, played by Paul Rudd, appears to drop dead onstage on Opening Night and forces everybody onstage to stop.
Spoiler alert: his character didn't die on Opening Night. Far as we know, nobody in our auditorium did, either. But the ensuing events of the evening seemed, for at least a few moments, to be a kontinuation of the karma that has haunted me in connection with seeing, or not seeing, this musical group.
----
Just getting there on time was a bit of an adventure. I made excellent time down the 90 and the state road off the Dunkirk-Fredonia exit, even having time to try to find the obnoxious Chautauqua County house with the Confederate and LET'S GO BRANDON flags I saw on the way to see Natalie in July. I never found it, but I was surprised to see a TRUMP FOR PRISON 2024 sign on a lawn about halfway down Route 60. A friend who grew up in Jamestown saw my post about it and said it had somehow lasted down there for a couple of months. I kinda want one, she said.
What I wanted more was a set of directions to and on the JCC campus, which I overshot with about 15 minutes to showtime. Siri sent me down a winding series of red brick residential streets to plant me on an unfamiliar side of academic buildings from what I remembered from 2018. Fortunately, a very nice kid who is studying music at the school showed me and two other 10,000 Maniacs Stalkers where to find the theater. As we chatted on the way, he asked who we were going to see. Um, the band named on the t-shirts we're all wearing?
He’d never heard of them. Or even of Natalie Merchant.
We headed in with our thanks to our misguided guide, I got to will-call just as the soundcheck was finishing, and the box office attendant looked me up and handed me my two tickets. Yeah, like I said, plural. To a sold-out show.
Turned out I had an extra ticket bought months ago. Damn I wish I could find that kid now to edumicate him.I left it at the box office in case anybody could use it, but nobody turned up next to me:(
----
I will skip ahead to the non-musical moment of the next hour, and return in another entry for a fuller review of the songs and the singer-performers who made the magic all night. About six songs in, Leigh just reaching the first one made famous by Mary rather than Natalie, the group stopped playing and the lights came up. Is there a nurse here? was the cry. ("Doctor in the house" is a bit of an unrealistic trope, especially in a rural county on a Wednesday night.). Then we saw, and moments later heard: an attendee four rows behind me was in serious medical distress. Everyone kept calm, a blanket arrived from backstage, my best guess is it was a seizure of some sort. EMTs arrived maybe ten minutes later, a stretcher several after that, so we take that as a good sign that they were still working on him.
For about 20 more minutes, there was uncertainty in the air. This was an audience almost entirely made up of locals, which means Bills fans, which means remembering the terror of the onfield incident in Cincinnati in January where a Buffalo player almost died on the turf. They wound up stopping play that night and eventually canceling the game. Ultimately for us, though, the decision was made that the show would go on. They launched right back into the Roxy Music cover they'd begun when the emergency hit. I'd have been fine with "let's all go home"- and we did, but well over an hour later after the Maniacs finished their business and played their hearts out- to an audience who appreciated "More Than This" more than ever:
First attempt: circa summer 1996, right after Natalie Merchant left the Maniacs. I took Emily, then all of about four, with me to hear the band for the first time ever. That didn't happen, and wouldn't for another 22 years, since their guitarist Rob Buck was too ill to go on (he would sadly pass away a few years later). John and Mary, they of the recent album find, came out for a duo set but the full band did not play on.
Finally saw: October 2018, a fundraiser for a Blue Congressional candidate in a beet-red MAGA district in New York's Southern Tier. The show was wonderful, the merch and autographs on the merch still memorable, but Tracy lost her election the following month to a soon-to-be-disgraced Republican incumbent in a district that no longer even exists.
Next outing: October 2021, Town Ballroom in downtown B-lo. Great songs, including my singular Mary favorite, but I had to bail early to get home for an online connection to a suddenly lost dear friend's memorial service on the other side of the planet.
The big event: May 2022, aka That Weekend. By far my favorite show of theirs I've seen, also by far the most miles I've traveled to get there, meet their bassist on a walking tour of their haunts, hear them perform, and finally get home with fewer keys than I left with.
The non-event: October 2022, the first stop of their continued 40th anniversary tour, which ended before it began. Full ticket price refunded. The beginning of a long hiatus that ended this summer with the group announcing Mary's retirement from the mike and strings and their youngest member's departure from Rob's former guitar slot at the same time.
Soon thereafter, the band announced that the voice and guitar replacements would both came from the Maniac-contemporary folk band Sixpence None The Richer, Leigh Nash and Matt Slocum. Best known for the 1999 hit single "Kiss Me," Leigh and Matt came north and prepared for a resumption of touring this fall. Several dates were announced but the first night's date, announced somewhat later, turned out to be last night, in the Jamestown Community College theater I first saw the full Mary-led group at almost five years earlier.
(Bassist and social media maven Steve Gufstafson explained the timing of the announcement toward the end of last night's show: an on-campus theater group had the stage booked for setup and rehearsal all fall for a November production of Something Rotten, but the cast and crew graciously let the band share the auditorium for rehearsals and tech setup for the tour. He encouraged us to buy tickets to it.)
I, meanwhile, had bought tickets online to their debut last night with the new lineup. Tickets, plural. This will be important later. There'd been quite a bit of chatter about it among band members I've befriended as well as on a fan group I belong to. So I knew that last night was the night in question- but I didn't put my ticket copies on my laptop's main screen like I usually do. Just as I was starting to root around for when I made the purchase weeks ago, I got an email from the venue:
Just a friendly reminder that you have tickets to the 10,000 Maniacs with Leigh Nash and Matt Slocum concert on September 30 at 7:30. As a reminder, the show starts at 7:30 and the doors will open at 6:30. Please arrive early so you can get your tickets and find your seat. Thank you for your support!
Well, that explained not having the printed ticket link, but, um, 30th? That was quickly corrected in a followup email from the venue. Eleanor was pretty wiped out from painting work in the garage, and living in hardware stores buying and returning things for it, but we did spend Tuesday night with the latest installment of Steve MartinShort's thriller-comedy Only Murders in the Building. This season's mystery involves a musical play-within-the-play directed by Martin Short's character and starring Steve's, and the episode title was a theater term I'd never heard before:
It seemed only fitting, then, that when I arrived inside the Jamestown Community College auditorium, I would post a picture of the musicians taking their first licks at their instruments with words and would use that same little piece of German as my caption....
....except I forgot to account for the plotline in Only Murders where the star of the play-within-a-play, played by Paul Rudd, appears to drop dead onstage on Opening Night and forces everybody onstage to stop.
Spoiler alert: his character didn't die on Opening Night. Far as we know, nobody in our auditorium did, either. But the ensuing events of the evening seemed, for at least a few moments, to be a kontinuation of the karma that has haunted me in connection with seeing, or not seeing, this musical group.
----
Just getting there on time was a bit of an adventure. I made excellent time down the 90 and the state road off the Dunkirk-Fredonia exit, even having time to try to find the obnoxious Chautauqua County house with the Confederate and LET'S GO BRANDON flags I saw on the way to see Natalie in July. I never found it, but I was surprised to see a TRUMP FOR PRISON 2024 sign on a lawn about halfway down Route 60. A friend who grew up in Jamestown saw my post about it and said it had somehow lasted down there for a couple of months. I kinda want one, she said.
What I wanted more was a set of directions to and on the JCC campus, which I overshot with about 15 minutes to showtime. Siri sent me down a winding series of red brick residential streets to plant me on an unfamiliar side of academic buildings from what I remembered from 2018. Fortunately, a very nice kid who is studying music at the school showed me and two other 10,000 Maniacs Stalkers where to find the theater. As we chatted on the way, he asked who we were going to see. Um, the band named on the t-shirts we're all wearing?
He’d never heard of them. Or even of Natalie Merchant.
We headed in with our thanks to our misguided guide, I got to will-call just as the soundcheck was finishing, and the box office attendant looked me up and handed me my two tickets. Yeah, like I said, plural. To a sold-out show.
Turned out I had an extra ticket bought months ago. Damn I wish I could find that kid now to edumicate him.I left it at the box office in case anybody could use it, but nobody turned up next to me:(
----
I will skip ahead to the non-musical moment of the next hour, and return in another entry for a fuller review of the songs and the singer-performers who made the magic all night. About six songs in, Leigh just reaching the first one made famous by Mary rather than Natalie, the group stopped playing and the lights came up. Is there a nurse here? was the cry. ("Doctor in the house" is a bit of an unrealistic trope, especially in a rural county on a Wednesday night.). Then we saw, and moments later heard: an attendee four rows behind me was in serious medical distress. Everyone kept calm, a blanket arrived from backstage, my best guess is it was a seizure of some sort. EMTs arrived maybe ten minutes later, a stretcher several after that, so we take that as a good sign that they were still working on him.
For about 20 more minutes, there was uncertainty in the air. This was an audience almost entirely made up of locals, which means Bills fans, which means remembering the terror of the onfield incident in Cincinnati in January where a Buffalo player almost died on the turf. They wound up stopping play that night and eventually canceling the game. Ultimately for us, though, the decision was made that the show would go on. They launched right back into the Roxy Music cover they'd begun when the emergency hit. I'd have been fine with "let's all go home"- and we did, but well over an hour later after the Maniacs finished their business and played their hearts out- to an audience who appreciated "More Than This" more than ever:
Silliness
Date: 2023-09-21 10:39 pm (UTC)Weirdly, I don't think I've ever heard Sixpence Etc.'s "Kiss Me." (Goes to YooToob and checks.) H'mmm, the opening guitar guitar riff seems familiar, but the song doesn't. I mainly know them for their lovely cover of "Don't Dream It's Over." This is probably because I kind of gave up on radio sometime in the early '90s, a decision that I (a) recognize as a sign of impending curmudge, and (b) don't regret when I do hear radio. I have no idea where I heard the "Don't Dream" cover, but I know I've heard it several times.
Somehow I have never had the chance to see 10KM, one of the few bands I regret missing in my serious concert-going days. (The other would be Pink Floyd. I had the opportunity to see the "The Wall" show in LA, but I couldn't see traveling from Berkeley to LA and back a week short of finals, so my friend gave the ticket he'd scored for me to another friend of his...)
Speaking of which, have you heard any of Roger Waters's ... strange ... remake of DSotM?
Re: Silliness
Date: 2023-09-22 12:00 am (UTC)Not to spoil the upcoming post about the rest of the music during the show, but "Kiss Me" and the "Don't Dream" cover both worked their way into the setlist.
No, that remake has not crossed my path. I was never that much of a Floyd disciple with the original, either straight or synced up with the Wizard of Oz. I'm home from the concert circuit for the month unless the scalpers release some last minute $20 cheap tickets for Peter Gabriel here next week.
Silliness
Date: 2023-09-22 12:10 am (UTC)The combination of the slightly-slowed-down, somewhat-stripped-down performance with the video brought misty tears to the eyes of this exiled New Yorker.
no subject
Date: 2023-09-23 03:34 pm (UTC)Is it just me or does Sitzprobe make anybody else think of something more substantial than bidet water coming for one's undercarriage?