2009 In Review: Concert Reflections

This is a sort of extended footnote to my list of memorable concerts from 2009. You can read Part I here and Part II here.

By the numbers

So, as it turns out, I went to my share of shows in 2009. As I noted before, I went to one hundred and thirty shows, give or take, as long you consider anything from a three-song acoustic in-store set to an all-day mini-festival to be one "show". Breaking that down a little more (because, um, I like keeping lists and counting things), I reckon I saw 404 sets over the year, by 309 unique artists.¹ And I figure I saw shows at sixty-two different venues, though again, there's room for argument over how you count some of those. But starting there, here's a visual breakdown of where I went to see shows — click to see it full sized:

And while I have the spreadsheet open, let's check on who I saw the most — in this case, bands that I saw three or more times last year:

Artist	Times Seen
$100	6
Gentleman Reg	6
Kids on TV	6
Hooded Fang	5
The Hoa Hoa's	5
Snowblink	4
Still Life Still	4
The Disraelis	4
Alex Lukashevsky	3
catl	3
Diamond Rings	3
Dinosaur Bones	3
Great Bloomers	3
Jon-Rae Fletcher	3
Laura Barrett	3
Lullabye Arkestra	3
Ohbijou	3
Spiral Beach	3
The Phonemes	3

This actually gave me some mild surprises. The $100 shows were more clustered earlier in the year, so it had escaped me that I'd seen them that many times. And though that mostly includes bands that I liked seeing again and again, Still Life Still, for example, were a group that I went to see again just to see if I was missing something and maybe their appeal would all of a sudden "click in" with me. (It didn't, more or less.)

The Reverse Heisenberg Effect

One thing that definitely changed how I went to shows — and was an impetus for going to more — came at the end of April when I got my rig together and started recording shows. In that light, Chain and The Gang at the Whippersnapper Gallery was a memorable night, as that was my first field test. I felt a vague twinge of nervousness and I set myself up for the first time, as if stern authority figures were going to suddenly loom over me and toss me from the joint. As it turned out, by and large people don't particularly take notice of what I'm up to, which is fine by me. But having a document of the show is strangely exciting, obviously gratifying not just on a musical level, but also appealing to, y'know, a certain love I have for accumulating stuff, sorting it, organizing it and so on. And the very idea that I was building up this archive of stuff certainly helped spur me on to head out when I might have otherwise stayed home, a mild kind of noblesse oblige to preserve all this good stuff somehow.

It probably also accented my completest sort of sensibility at shows, where I tend to want to get there at the start, pay attention to the whole thing, and stick to the end. Which certainly has its downside. There were certainly moments where I was less than fully engaged with whatever was going on on stage, and could just as well have wandered off, or gone for a drink, or whatever that I instead stuck through. But maybe it's not bad to have some enforced focus, causing me to think a bit more on why something doesn't work for me and so on. And showing up for the start also pays off some times, say when you discover an opening act that puts on a much better show than the headliner they're supporting.

Doin' it All Day Long

Slightly stoic stick-to-it-iveness was also an asset on heading out to a few marathon, all-day shows, which turned out to be some of the coolest shows that I went to all year.

The Friends in Bellwoods 2 release, taking up a full Saturday at the Tranzac not only had some unique and nearly one-off sets, but had a pleasant sense of the community-minded ethos that led to that project's existence. Owen Pallett's birthday was a sweet gift from the celebrant, putting up an almost non-stop succession of acts across two stages, and giving us a sense of the co-operative spirit that had inspired our local-lad-made-good. The ALL CAPS Island show had the benefit of being nestled away in one of the city's most beautiful spots, and had the adventurous feeling of a grand day out.

Although such quantity can lead to a bit of shellshock, a showcase of short sets is also a great way to be exposed to new bands. Although I can appreciate a hour-and-a-half long, deep-catalogue-trolling marathon from time to time, twenty or thirty minutes for a band to put their best foot forward can do wonders in getting artist and audience to sharpen their focus. Massive praise is due to the folks who undertake what must be a logistical tightrope walk to throw together these kinds of affairs.

Things Fall Apart

Being there and paying attention sometimes also pays off when you get to see well-laid plans go awry. Sometimes you can even catch a genuine WTF moment — perhaps the most memorably vaguely awkward thing of the sort I had this year was seeing The Homosexuals play a NXNE set at Sneaky Dee's, where it wasn't entirely clear how much of singer Bruno Wizard's eccentric stage presence was a grand punk gesture of challenging the audience, and how much he was just out of his tree. Sometimes, the artists can be firing on all cylinders, but the elements refuse to co-operate, such as during the Wavelength showcase during P.S. Kensington, when an intense cloudburst wouldn't keep Mindbender from his appointed rhymes, and nearly led to the untimely demise of Lullabye Arkestra's Justin Small, as a sagging tent roof looked like an electrocution waiting to happen. Even indoors, concerts are complicated things with unique set-ups, making it inevitable that every once in a while, something is going to fizzle out, as happened to Faust, playing at the Polish Combatants Hall. Just as the group was starting to really hit a groove, something tripped, and most of the stage was suddenly without power. The band rallied, playing an impromptu unplugged segment, but once things were back up, they couldn't quite recover. When things conked out for the second or third time, the band basically gave up, cutting their set short. Would I have remembered these shows so well if everything had gone smoothly?

Justified nostalgia

Like those oft-trotted-out-for-metaphors sharks, music-nerds tend to be moving ever forward, keeping an eye out for that next new thing that might somehow rekindle the magic that makes everything feel new. Some folks like to go to a show to hear a band play the songs they love, more or less the same way that they're used to hearing it on record. In fact, it turns out there's a big market for this kind of thing, though those are the kind of show that I usually try to avoid. Nevertheless, there were a few bands that I went to see out of loyalty to my younger self — someone has to look out for that misguided doofus, I guess — and some managed to even please the older, more discerning me. Nomeansno were a band that were hugely important as I was widening my horizons to a whole rock'n'roll universe that didn't have anything to do with the the music industry canon. But they weren't exactly the sort of thing that I'd spent much time listening to in the past decade, and had even fallen off a fair bit in the standard of the stuff they've been releasing. But finally seeing them — now in their guise of enraged old farts — was a validating experience. Equally so were The Vaselines, who delighted with their presence and cheerful banter even more than their music. Nostalgia shows usually have a couple strikes against them, being not just re-hashes, but re-hashes with a premium ticket price, so I was glad that these ones managed to get it right.

Soylent green

Bands form and break up, venues open and close, and there's always many little dramas rippling below the surface of the music. But the one constant is that there's always the crowd that you're a part of — for better or worse, show-going is an inextricably social activity. And ultimately, no matter how much one tries to write things up as a story about what happened on stage, it's also a story about a shared experience. And when you go to enough shows, you start to realize that there's a pool of people, semi-familiar faces who are also there at gig after gig. As a recovering don't-talk-to-strangers type, I think I was rather lucky this year that some pretty cool people took it upon themselves to introduce themselves to me, and some more that I managed to start up a conversation with on my own initiative. There's even been a few of the people that I've recorded and written about who have stopped for a kind word and pleasant chat. There is, as yet, some of those familiar faces who seem too-cool-for-school to chat with the likes of me, but who knows, maybe I'm just arbitrarily imposing a patina of unapproachability on them.

In the end, I think, as cornball as it is to say — and I don't mean to get all Ich und Du or anything on y'all — I'm sure the best part of it all isn't seeing more bands than the next person (or having a "I saw them back before they were big" story to impress people with) so much as it is seeing the undifferentiated darkened crowd become familiar faces, and familiar faces become nodding acquaintances — and maybe even some nodding acquaintances become friends.

Predictions?

At some base level of excitability, it's pretty easy to comb through the listings and see something going on near every night that would be pretty compelling. But there are diminishing returns, especially when you have to get up the next morning and deal with that Everything Else going on in your life. I certainly didn't set out at the start of last year to see anywhere near the number of shows I saw — y'know, it just sort of turned out like one thing after another. And I couldn't even guess how many I'd go to this year. If it's less, is it that big a deal? I'm not setting any targets, or even raising/lowering my expectations. On the other hand, I've had far worse years than the last one, so something's going right. And anyways, what else are you gonna do, sit around and watch TV? Nah, going to gigs at least beats pickin' cotton and waiting to be forgotten. So: this.

My apologies for getting ponderous. Notes from 2010 will start tomorrow or so.

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¹ Although that last number is subject to some interpretation when you think of almost-not-quite-the-same realignments of artists. For example, I saw Gentleman Reg a lot, but I counted the set I saw him do with Dan Werb as a separate entity. Similarly, I counted Feuermusik, Canaille and the Canaille Electric Trio as separate entities, but I could have just subsumed them all into a category called "Jeremy Strachan".