I am never going to see a live show in a venue that holds more than 200 people ever again. It has nothing to do with the bands or the locations; it is the crowds the come to these shows that make me wish to become a musical hermit. Saturday night I experienced the worst audience in the history of live musical performances.
The Shins played Chicago’s Congress Theater on the edge of the gentrified Wicker Park/Bucktown area. The Congress is an antique venue with a vast, open foyer and grand domed ballroom. It has fallen into massive disrepair, apparently the Luchador wrestling competitions and roller-derby shows are not bringing in the revenue to warrant a restoration. It is hard not to get carried away when you enter the theater. One feels the decaying silhouettes of the people that walked these halls in the twenties still linger about. Which makes the rest of my experience all the more painful to document.
Thanks to their contemporary cultural success every rude, mouth breathing, unisex eye-linered, spoiled, chic Jezebel and Solomon showed up, like a roving gang of Ipod commercial dancers. The Shins came on stage and one would have thought Lindsay Lohan had arrived at a nightclub. Countless cell phones and cameras shot into the air and snapped distant, nebulous photos. It didn’t stop for the entire show. People desperate for photographic evidence that they were, in fact, at this concert blocked views and pushed their way to get a clearer 1 pixel shot on their Razor. Apparently, their friends and MySpace buddies don’t accept a single word from these people’s mouths unless backed by a still photo of James Mercer from two hundred yards away.
When “New Slang†was let out of the bag the cameras went batty, as though everyone had waited all week to take a picture of that song. The goober next to me was recording fifteen-second video clips into his phone during every song. Have you ever heard a song recorded on the microphone of a cell phone played back through the speaker of a cell phone? It’s complete digital static, like an Internet predator sending you filthy vlogs. Cell phones and cameras should be banned from concerts; perhaps under a counterfeit law of copyright, but in actuality to stop the annoying beeps and flashes from distracting the fans that are actually there to experience the music. And now those digital cameras have three flashes leading up to the final culminating flash. The morons pressed a button and the room was washed in red-eye removal flashes, the filler lights, and then the face-finder beams. I was desperate to find flannel in the crowd, that soothing cloth wrapped around a person who understands and practices the principles of the courteous concertgoer. Sure, most of those people stand, arms wrapped coldly around their bodies, eyebrows furrowed deep into the crest of their nose, perhaps nodding their heads, slightly acting as though they weren’t enjoying themselves—but at least they were not the twits next to me who wouldn’t shut up about how they snuck a beer into the show.
When my peripherals weren’t lured from the stage at the notice of a beaming blue cell phone screen, my ears were being eaten away by the tiny mice of conversation in every direction. Not between songs, or a quick salutation when friends arrived, full conversations and detailed diaries regarding the lives of the people around me. Who pays that much money to catch up with friends? People got mad when songs they didn’t know were played and the girl in front of me was writhing in the air to a song that you just can’t dance to, as though the lyrics to “Phantom Lib” pulled a deep sexual repression from the recesses of her adolescent existence. Only a small percentage of the crowd was watching the stage and perhaps that is why I felt The Shins phoned it in.
Sure, they played their songs, they sounded just like the album, and they said the word “Chicago” enough assure us they knew where they were, but there was just no energy. It is the symbiotic relationship the band has with an audience that makes a live show so great. You get what you put in and this crowd wasn’t giving them anything. People were yelling “Freebird†after the first song… apparently not quite grasping the theory of when exactly to yell the request for “Freebird”. My eyes were rolling hard to the top of my skull and my lip was snarling at those around me. I looked like a possessed Mennonite towards the end of a powerful exorcism.
They opened slowly with “Sleeping Lessons”, the first track off the new album, and suddenly a giant curtain drops behind them to reveal, in one of the most anti-climatic moments of my life… their album cover. It just seemed to plateau from there. The simple, platonic pop-rock was not meant to fill a theater the size and power of The Congress. Their song choices were of the dreamy side of their catalogue and they slowly let the audience slip from their fingers. Not that anyone really would notice what with all the text messaging they had to catch up on.
We need to once again be reminiscent that the encore is a privilege, not a right. Every band expects to play an encore, and that shouldn’t be so. The Shins did not, in fact, rock my socks enough to warrant hearing them play again but the house lights didn’t even pretend to come up. The audience has to want it, not the band. Good thing they did play again because they turned it to 11, playing “So Says I”, and finally filling the quasi-arena with it first gasp of energy it had felt all night.
I left that night with bad vibrations all around me; I wish hideous things upon my fellow man. Had art been raped in front of me that night, and was my piss-poor attitude only egging the aggressor on? Halfway through “Australia” I was inspired by my boredom; the decaying edifice around me, and the pensiveness of the song to drift into a beautifully apocalyptic revelation of concert after an EMP destroys all of the electronics in America. The concertgoers would sit humbly on pine chairs listening to the Shins play on carved instruments they made with their own slivered, bleeding hands. Bands would trek between the small tribal villages looking to inspire the besieged, pragmatic townsfolk in song. Each melody would be a hard-pressed, philosophical proclamation as leaked from the bleeding soul of the artist. When the recital was completed, the town would be so moved by the experience that they would hoist the balladeers aloft and the night would be spent diving deep into inebriated revelry and uninhibited celebration. In the cold morning light, when the natives awake to find there was still land to farm and bellies to fill, they will stop for one moment, shift their weight hard on their rake and stare with glazed eyes to the distant, unfocused hills—replenishing their calloused souls with the artist rejuvenation of the previous night.
