Who Am I Without Live Music?
Posted in Features on September 17th, 2021 by JJ Koczan
Like a lot of people, I’ve spent the better part of the last year and a half separate from what I’d previously known as reality. A divergent timeline, splintered off from where it should be. It’s been a long Covid-19 pandemic, and I don’t think it’s going away anytime soon.
Really, I don’t. I see people announcing shows, playing shows, announcing tours, going on tours, and all I can think to myself is, “yeah, stay safe out there.” I’m vaccinated. If and when a booster is offered, I’ll be all over it. But I never stopped wearing a mask and certainly have continued to do so amid the rise of Delta variant numbers and deaths over the last several months. And I haven’t been to a proper, indoor club show since January 2020. Almost 19 months to the day.
I’ve attended outdoor gigs a few times — including just a couple weeks ago — but even for those I’ve largely stayed masked and despite knowing that open-air transmission of the virus is unlikely, I’m still scared. I can admit that, right? I’m scared. Isn’t that what it comes down to?
I’m scared for myself. I’m scared for my mother. For the rest of my family. For my son who’s too young to be vaccine-eligible. I’m scared for my wife, so exceptional in so many ways, getting a breakthrough infection being back at work on her college campus this semester. After all this time of living in this horrible new ‘normal,’ I’m still actively terrorized by the idea that not only could I get sick but I could be responsible for someone else getting sick. I could kill somebody I love by breathing the same air.
Checking case numbers has become a ritual. I look every day. It’s like checking the weather. 72 and sunny; 154,000 cases and 3,415 deaths yesterday. That death toll has been ticking up; case numbers evening out. But as school has started again and winter looms, I have a hard time imagining going out is about to get any easier.
This is true for me, understand. It doesn’t have to be you. You don’t have to agree. You don’t have to feel the same. I live in the American Northeast, in New Jersey. I’ve been attending concerts since before I could go without parental accompaniment, and as an adult, concerts and festivals have become a major part of my every single year. Who am I without that? I asked the question off the cuff earlier this week and I’ve been asking it in my head ever since. This is a piece of my identity, gone.
So many of my best memories are of shows. Alice in Chains at Lollapalooza 1993. Type O Negative at the Birch Hill however many times. Scissorfight and Pelican at the Knitting Factory in Manhattan. More shows at SXSW from 2003-2007 than I could ever hope to remember. The Book of Knots at Gramercy. Neurosis at Roadburn in the Netherlands. Høstsabbat in Norway. Psycho Las Vegas. Maryland Doom Fest. Om, Colour Haze, Sungrazer, Solace, Acid King. Touring with good friends in Kings Destroy. Hell, making those friends in the first place.
It’s a long, long list, and I don’t say that in an attempt to establish imaginary bona fides. I’ve never been cool, will never be cool. I’m trying to tell you it’s a part of who I am. Being in these places at these times has helped shape me. For better or worse, it has made me me. And I don’t know if I’ll ever get that back.
Melodrama is not my interest here. I don’t think I’ve seen my last club show or my last festival. As with many others, I’m making travel plans for 2022 — and missing travel is a big part of this, make no mistake — but even if those come to fruition, how can it be what it was? How can I not be fooling myself into ignoring that underlying fear of disease, even with all reasonable precautions taken?
I have so much in my life that I should be and am grateful for. My wife, my son, our families. My few but treasured friends. The house I live in. The records people send me to write about, and the fact that anybody might see these words at all; the support this site gets and has gotten over the last 12-plus years. So many of the good memories, music-related and otherwise, on which I can reflect. And when I check my privilege, I find it abundant. I have not worked one day at a job during this entire time.
But even amid this, and with hopeful announcements of shows and tours and fests filling my inbox and social media feeds, I feel as if a piece of me has caught this virus and died of it.
Who am I without live music? I am mourning. I have grown older, fatter, greyer, more frustrated and sadder for it. And this is the part of the internet-thinkpiece where usually there’s offered a sliver of hope, but I have none. In my heart of hearts, I believe that even if this virus and all its creepy-fingered variants magically disappeared tomorrow, I’d never be able to enjoy the experience of a live show in the same way again.
I will miss it for as long as I live.
Thanks for reading.
tone on that topical, hooky album highlight extends to brash, punkish cuts like “Ever the Optimist” and “Mutual” — more Mondo Generator than Queens of the Stone Age, though not as willfully mean — as well as the grungy “So Sick.” “Consolation” arrives as the third piece of an opening salvo before “Ever the Optimist” goes deeper into aggression, with the opening title-track setting a careening, urgent tone (Snyman guesting on piano helps that) that the Melvinsian starts and stops of “Silence the Screams” gleefully bashes to bits like Rob Crow got mad at a thing. Speed wins the day, but “Swallow Me Whole,” like “Consolation” and really the rest of what surrounds ahead of the comedown-until-it-isn’t closer “Hue,” it’s clear that songwriting is the underlying focus. Seems highly unlikely a band gets to its 10th album otherwise. If you want to write songs, you need to write songs. There’s your deep-rooted insight for the day.
