Who Am I Without Live Music?
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.
Tags: Days of Rona, Sad shit
This pretty much sums up my current state of mind as well.
My band took a planned hiatus in late October 2019, had one practice in February 2020, then nothing since.
I’ve been to 1 show since the pandemic started, my wife and I saw Patti Smith at an outdoor show in Minneapolis in early August.
It was a beautiful show and wonderful experience, but the next day I was hit with a profound sense of loss and anger. I knew that I missed that portion of my life, but I had been working hard to tell myself that it wasn’t really that bad, that we are fortunate in so many other ways, that I shouldn’t allow myself to feel bad about missing live music. But that all came crashing down, hard.
I’m profoundly sad and more than a little angry that this was all taken away from us.
Even though I’m vaccinated, I’m avoiding family (elderly parents and a nephew too young to be vaccinated) and I’m still avoiding indoor shows.
I almost went to the Skull / Obsessed show in Milwaukee, but it didn’t feel right so I stayed home. Saw photos on facebook the next day, zero masks, then a couple weeks later Eric Wagner was dead. So I guess I made the right choice?
Anyway yeah, I found this extremely relatable. Shit fucking sucks.
Thank you for sharing where you are at, JJ.
It can be tough to be vulnerable and verbalise how one feels. There are many friends that don’t share my sense of trepidation nor my need to keep myself and others safe.
As I was reading your passage I realised how much I miss the weekly local gigs. The musicians, the acquaintances, the friends, the feeling of connectedness in a room watching and feeling the music unite us all. What a mindfuck….
Tough deal amigo, but don’t worry – we go again. In the UK sadly a similar story – so many gigs cancelled, some of them gutting e.g.: Keep it Low in Munich, All Them Witches and Elephant Tree in London etc. However I’ll offer up this crumb of comfort. My heart is with all things stoner but my other half dragged me off to my first gig for 16 months – The Sisters of Mercy at the Roundhouse last weekend! Always preferred the Nephilim meself, but went along out of curiosity and having been starved of gigs was actually looking forward to it. How wrong I was… I wished I hadn’t, they were, in one word… crap. Not all bands are created equally – cherish those memories and get out there brother! (#129311#)(#128512#)
I had tickets for three shows before the end of the year. One has pushed it back a year, one is British so I think it will go ahead and the other I am actually hoping gets postponed. Not sure I’m totally ready for a show yet, despite being fully vaccinated. We shall see…
I’ve seen three shows since July and have two more upcoming: Cheap Trick next week and The Allman Family Revival in December. I’m vaccinated, I’m over it, and it’s time to get my life back to as close to normal as possible. Avoiding TV news, especially cable, and not having Facebook in my life has made the pandemic much less stressful than it could have been.
Thank you for sharing this JJ.
Thank you for sharing! If no one minds, I will take this as an opportunity to answer this question. It cannot hope to accurately provide a fully-formed picture of a person by its liturgic limitations, yet, it is worth pondering, nonetheless. Who am I without live music?
I’m a first-born son, brother, cousin, nephew, grandparent-less grandson, and uncle to many cousins’ children. I’m a third-generation American citizen whose great-grandparents left Russia, Romania, Hungary and Italy to escape the rank fascist air in Europe 100 years-ish ago. I’m a denizen of earth who tells himself he probably doesn’t do enough, globally or locally, to be a good representative of humanity. I’m a descendant of liberal secular (not full blown Jew, but Jewish) humans with a marked bend toward scientific inquiry and a love of creativity. I’m a religious atheist who is psychologically, logically and ethically militantly agnostic (I don’t know and neither do you!) that worships sounds built by riff lords who contstruct altars of fuzz on ancient tube amplifiers inside churches of tone, when possible. I’m a person who has spent the last 2,255 days listening to stoner rock sober. I’m a human in recovery from many insular wounds, self-inflicted scars unseen but living a life without regret and backward-stances as my past is owned and makes me me, and I’m not me today without old, no longer-really-me having had and instigated and held those traumatic experiences. I’m a two-time suicide survivor whose story isn’t over yet. I’m a dog owner currently. I’m a man who loves and misses his old pets. I’m a tattooed individual who bathes and shaves canis lupis sixty hours a week. I’m a born New Yorker, mostly having lived in Pennsylvania. I’m a writer and reader and two-dimensional artist in any medium, occasionally three-dimensions as well, who doesn’t feel much creativity or the burning desire of past mental illness to drive it, nor nearly enough of the time to enjoy the privilige of doing so. I’m a mental health advocate who fights the stigma of mental illness as being permanent when the and of the suffering I truly incur is solely based my inability to choose to accept that impermanece is the natural order in this chaotic environ I must inhabit (until my watch runs out of minutes). I’m a coffee fiend who hasn’t had a cigarette in almost four years. I’m a cold-turkey advocate barring actually physically medically-problematic withdrawl symptoms for any and all maladaptive coping mechanisms. I’m an ambidextrous tennis player who doesn’t play very often. I’m a person that cares for a partner with physical limitations. I’m a former misanthrope who keeps finding it difficult to hate others while I practice self-love (despite a lot of actions and behaviours that irk the shit out of me). I’m a child that makes an annual pilgrimage to his own personal Mecca (The Princeton Record Exchange) to spend inordinate amounts of funds on more stuff. I’m a tee shirt, record and CD collector. I’m a person that’s running quickly out of vices that harm me, whether that be spiritually, emotionally/psychologically or physically, and may be heading towards a dietary change to address the hypocrisy of healthily loving himself yet consuming dead animal flesh. I’m a secular AA attendant and meeting founder and universal sobriety seeker and advocate. I’m a non-gun owner (shocking, right?!). I’m a former mental illness sufferer years removed from medications and treatment and symptoms due to the privilige of thousands of years past hours spent in group therapy. I’m a shell with mortal limitations that doesn’t want immortality because he believes that the shortness in the truth of life is where the preciousness inherently lies, and the gods of time and death have yet to prove to anyone I’ve seen that they are special. I’m a human who believes he is not special, but trying to simply be me and no one else, as everyone else is take. I’m a driver who wishes sometimes his partner was also a driver. I’m a person who is seeing their first gig since March 7th, 2020 tonight, September 18th, 2021! Woohoo! I’m a fully-vaxxed, not fully-relaxed person who hasn’t stopped masking (due not just to my partners’ physical issues, but certainly mainly) that enjoys the idea of live music being vaccine-carded only. As I don’t drink today, my age is irrelevant, so the idea of being carded for a new card is interesting. I’m a grateful human who should probably go and start his day.
Great comments here and though this is a heavy subject, know that we are all bound to music and live shows are so very important. It may take a while but we will figure out how to beat this – like we beat the 1918 Spanish flu, the Mumps, etc. It is tough to live through, that’s the truth. May all who read this stay healthy!