We’ve heard way, way more recorded music than we have live music. This isn’t a weird flex. Just a fact. You’re maybe in a similar situation. Recorded music is all over the place and has been for a while now. It comes out of small plastic toys, haunts grocery stores, accompanies ads for mops, and so on. If someone says they are or were “listening to music,” we take them to mean they are or were listening to recorded music. We don’t imagine them cosied up to a living sousaphone player playing jazz standards in real time. We presume by default that music is a mediated experience rather than an immediate one. This is - if you think about it for too long (which, you’re welcome, we have) - weird.
It’s kind of banal or unremarkable to acknowledge that we’ve heard more recorded music than live music - but it’s very bizarre to consider that we’ve also likely seen more videotaped or photographed people on screens than we have seen living, breathing people directly in front of us. It’s strange also to think we’ve probably experienced more bedrooms and various other mundane places by reading books than we have experienced directly with our actual fleshy body and all its senses IRL. The prevalence of mediated experiences over immediate ones seems wrong when pointed out like that. Not dystopian exactly, but not not dystopian - y’know?
This, though, isn’t exactly true for music.
It feels entirely natural that recorded music wins out over live music. Recorded music has a lot of selling points. It’s convenient, quick. The songs sound the same every time you listen. No one drifts off-key or flubs a solo. You can also multitask while listening to recorded music, have Madonna accompany you on your commute, etc. Recorded music is also, in our current world, treated as a commodity without cost. The ability to listen to music whenever and wherever one wants for close to zero dollars without the encumbrance of musicians seems like an intuitive, obvious dream. What, after all, does live music have going for it? It’s hard to describe without falling into a tautology. Live music is good because… it’s live? What difference could that possibly make?
In the 19th century, a few people figured out how to make the desire for un-live sound a reality. In 1857, Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville invented the phonautograph which could record sound by visually transcribing wave vibrations which - as you can imagine - was cool and all but of limited utility.
In 1877, a couple decades after the phonautograph, Thomas Edison invented the phonograph which had the (dubious) benefit of being able to record the vibration of sound waves and play them back as, y’know, sound. Recorded music was now a real, actionable possibility! But music wasn’t at all what Edison had in mind when tinkering with all those cogs and funnels. Music was, strangely, pretty far down his list of uses for recorded sound.
Edison wrote an advertorial for his own invention in 1878 called “The Phonograph and its Future” where he toots his own horn, explains how his contraption works, and lays out all the incredible uses for his sound recording device. And what did he envision as the prime purpose of a machine designed for “the gathering up and retaining of sounds hitherto fugitive, and their reproduction at will”?
Voicemail for businesses.
That’s right. With a machine that could record and playback the beauty of naturally and artificially created sounds, Edison figures that its primary use will be for “letter-writing and other forms of dictation.” The idea being that people who do business are constantly having to talk to clerks or deal with stenographers who take down what they’re saying in the form of writing. What a drag! How awful! Thankfully, with the phonograph one can “dispense with the clerk” (Edison’s italics) and just talk into the machine. You don’t even need to go into the office. Just bring the machine home or use your friend’s because “the presence of the stenographer not being required” for this new, sonic form of transcription. The phonograph, in short, was seen as a business innovation that would do away with the “slow, tedious, and costly methods” of dealing with people!
It was not, though, just a tool for businesses. Edison also suggests that it could be used to document testimony in court, to record people reading books aloud for those who can no longer read (due to blindness or other circumstances), or to teach elocution to children. There are all sorts of uses described long before music. And when music does come up, it comes up real strange.
Edison’s chief example of music? “[A] friend may in a morning-call sing us a song which shall delight evening company, etc.” What kind of cursed life must you live if your first thought of music is of a friend showing up at your door and singing at you?
Edison doesn’t mention anything about professional musicians. He doesn’t suggest that an orchestra or folk trio or blues singer could make use of the device, share their songs with a larger public, render their music accessible in unprecedented ways. Instead, recorded music on the phonograph is cast as a casual, amateur affair. It is - as far as he’s concerned - just one of the uses that the phonograph can be put to alongside preserving “the last words of the dying member of the family” (!!) or maybe as part of a talking clock that can “call you to lunch; [or] send your lover home at ten, etc.” Music, then, was a lesser priority than preserving the voices of the soon-to-be-dead and getting lovers the fuck out of your space.
But there might be good reason why music of a professional sort didn’t come to Edison’s mind. Do people really want the sound of piano without the pianist? Who would want a disembodied clarinet jettisoned out of a funnel or little tubes rather than the experience of sitting in a room with others, sharing in the immediacy of a clarinetist (clarinetor?) creating music in real time? Wouldn’t music sans musicians be strange, uncanny, and disquieting?
Of course, as you know, people did want all and just that strangeness and - after not much time at all - recorded music of various kinds became common, popular, and gradually got taken as a given. Now we live in the topsy-turvy, post-Edisonian world where live music supplements recorded music rather than the other way around. We listen to albums and singles and playlists, then - if we’re lucky - the musicians responsible for the songs we like or love roll into town to play a show.
When they do, we buy tickets (if we can) and let the anticipation build. We maybe listen more fervently to an album in the week leading up to the show. We arrive eager, excited. We hope they play this or that song, maybe try to sneak a peak at the setlist taped to the floor if we’re close enough to the stage. Then, we listen and quietly notice how the live version of a song adheres to or deviates from the recorded version we know so well. We mark when the tempo is a little slower or some part slightly altered. We are pleased and maybe disappointed and rarely surprised by whatever occurs, then we go back to listening to the recorded songs and let the transitory, lived experience of all those live sounds get written over in time. In the best circumstances, we remember the show fondly - but only ever vaguely. They played this. It was great. They played that. Also really good. But the particularities of the performance as it happened slip inevitably away. Our brains are imperfect recorders and never play things back faithfully (if at all).
As rare, then, as it is to get to see a band or artist perform live - it is even rarer (for us) to happen upon a band or artist performing live that we did not know in advance. We don’t tend to buy tickets to see musicians with whom we’re unfamiliar. We don’t promise TicketMaster our firstborn son for just anyone let alone a full stranger because, first of all, we don’t have enough firstborn sons to go see all the concerts we want and, second of all, we don’t trust that all concerts will be good enough to merit even our lowly secondborn son. (We’re very judicious about how we spend our nonexistent sons.) Even when shows charge less than blood offspring for admission, we choose them carefully. Money may be more plentiful than progeny, but it’s still limited around these parts.
So, anyways, we bought tickets (Affordably priced! Purchased via not-Ticketmaster!) to go see a show at Sala Rossa last night. We arrived a little after doors and got a spot near the stage. We ran into some friends, talked for a spell, they went off to talk to other friends, we settled into the crowd, and eventually heard music we had never heard before that moment. A backing track of minimal synth pads, slowly swelling and fading, started to play and we saw a lone cowboy take the stage. We didn’t know what to expect from the opening act, but we were not expecting this at all even a little.
We weren’t, dear reader, at a country western show. But nor was this cowboy singing country western music. His posture and outfit may have said honky tonk, but the music did not. We didn’t have any context to understand what was happening, so we tried to think through comparisons. His vocals were deep and clear - talk-sung like a post-punk front-man. He sounded like Antony-and-the-Johnsons-era Anohni - but without operatic grandeur or major theatrics of any kind. His lyrics were wry, deliberate, and evocative like something you’d hear on a TV Priest track - but without the bravado or rage. His movements were loosely choreographed - maybe reminiscent of Karen O? And the backing track? It was sort of dream pop? We - like the rest of the people around us - quieted down and just looked and listened.
After the opening track, he stationed himself behind a pedal steel - but this pedal steel did not make pedal steel noises. Routed through a couple guitar pedals, run through and looped on a old (?) rack echo chamber or tape delay - this cowboy created ragged, distorted pseudo-synth loops like something adjacent to Fuck Buttons? These loops then melodically droned in the background as he sang of love and disillusionment and self-doubt.
None of this seemed experimental or pretentious or even ironic. This is an especially crazy thing to say because, no word of a lie, he covered Chris Isaak’s “Wicked Love” and turned what (to us) is the musical equivalent of a canker sore into a remarkably, melancholy, and affecting three or so minutes of music.
There was a candor, an unveiled quality to the whole performance that - looking at the pictures now - seems impossible. In one song, the lyrics seemed to address the performitivity of the performance directly, but there was nothing sly about it. “Look at me in my cowboy hat / Don’t I look funny? / Do you take me seriously?” There were - obviously - a few titters, but they were sparse. It’s unclear what it might mean to take a lone cowboy singing sardonically and knowingly about the trappings of the American dream and toxic masculinity and assorted other things over top of a glitched out pedal steel seriously, but we have to admit we did. This didn’t feel like a ruse or a posture or a trick. It all sounded just like it was the only way it could have sounded. We stood there undistracted. We stopped trying to understand what was happening and just enjoyed its happening.
At a couple junctures, the cowboy put away the microphone and turned off the looping background melodies. In a time when everything is always miced, to hear a song sung direct is jarring. It was as if the room shrunk or god turned down the world’s background volume. We felt called to attention. There was even, without microphone still, a call and response between the cowboy and us. He would say “Ok” and we would say “Ok.” If it sounds dumb, it was dumb! But also incredible? Fun? Joyful? Touching? Nice? Different intonations of the two letter word seemed to carry different meanings - but lord knows what those meanings may have been. He seemed, during that call and response, almost to be judging our ability to mimic. It was as if he was listening to us as intently as we were listening to him. None of us amplified or carried by anything other than the capacity of our lungs, vocal cords, and whatever other physiological stuff is required to say “ooookkkkaaayyy.”
We didn’t know the lyrics or names of the songs. We didn’t even know how to describe what we were witnessing exactly. We didn’t seek this experience out. We didn’t ask for it. We also, later, recognized that we had no idea how one would seek out or ask for this experience. If someone described it to us second-hand (like we are in the midst of doing for you now), we may even have avoided it entirely. We wouldn’t blame you if - reading the above - you squinted skeptically or rolled your weary eyes. And yet we are so, so grateful we were entirely ignorant and unprepared and open to the strange, strange, and moving forty (?) minutes of whatever exactly it was we witnessed and heard.
Leaving the stage after his set, Nicholas Merz introduced himself.
We searched him out on the internet late last night and spent the morning listening to everything he’s released. It wasn’t the same. That’s not a complaint. The albums and songs are all great. They’re just different. And what of that difference? We were now in the rare spot of hearing live music prior to recorded versions of same, so what’s the big deal? What is it, then, about live music that differs valuably from its recorded counterpart? What’s a non-tautological argument for going out to see Nicholas Merz live (in addition to buying and listening to his stuff on Bandcamp) if you can?
No idea. You just had to be there, we guess. But then again someone may have recorded the whole thing on their phone, so maybe it’ll show up on YouTube sooner or later.
Until then, we’ll hold onto an experience we can’t hold onto and sounds we can’t adequately describe and will never accurately recall. We will also, in the future, maybe try to put ourselves in places more frequently without expectation or preparation or deliberation just to see what kind of fleeting, unexpected, uncapturable, and beautiful weirdness transpires.
Oh, we almost forgot: Sunset Rubdown were headlining. It was their first show after thirteen or so years. It was really great, too, in its own indescribable way.
Low or zero expectations often leads to astonishment, appreciation and higher enjoyment. Sounds like that is what you experienced. Nice blog!
Without exception, I have always found live performances to be disappointing when compared with studio recordings - whether it be Joni Mitchell, CCR, Moody Blues, or even Charles Aznavour. At some point, I even decided to stay away from live shows with my favourite artists. And because of that decision, I have never experienced what you've described in this post. My loss, I suppose... Can't have it both ways.