Hi! I'm Michael Donaldson, and I write about music on 8sided.blog, license and publish music through 8DSync, and make music as Q-Burns Abstract Message. I think about music all of the time. My guess is you do, too.
This is the fifteenth episode of Ringo Dreams of Lawn Care, a newsletter loosely about music-making and music-listening and how technology changes the culture around those things.
I considered not running a newsletter this week. The events and injustices in this country are weighing heavy, and my little newsletter doesn’t seem to have a place right now. But, I’ve heard from some of you that Ringo is a welcome weekend distraction from The Strange Times. That might also apply to today. I’m happy to oblige if I can offer even an all-too-brief moment of respite. So, please enjoy this week’s ramble and its optimistic theme song, “Gaudakot.”
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I expect a lot of honking. Ray, a longtime friend and member of the Ringo crew, alerted me to The Road Rave, an event billed as "North America's first-ever drive-in festival of the COVID era." The festival is led by EDM sensation and Ultra Music Festival veteran Carnage, performing alongside at least four other acts. A maximum of 500 cars will line up in formation, facing the stage, each with two to six inhabitants encouraged to stay seated during the event. "Roaming golf carts" will take concession orders.
The Road Rave takes place this Saturday, about six miles from my house. No, I'm not going, but thanks for the invite. That said, I'm close enough that I'm sure the not-too-distant sound of 500 cars honking will echo over Lake Holden and into my eardrums throughout the evening. Every bass drop — honk honk honk. Every on-stage glitter explosion —- honk honk honk. Every DJ raising his hands in the air — honk honk honk. There will be a lot of honking.
We're now in the phase of The Strange Times where watching a concert from the seat of a car seems attractive. I get it — we're making our way through this any way we can. And even a glimmer of normality that's not normal at all can provide reassurance. But, man — all those cars.
In the last several months, there was a push to explore the idea of environmentally-conscious, carbon-neutral touring. Massive Attack and Coldplay were high-profile advocates of the concept. So it's ironic concert-goers are now encouraged to lean into the fossil-fuels, idling their automobiles as a festival broadcasts over an FM signal, and a guy in a golf cart takes another nacho order.
It's not only The Road Rave. The concert promoting Borg, known as Live Nation, is planning nationwide 'drive-in concert' tours this summer, taking place in the various parking lots of its 40 amphitheaters. And for promoters who don't own stadiums, drive-in theaters are a no-brainer for events. However, most existing drive-ins are far outside of bigger cities, and the owners would rather show movies. Says one proprietor, "We don't mind doing one-off special events, but most of us feel we're here to show movies." Less hassle, less honking.
In an article about the absence of live music, the drive-in theater aspect inspired Rolling Stone contributing editor Rob Sheffield to remember a scene from '70s movie dystopia:
There's a scene I keep re-watching from the Seventies sci-fi zombie trash classic, The Omega Man. Charlton Heston is the last human left alive in LA after the plague. He drives out to the empty theater that's still showing the "Woodstock" documentary. He sits alone in the dark, a ritual he's done many times before, watching the hippie tribes onscreen boogie to Country Joe and the Fish. "This is really beautiful, man," a dazed flower child tells the camera. Heston recites every word along with him. "The fact is if we can't all live together and be happy, if you have to be afraid to walk out in the street, if you have to be afraid to smile at somebody, right—what kind of a way is that to go through this life?"
Charlton Heston gives a sardonic smirk. "Yup—they sure don't make pictures like that anymore."
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On the other hand, there are approaches to social distanced gatherings that border on performance art. For example, the restaurant outfitted with mannequins and the TV show with an audience of balloon people. A precursor to social distanced performance art might be 2018's Mile-Long Opera, where listeners walked along NYC's High Line. Singers were encountered along the path, each singing in tandem, and, as an 'audience member,' you are encouraged to keep moving. It's a compelling idea, but nowadays, even a performance in motion has its COVID-19 dangers. Jane Moss of The Lincoln Center, considering the option, worries about transfixed groups stopping to watch in a virus-spreading bottleneck: "The more ingenious and intriguing you get, the more people want to come together to see what you've done."
Performance art directly inspired one daring concert experience. Marina Abramovic's exhibition (and terrific documentary film) The Artist Is Present featured the artist sitting across from a stranger in silence. The simple act of this face-to-face meeting — at about a socially distanced six feet — caused intense feelings of intimacy in many participants. Some of the seated museum-goers broke into tears during their sittings. From this idea came performances at the dormant airport in Stuttgart, Germany. A musician from the local orchestra gave a ten-minute 'concert' to one lucky audience member. They faced each other at a short length, with no conversation and no applause. In a NY Times piece covering the event, listeners spoke about the same sort of intimacy that Abramovic's temporary partners felt.
This intimacy is unexpected, but innovative answers to the live-music-under-COVID problem will produce unexpected results. That's the subtext of all performance art — experiment with people's expectations and things will happen. And the further away we get from a traditional live performance, the less it looks and feels like a concert. Understandably, that worries a lot of people.
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Others have attempted to zero-in on the center of the Venn diagram linking live music and COVID-19 safety. There was this small event in Münster that featured famed DJ Gerd Jansen, social distanced dancing (in theory), a 100-person limit, and €70 tickets to break even. And in Arkansas, blues-rock singer Travis McCready played to a sold-out — but still smattering — crowd who were temperature-checked before entering:
On the surface, the concert had all the makings of a typical rock & roll show. Stage lights set the mood. The audience clapped along, with some even dancing in their "fan pod" seats (tickets were sold in blocks to keep groups six feet apart). But when the bank of floodlights at the front of the stage illuminated a nearly empty 1,100-seat theater during Travis McCready's set, the reality of the situation was clear. The first socially distanced concert in the US felt more like a dress rehearsal than a typical concert experience.
It's something, but is it helping? And by that, I mean, helping us cope or return to something like our ordinary lives? Since reading the Vulture piece I linked to above I think a lot about this paragraph:
The first fallback options—play to an empty house (as a small sub-ensemble of the Berlin Philharmonic has done) or distribute a few hundred listeners around a hall that could seat 2,000—would only emphasize the melancholy weirdness. That kind of event can have an impact as a ritual of mourning, a dramatization of all we've lost. But it's no way to lose ourselves in some alternate, virus-free world of the imagination.
The music is only one reason we go to concerts, festivals, nightclubs, or raves. We also go for the community, to connect with (as Seth Godin says), "People like us who do things like this." We've all forged at least one friendship with someone we saw at 'all the same shows.' Many of us even met our future life partners at a club or concert. These solutions I pointed out — attending in cars, listening alone to a flute player, or boogying at a distance in a near-empty club — only solve the 'music' part of the equation. It's true that we miss and crave the rush of volume, performance, and the live music experience. But until we regain the electricity of community that accompanies it, we've, so far, only captured the facsimile.
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EDGING →
Let's play around with the format of this newsletter and welcome a section called 'EDGING,' featuring quick bites of things that are noteworthy-to-me:
• The Quietus's David Bennun wrote about Chris Blackwell's Bahamas-based Compass Point Studios and how Grace Jones was its defining artist. The article contains this revelatory line: "What Prince was achieving with funk and R&B on [his first few albums] – new-waving them, fundamentally altering their DNA until they became something else altogether – Grace Jones and the Compass Point All Stars did with reggae." [LINK]
• You could take hours and hours of classes on music licensing, publishing, and rights-management to understand how the business of music streaming works. You could also listen to these two episodes of the always informative, entertaining, and frequently funny Setlist podcast and probably learn just as much. [LINK] + [LINK]
• Bruce Sterling shut down his 17-year run of the Beyond the Beyond blog. His thoughts on its history, why he kept it going, and why he's stopping make me even more devoted to the autonomy of blogging and newsletter-ing. [LINK]
• At one point, you may have dreamed of assembling a mock nuclear reactor control center in your rec room. If so, you're one high bid away from making your dreams a reality. Hurry — it ends on Tuesday! [LINK]
• No doubt this pull-quote will compel you to click the link: "The only things the truck dispenses are metal music and disappointment." [LINK]
• Mike Watt reveals how the cover of one of my favorite albums was an homage to Kraftwerk:
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It might add comfort in our continuing isolation to watch the stories of people who are isolated by where they choose to live. 'Choose' is the key word here — these folks wouldn't want to live anywhere else.
I watched the documentary Children of the Arctic, described as "a portrait of five Native Alaskan teenagers growing up in Barrow - the northernmost community in the United States." The town (since renamed Utqiagvik) has unique challenges, including the all-too-apparent effect of climate change on its way of life, a loosening of revered traditions, the months of total darkness, and the depression that overtakes its residents. A couple of the teenagers do leave for a bigger city — but then they come back. What we see as isolation is their preferred place, a home they won't give up. [LINK]
The next night I watched Darwin, which profiles the 35-strong population of the dying town in Death Valley, California, that gives the film its title. It's a place where people go to hide, though not necessarily from the law. The mines are long-closed, as is the Black Metal Saloon, but the residents love living in Darwin and sing its praises throughout the documentary's run-time. [LINK]
The musical score in Children of the Arctic is remarkable — gorgeous and droning and fitting the views of northern lights and snowy vistas. I noticed, in the credits, that Michael Brook is responsible. Then Darwin's score also grabbed me, with lonely, far-away guitar riffing and desert-toned passages. I watched the credits and — again! — Michael Brook. What a coincidence, right? Not really, as I realized the same director is responsible for both films: Nick Brandestini. This double-feature was not intentional, and I wasn't familiar with Brandestini beforehand. But now I'm looking forward to seeing his latest documentary, Sapelo. From the IMDb description — the film takes place on "a unique American island" — it appears to also involve isolation by choice.
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I hope you enjoyed this episode of Ringo Dreams of Lawn Care. This one might seem more downcast than usual but, I assure you, there’s a lot of optimism in here. I mean, there’s got to be. As always, let me know if you have any comments or questions or need someone to write to in this challenging time. I'd love to hear from you. You can learn more about me, what I do, and contact me with your comments here.
If you can think of some lucky soul who would like this newsletter, then please pass it on. And, yes, sharing Ringo on your favorite social media doohickey is also appreciated. There are some cool moves planned, so I'm into getting the word out. Your help with that means a lot more than you know.
Thank you so much for reading. I know I say ‘hang in there’ and/or ‘stay safe’ each week but this time I especially mean it. Hang in there and stay safe. The good times were here before and they will come again. I’ll see you next week! 🚀