Mercury Lounge was always my favorite venue ... until, that is, October 7. It was my favorite venue because of the clarity of the sound; I could always decipher the words. While one sometimes might not have understood the imagery in the lyrics, there was never a problem with hearing the words. While some sound men at other respected venues don't give a damn whether you can make out or even hear the words, Mercury Lounge was always one place where I could hear the fullness of the music, both instrumentals and the lyrics.
So I was really looking forward to October 7, because Robbers On High Street, one of my favorite bands, was playing at Mercury Lounge, my favorite venue. I had first heard ROHS back in 2005, when they played at North Star, and then would hear them play at several other times and places over the intervening years.
I would have to say that I was a little put off and annoyed when I examined the Mercury website in more detail, for they had seemed to largely abandon the four-band nights, now dividing up the four bands into two separate shows of two bands each, with separate cover charge admissions. Ewwwww. That started to get me a little peeved. ... But I decided to go anyway.
I had an ulterior motive as well. I've been becoming more and more disenchanted with the music scene in general and was seriously thinking about bringing my music blog to a close. Since Robbers On High Street was one of the first bands whose music I featured on my page, I thought that ending this blog with a sample of their music would be a nice full circle.
My next disappointment was when I got inside. It's been a while since I had been to Mercury Lounge, and their sound quality has descended to that of a lot of other venues. The lyrics were a blur. Couldn't make out too many words beyond what I remembered from listening to their music on line.
One of the things that I like about Robbers On High Street is their writing; they're continuously working and reworking their music. When you go to one of their live shows, you have no idea what to expect in terms of the lineup, what instruments they'll have, which musicians they'll have. In the case of October 7, they had an added and unexpected brass section! Nice!
When I first heard ROHS in 2005, they had recently released their acclaimed album, "Tree City." The music was full. In the couple years after, the music thinned out a little, which was not to my liking, but then it seemed to fill out again when I heard them last year at M Room.
On one level I got what I wanted. I've complained many times about bands that don't innovate. ROHS does it continually. It was just that on this Friday night, October 7, their sound had pulled back a little and was a little thinner as a few years ago. I couldn't fault them for that. They were doing what I wanted. But their style that night was not what I was into.
Between the cover charge for a two-band lineup, the sloppy sound work, and the thinning, more gentle style of the band, I was ready to leave. Half of me felt I should stay, because I had traveled and paid the train fare up to New York, but the other half of me wanted to leave because I wasn't having a good time. So I applied the "last thirty minutes" rule, which is this. If this were the last thirty minutes of my life, what would I do? What would give me the most pleasure. That rule always works, and this time made it easy. .... I walked out of there even though the band had played only fifteen minutes.
As I walked down Houston Street, I noticed an area up on the next block and across the street where there was an open space with some trees and some festive lights and a gathering of people. What was that? ... I walked across the street and found in a courtyard or large alley between a set of buildings, an "outdoor room" had been set up with a meeting taking place. What was this? I picked up a brochure. it was the "BMW Guggenheim Lab". The
BMW Guggenheim Lab is a "mobile laboratory traveling around the world to inspire innovative ideas for urban life". One of the functions of the "lab" is to host meetings. On October 7 when I happened to stop by, it was a meeting of
Signified, a "web series and multi-platform documentary", largely about Gay life.
7/4/20 ::: OOPS. Sorry. These two links have completely vanished!
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As I said above, I've become somewhat disenchanted with the music scene. I see venues doing what Mercury has done, slimming down the nights from the standard four band shows to either three or sometimes an outrageous mere two. It's almost not worth going out.
I've also seen what seems to be less creativity in the writing as compared to a few years ago. This is reflected in fewer good bands playing in each lineup. Time was just a few years ago when I could go out to hear a favorite band and probably enjoy the other bands on the lineup and maybe even liking one of the others so much that they would become a favorite, too. But that happens less and less these days. Now a lot of times when I go out to hear a favorite band, I feel like I'm "putting up with" the other bands in the lineup, or sometimes feel like I just have to get out of there.
Is it worth staying up late (and wrecking the next morning) just to hear two or one 30-minute sets? It's frustrating. A lot of times the answer is "no". It's not my idea of a good time to hang out for a few hours and only have one good set to show for it. ... I'm not faulting any venue in particular when I say this; it seems to apply across the board. ... Music styles are changing? ... It's seeming more difficult to find bands with strong individualities. A lot of bands, once that first album is successful, often bland towards the same-old same-old that everybody's doing in the middle.
A frustration with writing the blog is the changes that
Myspace made about a year ago. The blog space is blanded down with no color and simplified down with offering no ability to go back and look at specific blogs. Hence my starting the parallel blog here on Blogspot. ... Bands and people are migrating away from Myspace which makes it more difficult to post music when I do hear a good band. Some of the other sites don't interface well with either Myspace or Blogspot.
And a huge frustration in trying to pick out where to go to hear live music is the increasing trend of venues to link their sites over to Facebook pages of the bands, even if the bands do have Myspace. This is so aggravating because most of the Facebook pages don't even have any music on them, and, those that do, often have only a couple samples, or a music player that doesn't' work at all, or what really gets me, is music players that will only function if you "like" the band first. Fuck all the bands that have so little confidence that people will voluntarily like them, they have to trick people into clicking "like" before they can listen to the music. I'll decide if I like it AFTER I listen. :) To me that counts as a negative for them and possibly for the whole lineup. The more difficult the venue and the bands make hearing samples of music, the more I just want to move on. ... The process of cross-checking venues and bands to hear music samples has become more time-consuming and aggravating for these reasons.
And there''s more. On top of all of that, my file hosting companies on which I have all my photos stored are providing less reliable service, with more frequent and lengthier equipment and service "outages". Today all the pictures on my profile page are still blank.
I didn't want to end the blog on a downer, the Mercury show that I didn't really like, so I decided to wait until I saw Long Walk Home, another one of my long-time favorites, do their 2011 annual show on October 28.
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I was not in the mood to see shows for a while after October 7, and DEFINITELY not even looking at any venue that was offering less than four shows in a lineup. I was overreacting? ... Until David told me last week about a FIVE-BAND night at The Fire. And one of the bands was one that I had seen before, "The Sea Around Us". That Philly band does some very ambitious vocals. I had only heard them once prior, just over the summer at North Star. Since that time, the band got the vocals a lot tighter and on target. They did a good show. They just came back from a lengthy tour.
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Long Walk Home is one of my favorite bands, and I was happy to see that they were doing a show last Friday, October 28. At M Room this year, this was what's getting to be one of their "annual" shows. I enjoyed watching their music on a regular basis up through a couple years ago. But after the guys graduated from Temple and St. Joe's, they went their own ways professionally and now just get back together to do a show usually once a year.
I checked M Room's website right before I left home. It said 8pm doors, 8:30pm show. I got there at 8:25pm. The first disappointment was that M Room no longer seems to offer draft beer and had sunk to the depths of the bars at Tritone and the old Grape Street with just the bottled kind. ... I went into the music room. Well a little relief there. I saw a band up on stage doing a sound check. "Yay!" I thought. This is being timed just right. However, after the sound check, the band got off stage and disappeared. ... 8:45pm no music. ... 9:00pm no music. ... 9:15pm no music. ... By 9:30pm I was pissed and felt like I had had enough. M Room is notorious for not sticking to schedule, and maybe I should have anticipated that in advance. An hour is my limit for waiting for a band to start. It's arrogant to collect a cover charge and then make people wait over an hour for an indefinite time for the music to start; that's a case where a refund of the cover charge would definitely be appropriate. But I'm sure the owners of M Room couldn't care less.
While music is art, a person going to a concert doesn't just go as an expression of artistic interest. It's an economic transaction. Fans are PAYING CUSTOMERS, although many venue owners and bands don't seem to have a clue or care how shitty they treat their paying customers by making them wait. Adding all this up, I need to take a hiatus from this. It's much less fun than it used to be.
Current song playing right now
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7/4/20 ::: OOPS. Sorry. The band no longer has any sharable links.
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So this still isn't a good experience with which to end up the blog. But it is indicative of the frustration and lack of fun I'm having with live music these days. I need a break for a while.
