Oak: Ephemeral
Jan. 30th, 2003 12:39 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tmcgWe went to see Christine Lavin and the duo Buskin & Batteau at the Bottom Line in Greenwich Village last Friday. John Platt of WFUV was the MC. It was one of those shows that's so wonderful it leaves you feeling drugged, euphoric, even when all you've had is one plastic cup of absurdly overpriced coffee and Nutrasuc. Christine, I'm sure, will keep touring and playing out in addition to all the producing and other things she does with her career. But this bloody well better not be the last time Buskin & Batteau appear.
Lavin was delightful, as always. She has some super nifty audio technotoys to play with these days--most notably a gizmo that can sample her voice live so that she's singing several-part harmony with herself--and makes full use of them. She's got a sweetly beautiful voice and writes excellent songs, which she performs with the verve and consistency of a veteran. She got such laughs with "It's a Good Thing He Can't Read My Mind" that I wondered how many in the audience hadn't seen her before--and she added a new (to us) verse about folksinging that had her veteran listeners in stitches even while it was directly targeted to people who might have been dragged to the show on a date. (Started something like "I am at a folk concert / I'm sitting at a folk concert / I do not like folk music / But I love him.") She twisted our minds with "Wind Chimes"--we thought we needed an insulin injection until the props started appearing and we realized that the whole song was a hilarious mind&*^%. She performed her paean to Pluto, with scientific updates, and then hosted a competition and quiz session. She also hosted the "Mr. Bottom Line" contest, after roving through the audience singing "You Look Pretty Good for Your Age" to random men, and the guy she picked was wonderfully funny. A horde of men accepted her c/h/a/l/l/e/n/g/e/ invitation to come up onstage and help with "Sensitive New Age Guys" (but she took out the orgasm verse--bummer!), including Mr. Bottom Line, wearing his crown. And of course she did her baton-twirling act, with the light-up-in-the-dark batons. It was as much performance art as concert, and a wildly enjoyable time.
Dave Buskin and Robin Batteau stopped playing out and making albums together about twelve years ago, and this was their reunion concert. I don't even know how to describe how great these guys are. They sing and play guitar; in addition, Buskin (whose solo album Heaven Is Free Tonight I cherish) plays beautiful piano and Batteau plays beautiful violin and mandolin. We'd never seen them with backup before, and were a little worried at the drum set (although relieved that they were mostly hand drums and bongos) and electric bass on the stage, but their sidemen were fabulous, and I'll update here when I can get their names right. The first song was a little rocky, although I couldn't have told you why--the playing was tight, the singing was fine, These Guys Are Professionals. But after that their performance just took me up into the stratosphere. Their voices warmed up, they warmed to the stage and the audience, and for something more than an hour they filled that place with more humor and emotion and melody and harmony and chordal flavor and mesmerizing rhythm than I have words to describe. Their audience adores them; one oblique introductory chord or comment and we were applauding, beside ourselves with excitement at recognizing what the next number was going to be. By doing four of the songs we most wanted to hear--"The Boy with the Violin" and "Guinevere," both very moving, and the sidesplitting "ESPN" and "Death in Venice"--they left us as close to sated as we could be without them having done their medley-of-commercial-jingles number, my only disappointment.
But...
During the encore, as I sat there with this incredible sound washing over me, coming live from living throats and lungs and hands on the stage in front of me, my brain cells suffused with endorphins or dopamine or whatever the goodest of feel-good neurotransmitters are, I became aware of the weirdest undercurrent of sadness and fear. What if I never hear these guys perform together again? It's very hard to get their albums, and in fact I have only one, a slightly warped vinyl LP that had been in one of their garages for years and they sold off after a long-ago show, and it's not enough, it's not enough. They never recorded all the songs I've heard them do live. And the recordings are not enough. Buskin by himself is fantastic...but those voices, those two voices in harmony, that unique sound coming from living performers...what if that's the last time I ever hear it?
I'm a creature of an age of recordings. I expect to be able to consume material again later. On some subliminal level, I expect it to be available to me in some format. But live music is live. Live music is by nature ephemeral. I would have bought another ticket and gone in to watch the second show, just to hear them one more time, if I hadn't been with folks who needed to leave. I didn't want to let go. Memory is not enough. A video recording, although I sorely wished I could have made one that night, would not be enough. I want to be able to experience that again, live, for real, in the moment. And then again. And again.
Where there's life, there's hope. I gather that there's some possibility that Buskin & Batteau might continue to play and tour together. I will keep wishing for that. But still I rail at the injustice of the ephemeral. Once-in-a-lifetime experiences derive part of their beauty from the poignant element of will-never-come-again. And will-never-come-again comes even when your band hasn't broken up, when none of its members have been murdered on their own doorsteps or overdosed on drugs. People age, and die. Peak performances are sometimes never repeated. Death is one of the things that render life precious and beautiful. All things pass away.
But dammit, I just hate that.
And you can't say these guys didn't leave the audience wanting more. Way to go. :)
Lavin was delightful, as always. She has some super nifty audio technotoys to play with these days--most notably a gizmo that can sample her voice live so that she's singing several-part harmony with herself--and makes full use of them. She's got a sweetly beautiful voice and writes excellent songs, which she performs with the verve and consistency of a veteran. She got such laughs with "It's a Good Thing He Can't Read My Mind" that I wondered how many in the audience hadn't seen her before--and she added a new (to us) verse about folksinging that had her veteran listeners in stitches even while it was directly targeted to people who might have been dragged to the show on a date. (Started something like "I am at a folk concert / I'm sitting at a folk concert / I do not like folk music / But I love him.") She twisted our minds with "Wind Chimes"--we thought we needed an insulin injection until the props started appearing and we realized that the whole song was a hilarious mind&*^%. She performed her paean to Pluto, with scientific updates, and then hosted a competition and quiz session. She also hosted the "Mr. Bottom Line" contest, after roving through the audience singing "You Look Pretty Good for Your Age" to random men, and the guy she picked was wonderfully funny. A horde of men accepted her c/h/a/l/l/e/n/g/e/ invitation to come up onstage and help with "Sensitive New Age Guys" (but she took out the orgasm verse--bummer!), including Mr. Bottom Line, wearing his crown. And of course she did her baton-twirling act, with the light-up-in-the-dark batons. It was as much performance art as concert, and a wildly enjoyable time.
Dave Buskin and Robin Batteau stopped playing out and making albums together about twelve years ago, and this was their reunion concert. I don't even know how to describe how great these guys are. They sing and play guitar; in addition, Buskin (whose solo album Heaven Is Free Tonight I cherish) plays beautiful piano and Batteau plays beautiful violin and mandolin. We'd never seen them with backup before, and were a little worried at the drum set (although relieved that they were mostly hand drums and bongos) and electric bass on the stage, but their sidemen were fabulous, and I'll update here when I can get their names right. The first song was a little rocky, although I couldn't have told you why--the playing was tight, the singing was fine, These Guys Are Professionals. But after that their performance just took me up into the stratosphere. Their voices warmed up, they warmed to the stage and the audience, and for something more than an hour they filled that place with more humor and emotion and melody and harmony and chordal flavor and mesmerizing rhythm than I have words to describe. Their audience adores them; one oblique introductory chord or comment and we were applauding, beside ourselves with excitement at recognizing what the next number was going to be. By doing four of the songs we most wanted to hear--"The Boy with the Violin" and "Guinevere," both very moving, and the sidesplitting "ESPN" and "Death in Venice"--they left us as close to sated as we could be without them having done their medley-of-commercial-jingles number, my only disappointment.
But...
During the encore, as I sat there with this incredible sound washing over me, coming live from living throats and lungs and hands on the stage in front of me, my brain cells suffused with endorphins or dopamine or whatever the goodest of feel-good neurotransmitters are, I became aware of the weirdest undercurrent of sadness and fear. What if I never hear these guys perform together again? It's very hard to get their albums, and in fact I have only one, a slightly warped vinyl LP that had been in one of their garages for years and they sold off after a long-ago show, and it's not enough, it's not enough. They never recorded all the songs I've heard them do live. And the recordings are not enough. Buskin by himself is fantastic...but those voices, those two voices in harmony, that unique sound coming from living performers...what if that's the last time I ever hear it?
I'm a creature of an age of recordings. I expect to be able to consume material again later. On some subliminal level, I expect it to be available to me in some format. But live music is live. Live music is by nature ephemeral. I would have bought another ticket and gone in to watch the second show, just to hear them one more time, if I hadn't been with folks who needed to leave. I didn't want to let go. Memory is not enough. A video recording, although I sorely wished I could have made one that night, would not be enough. I want to be able to experience that again, live, for real, in the moment. And then again. And again.
Where there's life, there's hope. I gather that there's some possibility that Buskin & Batteau might continue to play and tour together. I will keep wishing for that. But still I rail at the injustice of the ephemeral. Once-in-a-lifetime experiences derive part of their beauty from the poignant element of will-never-come-again. And will-never-come-again comes even when your band hasn't broken up, when none of its members have been murdered on their own doorsteps or overdosed on drugs. People age, and die. Peak performances are sometimes never repeated. Death is one of the things that render life precious and beautiful. All things pass away.
But dammit, I just hate that.
And you can't say these guys didn't leave the audience wanting more. Way to go. :)
