Between a Heart and a Hard Place

Husky, dusky, powerful, great voice, great guitar playin’, great camaraderie and I don’t have my flip video camera cause at the last minute I wimped out.  Got scared at the very end like the first time I skipped school.  Didn’t even skip my first class until I was a sophomore in HS…  I didn’t even leave the class to drive off with my friends and our new driver’s licenses to hit the beach and share a beer and joint.  Instead I hid in a school bathroom, standing on a toilet seat, sneaking a cigarette drag every now and then.

Another example of time travel in the 21^st Century… Here was Heart, “Oh my God, look at those two women – feel that energy… those sisters, performing their asses off thirty years after first hittin’ the stage with their hard rock sound!”

I wanted to bring my new Flip HD Video camera to the gig, I was all excited about it, conjuring up the recording I would make of the show; stuffed the petite device into the bottom of my purse to hide it from the security search …and then…took it out again and left it on my desk at the office.  What if it gets confiscated?  What if I get caught?  After all, working the concert production biz; I have spent many a night with an eagle eye toward illegal cameras and recordings.

So there I was, in front of the speaker stacks, three feet from Ann and Nancy cursing myself as I watched the masses holding up iPhones and Blackberries and Flip cameras and every other high tech device known to man, recording one of the greatest concerts I’ve seen in forever, while I could only daydream about a weekend spent pulling old albums for a nostalgic sing-along.

Back in 1970 folks were killin’ Bill Graham with screams of “The music should be free!”  Considering how many benefit concerts he staged, I can understand why that drove him crazy.

When Festival Express rode through Canada that year carrying the likes of Janis Joplin, the Grateful Dead, Traffic and the Band, the movement against paying for music was in full throttle.  While the train kept on rollin’ and the bands played on, the promoters found themselves in financial ruin amidst the rioting chaos.

The Grateful Dead allowed their fans to record their shows on audiotape, eventually dedicating a taping section located behind the soundboard to them.  Of the approximately 2,350 shows the Grateful Dead played, almost 2,200 were taped.  As a band with only one commercial hit ever, and that one very late in the group’s life, taping let the fans share their favorite band’s music with others, quickly compounding their fan base.

Barry Manilow started a cameras-OK policy in 1981.  Although the promoters freaked, the fans loved it and still do.  Barry’s website shares over 10,000 photos from fans sharing every angle of his pan-caked smiling face.  According to one of his staffers, the flashes make the show even more exciting and the lights from the iPhones save on lighting rigs!  His fans are hooked … and they in turn, turn on their kids and grandkids.

I have a production friend who told me about a performer coming to town who was demanding that the promoter insure that no cameras or video cameras made it into the venue.  What’s the promoter to do?  Confiscate 5500 cell phones?  The beast has been unleashed and I don’t see how he’ll be recaptured.

In 1991, I spent the night in Golden Gate Park before Bill Graham’s memorial the next morning, making hot chocolate for others so sentimentally inclined.  I soberly awaited the gate opening for the polo fields very much aware of the somberness of the affair.  A thousand others pushed past me and toppled the fencing while making a mad dash to the front of the stage – there was nothing else to do but run myself, having been overtaken by throngs who had only just arrived.

That’s kind of how I feel right now.  On the fence, trying to stem the tide of all or nothing, thinking that if we give the fans all, we’ll keep nothing.  As a fan, with no disrespect to the act, I want to jump the fence too.