Concertgoing – part I, II, III | Listenings by Jason Weiss

A few years ago, I wrote a book of short texts that aimed to take stock of some five decades of listening. The project grew out of a reflection, sitting at a local house concert, about how very many concerts I had attended over the years, from my childhood in the 1960s at the Jersey shore (in the US), to Berkeley, to Paris, and New York.

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From there, the book grew to encompass all sorts of experiences in listening, as a form of engagement, the boundless ways we pay attention to the world, or at least get charmed by it. About half the hundred texts in Listenings deal with music in some way, and throughout the book, appearing intermittently, there is a series of eleven texts that attempt to lay out a personal history of concertgoing, with what shreds of memory remain. That series is presented here, in five installments.

First Concert

The first concert I ever went to because I wanted to go was Richie Havens at Princeton. I’m guessing 1967, so I’d have been eleven unless it was at the end of the year or later. I loved his first album, and had seen him on TV—the distinctive way he barred the bass notes of his guitar, his thumb hooked over the neck, and how did his arm not fall off strumming those strings so fervently. So, I was eager to see him play live. I don’t recall if the idea was my own at that age, very possibly. But it did mean that the whole family was going. If my brother was home on college vacation, it could have been his idea, or even my sister’s, she was in high school. The remarkable thing is that the four or five of us went together to attend something modern, for once. A troubadour from Bed-Stuy who was a hit in Greenwich Village. More modern than Broadway musicals or the symphony.

The place was an hour from where we lived at the shore, and probably both ways driving were at night. With kids in the back. Kids who presumably instigated the excursion. I’m glad I didn’t have to do the driving. All because of a 33⅓-inch vinyl record that I, or we, liked to listen to. Not that I really remember anything of the theater or the concert—was it three-quarter surround seating?—but to know that we went. Somehow that remains, lodged in a vague corner of the mental archives, even in my physical constitution. Like the memory of so many subsequent musical events.

After all, what are we left with from such experiences? A short time after, what are we left with? Occasionally a friend insists to me that they retain clearly in their mind the experience of hearing a particular opera singer or rock band live in concert, that they remember the actual music, the specific inflections of the solos, but that is not how it has ever been for me. The utterly invisible medium, made manifest in the blaze of the performance, and then the receding memory of people to convince us that we heard it; or heard something.

Of course, it may well be that I don’t have it quite right, in the order of first concerts. Maybe the Monkees at Forest Hills was the summer before, not after. Jeff Kaplan’s father was willing to drop a few of us off and pick us up later; or else he stayed nearby in the vicinity. An afternoon concert at the stadium, where we were too far from the stage to see very well. We could hear them play their hits, and their clever in-between banter, but wherever that vault of impressions dwells inside me, I cannot find it. Still, I’m pretty sure that was before the big concerts I went to just down the road in Asbury Park, summer of ’68, right on the boardwalk at Convention Hall.

Concertgoing 2: Janis, Jim, ISB

Half a century after they recorded, I listened again to Janis Joplin with Big Brother and the Holding Company, the Cheap Thrills sessions. I don’t know how she would have lasted even to middle age, the way she used her voice. Like she was hauling a lifetime full of blues—and she was only 25! The musicians, on the other hand, sound nice but not so psychedelic as I thought I remembered, and their playing not so sophisticated either. That summer, was it 1968, I saw them play at Convention Hall on the boardwalk in Asbury Park. No, say the webs, she played there on August 23, 1969, a week after Woodstock and no longer with Big Brother. For lack of evidence to the contrary, I’ll imagine that was the date. I also saw The Doors at Convention Hall, what I thought was the same summer but apparently not. Thanks to rock obsessives online, I find it was August 31, 1968, that The Doors played in Asbury Park, which poses another mystery: that was my father’s birthday, just 44! Would he have let me, at the age of twelve, go off to a rock concert? Well, maybe so, all the more if my brother and sister were out that night too, maybe the three of us went together, lucky them. Recently, I found a recording on YouTube of Jim and the boys doing “Light My Fire” that very night in Asbury Park, preceded by him doing a poetry thing over some improv business from the musicians. If I saw any such art when I went, it didn’t register. Sometime during the ensuing school year, eighth grade, I sang “Break on Through” and possibly that song too in a band with my friends that lasted barely a few months; we didn’t get arrested. But listening to the recording of The Doors from that night, which I must have heard live (though I probably went to the early show), I am struck once more by the relative simplicity of the music, even if they do rock on for a good nine minutes. I can almost recall the excitement of going, the anticipation in advance of each song, and wondering like everyone else if Jim would behave that night.

That fall, on November 27, the eve of my birthday, unless it was the following September—these are the dates that the electronic memory bank says they played there—I went to see the Incredible String Band at Fillmore East in Manhattan. I must have been almost in heaven. I was invited by my sister’s boyfriend, Joey Rubin, a guitarist in a band, who knew I liked them and offered to take me. That meant him driving the sixty miles from the Jersey shore. What did we do for parking back then? I think it was just the two of us, but in truth I don’t remember the drive. No, my sister must have gone. And I’m inclined to figure it was the earlier date, since both of them were four grades older than me and seniors in high school still.

Whichever date, I only went one other time to Fillmore East and that was an escapade full of deceit, close calls, and blind luck.

Concertgoing 3: Woodstock and beyond

Back in December I had celebrated my bar mitzvah, at an orthodox synagogue in Asbury Park, so by August I was ready for Woodstock. I saw the ads in Rolling Stone, and I managed to convince my brother to go, he was home from college, as well as my sister, she was on her way to college; he in turn invited a girl down the street and my sister’s boyfriend came too, the electric guitarist; plus my mother lent her car. The lengths one goes to listen, no? What all that meant, though, besides a full car and a crowded lean-to, was the others were going to be occupied and I would mostly be on my own. No one seemed to register the slightest concern, and that was quite all right by me. How I found my way back each night very late through the vast labyrinth of people, who knows. And how our parents let us go like that, a wonder in itself.

Plenty more of the experience that I don’t remember than what I do. Somewhere in the cell memory, no doubt. The first night I stayed watching concerts until 1 a.m., and the second and third nights until 3 a.m. What did I do during set changes before the next band took the stage each time? Talked with people near me; watched the peace and love circus. For three days, most of my waking hours were spent listening to live music, and I don’t recall what we ate or did for food, or if we brought food and in what form. Also, no idea what I had on me in the way of money. Nor to what degree, if any, my siblings ever worried about what I got up to. How would they explain it if little brother, instigator of the adventure, got lost or went off with the wolves?

But the fact is I did not get into trouble; and I was not smoking cannabis yet or doing anything else, I would just pass the joint on to the next person. I came because there were a lot of great bands playing up on the main stage, and I aimed to go hear as many as I could. Being more on my own, I was able to engineer that. So, I did not wander too far or get distracted by side shows. Mostly I threaded my way deep among the tight irregular rows of people sitting on the ground and planted myself within a decent view of the stage. For hours and hours I stayed, until nature called or some other good reason like the rain pouring down. Which was quite a nice sound in itself, magnified by its falling on so many fleeing bodies, all making their own hurried sounds. The rain falling in sheets everywhere over the summer fields.

Funny I imagine the rain again in that setting…

After five decades of going to concerts, I can say the mystery of live music remains intact. Memory tiptoes around in the antechamber. Glimpses of a performance may linger, impressions of tone, but from the perspective of sound, what was produced in the moment, being there is once only. Normally, a recording doesn’t quite bring that back, even if it’s Country Joe at Woodstock doing his modified F-I-S-H cheer. I do have one recording, though, that I made myself from the audience, which reveals a singular detail that few would recognize amid the general excitement of the music. Paris 1981, the theater at the Musée d’Art Moderne: Lester Bowie’s terrific avant jazz gospel ensemble From the Root to the Source. There in the midst of the concert, when it’s really heating up, you hear a gravelly resonant voice nearby calling out, “Yay, Lester!” That’s my great friend Ali, right beside me. And you can still hear him like that today.

But Woodstock also spoiled me, in a way. To have had the opportunity at a young age like that to binge on so much popular music, at such a moment in its history, did that somehow accelerate my curiosity as a listener so that just a few years later I was pretty much not going to rock concerts at all anymore in favor of so much else?

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Headline photo: The author at about age 13, in 1968-69, as lead singer of the band Yesterday’s Ice Cream, performing “Break On Through” at their school, Deal, NJ.