Please help!

I can't find anything in the way of a quote, but Tim has a few paragraphs in here about live music. Here's paragraph 1, if this sounds familiar I'll add the other two paragraphs once I get off my phone....

"Visceral, not visual.

You have to be there. You can't imagine being anywhere else. Job? School? Insignificant. The only thing that matters is going on in this room. You try to imagine what it will be like tomorrow night in the same space. What is it? Ice Capades. Wrestling, Basketball. No, it doesn't fit here. The only thing that matters is ...Right now.

You ask youself "How am I affecting the vibrations of this room? I'm taking up space. Music is bouncing off of ME. I'm giving back to the band. I am IN the band. THEY are out here with me."

I've spent thousands of hours of my life in the crowd, at shows, hoping to bare witness to "that moment". That transcendence, when the audiene audience and the band are one. When the music plays the band and the crowd is the music. It doesn't happen very often. Most of the time the artist is purely up there to entertain. And of course, that's fine. That's what they're paid for. But, it's usually safe and predictable. There is no mystery. No risk. For me, I don't want to know exactly when the flash pots are going to go off, or when he lead singer is going to be hoisted above the crowd in the cherry-picker to sing the exact same song in the exact same way as the night before. I want to be afraid. Afraid of the barrage of notes flying around the room might collide and male something scarry, beautiful, unexplainable.

I remember a moment at a show. It was a long time ago, and I'm afraid to say the name of the band, but I had an ephiphany. I had been going to rock shows for a while, even though I was fairly young. And I had been blown away by the visual tactics of the time-lights, costumes, fairy tale figures and blood and by the visual crotch thrusting musical showmanship of the guitar solo and drum solo. But at this particular show, there was none of that. There were just some guys up there playing. Just regular people. They could have been standing right next to me. As I had that thought, I looked at the person next to me, and there was this beautiful face. This person's eyes were closed, and seemed to remain that way for long periods of time. They didn't need some crazy visual stimulus to enjoy the night.  They just needed to feel the music. That's when I realized that I didn't need all of the extraneous stuff to get off on the music. Sure, lights were cool, and I for sure wasn't going to close my eyes and not watch the band, but I knew that I discovered the way for me to experience live music.

Tim Bierman