The stage can be a pulpit, a diorama, a tin pan alley, a juke joint, a communion, or a severance, from either side, on or off. The fourth wall in front of you is one thing. It could be bright lights which box in your vision to just a few faces in the front, or it could be sonic, fighting against feedback and bad monitors just to keep track of what it is you are supposed to be doing up there. It could also be those faces themselves which act as a kind of barrier. What is it that they are looking for? What is it they might find? It is one night for you, and, I suppose, for them, to find footing, navigate the space, get alive and get dead. “Leaving it all on the stage” is not real, there is no communion in giving all of yourself, that is just subjugation, and there is no reason to think about a performance any further if it is completely spent, poured out before one’s eyes. Anytime we have borne witness to one of these and it has stuck with us, it is because the illusion has been a success, which is exciting in and of itself.
If one values place, the stage in the well-worn rock club is probably not the place to lay that value. Those dark rooms that feel so familiar, the ones just far enough away to embody only periodically, but not so far away as to become exotic and august in their infrequency, they are not really home, and you know it. I talked to my grandfather as some length, years ago, about the family history, a “greatest generation” story which surely would not resemble my own in any meaningful way. It was a long boat ride with the “thousands sailing across the Western ocean,” shining shoes at the Columbia Exposition as semi-legal employ for a twelve year-old Black Irish kid, enlisting early and staying in Australia for extra tours, and, eventually, suburban family and legendary status at bars in Brooklyn and the West suburbs of Chicago. Now it’s, perhaps improbably, outliving his younger siblings and surveying the progeny and the unrecognizable lives they—I—lead. The conversation took an odd turn at the end, which was concerning the general priority or value of family. Perhaps it was not odd to have him suggest that family really ought not to be the most important thing, or at least that it never was to him. There is, after all, a lot of dumb luck involved, and if one needs look farther then their own circumstances to witness the damage blood family can do, they likely do not need to look much farther. What was instead odd was that family came up in the abstract at all, totally unsolicited, and after the parts of the story that needed recording were recorded. Not least strange for me to be the receiver of these insights; there were no late-night, kitchen table conversations between us, that element of the Irish family cliché was never present. I saw him drink whisky only once, having been dry for decades, at a cousin’s ill-fated wedding, bellowing out Amazing Grace while another cousin and I fumbled through a chord chart at the upright piano, Grandpa’s large, arthritic hands on each of our outside shoulders. I guess that element of the cliché, for one night at least, one night, one night only, was present.
So the fucking point is not a lot of things. It is not about bands being like families, or the siblinghood of the players onstage, or even about music and scenes creating kinship between affiliates and aficionados. Do I feel closer to someone who recognizes the cover art of “You Can’t Hide Your Love Forever” on my lapel pin? For about fifteen seconds, sure, or at least I assume so, because it has never happened, and thus is not the point either. The point is also not to register a polemic about family more broadly, or to make you draw your own connections between darkened, empty clubs and my Irish grandfather’s conception of the brood he will have left (four kids, one deceased—the musician, of course—six grandkids, one estranged, three great grandkids, and, I assume, counting; I will not be participating in that project myself and thus have no incentive to keep close account). The point, for me, and I’ll have to tell you because I’ve not given you enough to derive it of your own accord, is that if family is so tangential to a quintessential “family man,” whose immigrant dreams and aspirations are ordained to be, from on high in the most American part of American Dream, precisely to leave a blood legacy, then what might is it to mean to me? I, of course, have my own answers, which are not worth sharing here. But what is, I hope, worth sharing is the corollary notion of the ultimate place: home.
Homelessness and houselessness are separate, if obviously overlapping, spectra. To cut through the abstractions: onstage is a hell of an odd home. As a place of business, expression, escape, semi/voluntary imprisonment, I could make for you a case. But standing in that empty club long before or a ways after the confetti has fallen and is stuck to the floor, beer, sweat, and blood spilled in various denominations on the dancing surface which shields the earth beneath, the first thump of the kick and the final button—immer alles a button for Feli—doors to curfew, it is a home only to the dialectic tug of hope and darkness, and always the next one, until the very last one, whenever that should pass. There is vindication in this home, but there are also rules, penalties, rewards, batted eyelashes and averted, disconnected glances. In this place I reciprocate meaningful and bemused glances with Feli, I place my hand on Moist’s, well, moist, back, I point at Dallow at opportune moments, watch Jeffrey do a monkey dance, toast surreptitiously with Furey or Zee, and sit, back-to-back on an upright monitor with Jack, each feeling over his own shoulders to make sure the other is still there, stable and alive, around for another round. He is still there, in balance, as best he can for the other man. It is a mixed melancholy, the comedown as sweet at the high.
