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which_chickI'd mentioned Billy Strings to brother-the-younger some months ago (in this post) and he remembered that the guy would be in State College in August and bought tickets and so we drove up there on Saturday and went to see him in concert at the Bryce Jordan Center. (Bryce Jordan was the head of Penn State University when I went there, if you were wondering who the fuck Bryce Jordan was.)
It rained the entire drive up there, which is worth a mention because it hasn't rained for more than five minutes for the last month and a half.
I have never seen so many white people wearing dreads in my life. While I grant everyone the right to do what they want with their bodies and obviously their hair, I do not think dreads on white people is a great look. Maybe it's more statement than aesthetics? Anyway, there were a lot of white folks with dreads at this thing. That surprised me. Along with the dreads, there was a shit ton of tie dye. I felt like I was going to a Grateful Dead concert, tbh.
In line for getting into the venue, there were people hawking T-shirts, hat pins, and pre-rolled joints, in broad daylight in front of God and Everybody. Now, in Pennsylvania, recreational weed is still illegal. You can have medical card weed but I don't think you're supposed to be smoking it. So I'm not sure how they were selling pre-rolled joints, but they totes were. Hrm. I discussed this with Brother-the-Younger but we did not feel it would be a good idea to detain one of the vendors with dumb-ass questions about what exactly he was selling and how he managed to not be arrested about it and so forth, especially since we were not looking to buy and were just curious about the deets.
There is screening (metal detectors) to get into concerts these days, which I guess is the world we live in. People were pretty reasonable about that and the lines moved right along.
Many signs were about in the Bryce Jordan Center telling us that it was a No Smoking Venue and that anybody caught smoking would be removed from the venue. This turned out to be a complete and total lie.
The crowd was pretty Central PA which is to say mostly white, comprised of a mix of ages, from young stoner to aging hippie with a bunch of fairly normal bluegrass-liking people in there as well. Neither Brother-the-Younger (in overalls and a sleeveless British Union Jack shirt) nor I (Childless Cat Lady with upside-down t-shirt skirt over bike shorts) were in any way remarkable in our attire. It was a decidedly casual affair.
Concert did not have an opening act. Started half an hour late, which was more or less "on time" for concerts.
When they are playing bluegrass-style music, they are very good. They also play non-bluegrass things and occasionally wind up noodling around in a vaguely jazz-inspired sort of a way, about which I have some thoughts.
I do like noodling around in a vaguely jazz sort of a way, but when you're noodling around like that, it's kind of like listening to me tell you a story. The story is not going to be linear, but there IS A POINT and we are going TO GET TO THE POINT at some future time. You may not exactly understand all of the riffs and side quests and rambles and oh, that reminds mes, which are in and of themselves entertaining and enjoyable, but if you trust the process and pay attention, all these things, all the entertaining and enjoyable side alleys and rambles and whatnot will come back together and re-condense to inform and expand the narrative that we started with in a much better way than if I'd just told you the story straight up. There will be a resolution, things will COME BACK from the noodling rambles, and (if it's done well) the noodling rambles will all suddenly make sense and contribute in some vague and undefined way to a broader and deeper understanding of the gestalt. While not a music person, I feel like this is a jazz concept. It is also a bluegrass concept.
So be warned, if you're gonna take me on some sort of jazz-like (it's not jazz but it has a jazz feel, if you will) noodling ramble, you had better fucking well see to it that the noodling informs and enriches the point of what you're doing and that things resolve in a timely, reasonable, and orderly payoff WITH A POINT before people have lost the thread and forgotten what the original narrative was about. This is doubly important if half of your audience is stoned. Like, don't noodle around so fucking much that your audience loses faith in the journey with you.
You're lost, aren't you?
Do you know where we're going?
Is there a point to this?
Like, these are thoughts your audience should not be having. You build some goodwill with clearly competent and effective playing and so folks are willing to wander a bit with you, but ... you lose them if you wander too far or too long or too strangely. You're off inside the fairy ring of mushrooms and we are not with you. This is less than ideal, tbh. So, don't do that. It does not matter if it makes sense to you, you are performing for an audience and it needs to make sense to them even if (as is likely) they are less than you. Your goal, kinda, is to help bring them along and help them to see the structure and noodling that you see so that they are made bigger by the experience. And that's a huge ask, I know. Show us what you see inside the fairy ring. Tell us of your travels. And we are not you, so sometimes you have to kind of bring up the threads of the original narrative mid-noodling so that we all can remember where you were going, help us wayfind, etc. This is very hard stuff to do and not lose the audience. It's a life's work to get it right and you are young.
Billy Strings is a fucking talent and I think he may one day get the hang of how much jazzy noodling around is truly appropriate but for right now, he is a young artist and he gets lost in the music and leaves the audience behind (at times) and this is a thing he should probably fix going forward. A more structured noodling around... like, structure PLUS noodling, noodling where we don't completely lose sight of the point, noodling where all of it adds to and enriches and informs the original narrative, noodling around where we don't lose faith that this will resolve... that would be better. He's not there quite yet and that was disappointing at times but on the whole it was a good concert. Like, this is one minor quibble about which I am talking because the rest of the thing was so fucking banger and it could have been absolutely perfect and yet fell short a few times.
Post-concert, as we walked across the parking lot to our vehicle, there were multiple stations of folks with a gas tank (the kind for, like, oxygen or welding, not gasoline) selling, I kid you not, ice cold whippets which is not... dogs in need of sweaters but in fact nitrous oxide sold in balloons. I didn't realize that whippets was something that needed to be explained until I related this story to my friend Lala and she was WTF?
I thought everyone knew what whippets were and obvi they are cold because rapid expansion of gas from compressed to less-compressed drops the temperature because of physics. And it's sold in balloons because it's a gas and you can't put it in a cup or something.
But anyway, whippets is also stuff that you can't sell in PA except there were totally people selling it out loud in broad darkness in the parking lots of the Bryce Jordan Center.
It rained the entire drive up there, which is worth a mention because it hasn't rained for more than five minutes for the last month and a half.
I have never seen so many white people wearing dreads in my life. While I grant everyone the right to do what they want with their bodies and obviously their hair, I do not think dreads on white people is a great look. Maybe it's more statement than aesthetics? Anyway, there were a lot of white folks with dreads at this thing. That surprised me. Along with the dreads, there was a shit ton of tie dye. I felt like I was going to a Grateful Dead concert, tbh.
In line for getting into the venue, there were people hawking T-shirts, hat pins, and pre-rolled joints, in broad daylight in front of God and Everybody. Now, in Pennsylvania, recreational weed is still illegal. You can have medical card weed but I don't think you're supposed to be smoking it. So I'm not sure how they were selling pre-rolled joints, but they totes were. Hrm. I discussed this with Brother-the-Younger but we did not feel it would be a good idea to detain one of the vendors with dumb-ass questions about what exactly he was selling and how he managed to not be arrested about it and so forth, especially since we were not looking to buy and were just curious about the deets.
There is screening (metal detectors) to get into concerts these days, which I guess is the world we live in. People were pretty reasonable about that and the lines moved right along.
Many signs were about in the Bryce Jordan Center telling us that it was a No Smoking Venue and that anybody caught smoking would be removed from the venue. This turned out to be a complete and total lie.
The crowd was pretty Central PA which is to say mostly white, comprised of a mix of ages, from young stoner to aging hippie with a bunch of fairly normal bluegrass-liking people in there as well. Neither Brother-the-Younger (in overalls and a sleeveless British Union Jack shirt) nor I (Childless Cat Lady with upside-down t-shirt skirt over bike shorts) were in any way remarkable in our attire. It was a decidedly casual affair.
Concert did not have an opening act. Started half an hour late, which was more or less "on time" for concerts.
When they are playing bluegrass-style music, they are very good. They also play non-bluegrass things and occasionally wind up noodling around in a vaguely jazz-inspired sort of a way, about which I have some thoughts.
I do like noodling around in a vaguely jazz sort of a way, but when you're noodling around like that, it's kind of like listening to me tell you a story. The story is not going to be linear, but there IS A POINT and we are going TO GET TO THE POINT at some future time. You may not exactly understand all of the riffs and side quests and rambles and oh, that reminds mes, which are in and of themselves entertaining and enjoyable, but if you trust the process and pay attention, all these things, all the entertaining and enjoyable side alleys and rambles and whatnot will come back together and re-condense to inform and expand the narrative that we started with in a much better way than if I'd just told you the story straight up. There will be a resolution, things will COME BACK from the noodling rambles, and (if it's done well) the noodling rambles will all suddenly make sense and contribute in some vague and undefined way to a broader and deeper understanding of the gestalt. While not a music person, I feel like this is a jazz concept. It is also a bluegrass concept.
So be warned, if you're gonna take me on some sort of jazz-like (it's not jazz but it has a jazz feel, if you will) noodling ramble, you had better fucking well see to it that the noodling informs and enriches the point of what you're doing and that things resolve in a timely, reasonable, and orderly payoff WITH A POINT before people have lost the thread and forgotten what the original narrative was about. This is doubly important if half of your audience is stoned. Like, don't noodle around so fucking much that your audience loses faith in the journey with you.
You're lost, aren't you?
Do you know where we're going?
Is there a point to this?
Like, these are thoughts your audience should not be having. You build some goodwill with clearly competent and effective playing and so folks are willing to wander a bit with you, but ... you lose them if you wander too far or too long or too strangely. You're off inside the fairy ring of mushrooms and we are not with you. This is less than ideal, tbh. So, don't do that. It does not matter if it makes sense to you, you are performing for an audience and it needs to make sense to them even if (as is likely) they are less than you. Your goal, kinda, is to help bring them along and help them to see the structure and noodling that you see so that they are made bigger by the experience. And that's a huge ask, I know. Show us what you see inside the fairy ring. Tell us of your travels. And we are not you, so sometimes you have to kind of bring up the threads of the original narrative mid-noodling so that we all can remember where you were going, help us wayfind, etc. This is very hard stuff to do and not lose the audience. It's a life's work to get it right and you are young.
Billy Strings is a fucking talent and I think he may one day get the hang of how much jazzy noodling around is truly appropriate but for right now, he is a young artist and he gets lost in the music and leaves the audience behind (at times) and this is a thing he should probably fix going forward. A more structured noodling around... like, structure PLUS noodling, noodling where we don't completely lose sight of the point, noodling where all of it adds to and enriches and informs the original narrative, noodling around where we don't lose faith that this will resolve... that would be better. He's not there quite yet and that was disappointing at times but on the whole it was a good concert. Like, this is one minor quibble about which I am talking because the rest of the thing was so fucking banger and it could have been absolutely perfect and yet fell short a few times.
Post-concert, as we walked across the parking lot to our vehicle, there were multiple stations of folks with a gas tank (the kind for, like, oxygen or welding, not gasoline) selling, I kid you not, ice cold whippets which is not... dogs in need of sweaters but in fact nitrous oxide sold in balloons. I didn't realize that whippets was something that needed to be explained until I related this story to my friend Lala and she was WTF?
I thought everyone knew what whippets were and obvi they are cold because rapid expansion of gas from compressed to less-compressed drops the temperature because of physics. And it's sold in balloons because it's a gas and you can't put it in a cup or something.
But anyway, whippets is also stuff that you can't sell in PA except there were totally people selling it out loud in broad darkness in the parking lots of the Bryce Jordan Center.
