How the popularity of rock reunions explains the joys of live music

Rock Reunions - Music - Column - New York Times, 5/6/07: "In fact, if it weren’t for sentiment, if it weren’t for our strong but ultimately inexplicable desire to be in the same room as people making music, we might not bother to go to concerts at all. In that sense, a reunion show is the ultimate rock ’n’ roll concert: a sensory experience overwhelmed by an imaginary one; a musical event that is merely a pretext for a social one. Those people onstage are old friends, in a sense; they have been living in our heads for years or decades. (That’s why substitutions are so irritating: what’s the point of being reunited with someone you’ve never met?) At a reunion show, those figments turn back into real people for a few hours."

The above column was in response to this column, published several weeks earlier.

Not Reunions, Reinventions (Back and Better. Really.) - New York Times, 4/22/07: "Ashley Capps, who helps produce mid-June’s Bonnaroo festival in Manchester, Tenn. — which has booked the Police as one of its headliners this year — put it in a slightly simpler way. 'When I was growing up, the release of an album was an event,' he said. 'We’ve moved away from the notion that the release of a recording is an event. Somebody can release a great album and get fantastic reviews and everybody’s talking about it, but how long does that last? Six weeks? In that sense, live performances are becoming the important event.'

Gary Bongiovanni, editor of Pollstar, the concert-industry magazine, is so used to old acts propping up the industry that he doesn’t believe this year’s picture is substantially different. 'Last year you had Bob Seger, this year you have Genesis,' he said evenly over the phone recently. He is not sure whether new bands — Arcade Fire, say — are striking deeply enough into the soul of the culture to necessitate their own reunions down the road. I think context will determine it. If there are lots of great new bands in the next 10 years, we won’t feel we need an Arcade Fire reunion. If there aren’t, we will.

It seems now that the audience position for rock is coming closer to that of jazz around the mid-1970s. Most of the forefathers are still with us; increasingly, they seem to have something important to teach us. And we are developing strange hungers for music of the not-so-distant past that might be bigger and deeper than the hunger we originally had. That feeling people talked about during the Pixies shows a few years ago — the word 'eerie' was used a great deal — seems similar to descriptions of the feeling generated in the Village Vanguard when Dexter Gordon played his comeback shows there in 1976, after living abroad. Since then, jazz has advanced into a culture of incessant re-experience, endless tributes. Actual reunions are barely noticed: a huge percentage of the music refers to great moments of the past. Yet that doesn’t mean that jazz can’t still be fantastic, even transformative. It is, all the time.

We have to allow for the possibility that Rage Against the Machine — or the Police, or the Jesus and Mary Chain — could be as good as it ever was, if perhaps a little more wizened, a little more skeptical. (It will depend on their practicing of course.) If you’re still looking for something sacred, it probably can’t be found in their values or politics or cult significance. It’s in you: It is your own reaction to how they sound. Nobody can take that away from you."