A few weeks ago, I saw Ivri Lider in concert at a private party held in a club. Through admittedly limited exposure to his music, he had never made much of an impression on me. What's more, he comes off as a stuck-in-the-mud blowhard as a judge on X-Factor, with a Simon Cowell-like limited worldview of what can and will sell in the modern world. It turns out that private party Ivri Lider is nothing like the introspective singer-songwriter Ivri Lider whose songs I'd been hearing up until now. He transformed all of his songs (even the sensitive ballads like "Zachiti Leehov") into party-starting rave-ups. Everything got the pseudo-trance remix treatment with Lider as the vocalist/party host, frequently heading into the audience to dance with fans and happily pose for photos and selfies. It was something I never thought he could pull off, quite frankly. Even amongst an audience of people from his age bracket (myself included), this type of show could have flopped miserably -- nothing is less cool than a forty-something artist trying to reinvent themselves for a younger audience. Obviously this was no experiment on Lider's part, for he's clearly polished and perfected his private concert persona, but I personally needed to see it to believe it. I also could have never believed I'd have so much fun watching it.
All in all, it was either the best or second best DAT/playback concert I've ever seen. Oh yes, Lider appeared with a guitarist and a DJ/percussionist, and the entire concert save for Lider's vocals, and possibly some sparse bits of guitar and percussion were pre-taped and mimed. For me, only Moby's set from the See The Lights tour in 1993 comes close. I don't have a recording of that gig, but here are snippets from New York and Sydney from the same year. In the New York show, you can see that most of the audience stands around looking puzzled, treating the entire spectacle as a piece of performance art, while the first few rows lose their minds. When I saw Moby, I was one of those people losing their minds, possibly oblivious to the apathy taking place behind me. I recall a wild party atmosphere in the entire club, but I was smashed up against the front of the stage, so who knows what I wasn't able to see?
Those Moby shows don't hold up at all (there are plenty of alternate clips on youtube). The vocals are terrible, and rave was already out in a big way by 1993. Moby had been grandfathered in because he had been so instrumental to the scene, but he was swiftly being ushered out. The speed of his fall was discussed in detail in his autobiography, "Porcelain". I think that's the lesson of the DAT shows, and the reason why more people don't do them even today -- they're best enjoyed in the moment, with no apologies, and no aspirations for creating a piece of art that will last beyond the moment that the last person files out of the club. The only thing that's changed in the past quarter century is that now we have the selfies to prove we were there.
Sunday, March 25, 2018
Saturday, March 03, 2018
The Tragically Hip, "Long Time Running"
At the time, I wrote that the broadcast of the band's final concert was a disappointment, in that it didn't rise to the majesty of the moment. It looked like just another arena concert recording, and didn't capture the connection between the fans and a legendary band almost certainly playing their last ever show.
Fortunately, "Long Time Running" fills that void and perfectly captures the emotional long goodbye to The Tragically Hip. There's little in the way of philosophizing about why the band means what it does, and no critics appear to explain the appeal of the Hip. It's an intensely personal (sometimes uncomfortably so -- details of Downie's treatment and recovery can be difficult to hear) look at the band's final tour from their innermost circle. Everyone who appears is part of their extended family, from the neurologist who performed Downie's surgery (a longtime fan and friend of the band), to Downie's hatmaker who saw her work as a way to give back to the band for providing decades of memories, to their tour, sound and security staff, most of which have worked with them for over twenty years.
The filmmakers (Jennifer Baichwal and Nicholas de Pencier, two more long time friends of the Hip) were asked to do the project only five days before the start of the tour, and yet with such little preparation, they almost telepathically knew how to wring the best possible footage from the band and their audiences. They try hard not to turn their film into the Downie Show, but like the tour itself, it couldn't not be. Frail and shirtless, standing in his underwear before a show, Downie could look any less of a maverick poet rockstar. Then he begins his pre-show ritual, which includes shining his own shoes -- he explains that it's something he's done for his entire career. Amazingly, Downie brings the same determination and intensity to monotonous shoe shining that he does to his on stage singing. Then he gets dressed in that night's pair of shiny pants and outrageous hat and suddenly he looks twenty years younger, a gleaming larger than life rock star. The transformation would have made David Bowie proud. The confused, emaciated, bearded singer we saw in his first post-chemo rehearsal in Toronto one year before is a distant memory.
Fortunately, "Long Time Running" fills that void and perfectly captures the emotional long goodbye to The Tragically Hip. There's little in the way of philosophizing about why the band means what it does, and no critics appear to explain the appeal of the Hip. It's an intensely personal (sometimes uncomfortably so -- details of Downie's treatment and recovery can be difficult to hear) look at the band's final tour from their innermost circle. Everyone who appears is part of their extended family, from the neurologist who performed Downie's surgery (a longtime fan and friend of the band), to Downie's hatmaker who saw her work as a way to give back to the band for providing decades of memories, to their tour, sound and security staff, most of which have worked with them for over twenty years.
The filmmakers (Jennifer Baichwal and Nicholas de Pencier, two more long time friends of the Hip) were asked to do the project only five days before the start of the tour, and yet with such little preparation, they almost telepathically knew how to wring the best possible footage from the band and their audiences. They try hard not to turn their film into the Downie Show, but like the tour itself, it couldn't not be. Frail and shirtless, standing in his underwear before a show, Downie could look any less of a maverick poet rockstar. Then he begins his pre-show ritual, which includes shining his own shoes -- he explains that it's something he's done for his entire career. Amazingly, Downie brings the same determination and intensity to monotonous shoe shining that he does to his on stage singing. Then he gets dressed in that night's pair of shiny pants and outrageous hat and suddenly he looks twenty years younger, a gleaming larger than life rock star. The transformation would have made David Bowie proud. The confused, emaciated, bearded singer we saw in his first post-chemo rehearsal in Toronto one year before is a distant memory.
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