Get old with music
There’s a terrible Google commercial featuring 26-year-old “Ted” asking Google AI to find him, very specifically, a “cool” music activity in his city that still gets him home at a reasonable hour. This Ted person is allegedly 26 years old. And cares about being home at a reasonable hour. I go to bed at 9pm and have, I am told by unreliable narrators like my spouse, always been grouchy about staying up late. But not at 26.
Anyway, Google AI sends Ted to a James Blunt show. This is how you know Google AI doesn't work.
Quite without my having asked for it, my own social media feed alerted me to an upcoming show featuring Orcutt Shelley Miller, and that it was at the 299-seat Barnsdall Gallery Theatre, and that the show would begin promptly at 7:30 and that it would end before the Barnsdall Park closed its gates at 10pm.
Orcutt Shelley Miller is Bill Orcutt, formerly of the band Harry Pussy; Steve Shelley from Sonic Youth; and Ethan Miller of Howlin’ Rain and, before that, Comets on Fire. Together, they make music that’s more rock than you might assume if you’ve heard any of the bands I just mentioned, a slow bake of their combined origins, an end result that’s something akin to Grateful Dead from the crypt of No Wave. Targeted marketing isn’t always bullshit.
Alonso – the spouse – with commentary: "The opening band is just Henry Winkler trying to sell you Colonial Penn Life Insurance."
Earlier this year, I went to my first live-music event since double hip replacement. Kylie Minogue at whatever they call Staples Center now, the Los Angeles stop of a seven-month-long world tour. (It just ended, the immediate social-media aftermath involving Ms. Minogue stating that she already missed doing shows night after night. That may possibly be true on some level, but a spa vacation that can only be accessed by helicopter could help a person get over that minor bereft feeling.)
The Kylie show was an obstacle course of ramps, stairs, and ecstatic gays. I was proud of myself – formerly unable to do much without shocking pain – for navigating the space minus the cane I used from 2022 until about a month before the concert. There was an ego-based goal. I knew my friend Rick would be there, and he had hip-replacement surgery at around the same time I did. Rick is an athlete. Rick spins around on trapezes like Burt Lancaster. No cane for Rick. I was a fall risk but refused to be seen still hobbling around. Alonso was with me. I forged ahead.
I saw some canes at Kylie. Not as many as when I go to an opera matinee at Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, but some. The “Padam Padam” kids notwithstanding, I’m in her demo. I know the lyrics to “Shocked.” I know the rap portion of “Shocked.” I’m that. Some local gay friends, a couple with a teenage daughter, asked their kid if any of her friends listened to Kylie and her response was, “No, because they aren’t middle-aged gay men.”
I went alone, happily so, to Orcutt Shelley Miller, an evening tailored to me. When I was young, I promised myself I wouldn’t bail on agitated guitars as I got older. Now that I’m at the age to make good on that vow. I have specific needs. A sturdy chair. A set that doesn’t mock my bedtime. There was a night in 1991 when I waited until 1am for De La Soul to show up at a small club in Dallas. No seats. Everyone on their feet for five hours. It was fine. I was 26 Ted Years. I will never do that again.
I climbed a couple hundred stair steps, multiple steep flights, to get to Barnsdall. It’s at the top of a hill. Some young people raced past me. They’ll learn.
Shelley drums so happily it’s like he’s Gina Schock. Bill Orcutt sits and folds himself over, moving his hands so fast they blur. Ethan Miller is a psychedelic hologram from 1972, which I appreciate. A one-hour set, the perfect amount of time, and the no-singing of it all lets you drift. Sometimes songs are songs, and sometimes songs are atmospheres for thinking about how good you feel again, or for internally composing tomorrow’s to-do list. It soothes me.
They’re touring for an album, like Kylie was, but their sets are largely improvised, so there’s nothing to anticipate but the thrill of watching people work perfectly together on something they’re inventing for you. It’s the opposite of an arena hits package with a team of light techs and medics on call for injuries to dancers in Everlasting Gobstopper costumes. One might also mentally compose a to-do list in that scenario. I did. All pleasures are not equal, yet still pleasures.
At 9:45pm, I walked back down all the steps, got in a Lyft, and spent 15 minutes being interrogated by my driver about the aesthetic difference between “David” and “Dave.” At 10:15pm, Alonso greeted me, ready to amuse himself: "Oh look, you're still awake."
