More ruminations after the Bellrays show last night, downtown Tempe, Arizona.
This was a show featuring 4 local bands and the headliner, the Bellrays. The constant theme of the night was "Let's bring live music back to Tempe." What the hell happened? Yeah, I've been out of the loop for a while. Well, I'm old. But I remember a time, not so long ago, when there was a band playing on every corner on Mill Avenue. For a while there was even a nationally-known Tempe scene that produced bands like the Gin Blossoms and Dead Hot Workshop. Sometimes I was playing on Mill myself, and I wasn't unusual to hear the sound of another band playing across the street when we were between songs. Tempe used to have a vibrant musical culture. Is it completely gone?
It's not like there's no good local music any more - the Sugar Thieves played a set last night that blew me away.
I can rant all I want about what music has come to in this new millennium, about the the way musical knowledge and performance quality has declined, about how nobody knows what a song is any more. Like any old fart. But apparently something worse has happened - people just aren't very interested in listening any more.
I was struck last night by the indifference of most of the crowd last night. During an absolutely killer, world-class set by the Bellrays, I looked back at the audience (I was about 5 feet from the stage). I saw maybe two dozen people giving the music the attention it deserved, while the rest of the bar was filled with people doing their level best to ignore the band so they could carry on their conversations.
It couldn't have been easy.
