When you are in a band you will always notice the people who dance in front of the stage. For example, when Great Northern plays at The New Deal Café, there's a guy who comes out and just spins and spins through the entire performance. Doesn't dance, exactly - just spins. I don't know who he is. He's never at any of our other shows. But clearly he isn't prone to dizziness.
During set breaks I always like to go out and talk with people in the crowd, particularly the dancers. They're the ones most visibly enjoying the show and it's fun and flattering to interact with them. I've got a standard patter about how much I enjoy feeling the energy from the crowd and that the band feeds that energy back out in the performance, and it the result is an energetic bond between the performers and the audience. It's all a little more hippie-dippie new-agey schtick than anything I actually believe, but it's not entirely bullshit, and it makes for good small talk.
Also I must admit, sexist though it may be, it's particularly fun to talk to women. Dear reader, I assure you I have the purest and most innocent of intentions, but as an otherwise invisible skinny old bald man, it's fun to have women at a bar not just pay attention to you, but tell you how great you are. On nights when the pay is $1.50 plus a couple of free beers, the flattery still makes it worthwhile.
I played a gig last week out at a brewery in Ashburn. It's one of a series of pickup gigs I do - not a regular band I'm in, exactly, but a loose collective of players who can come together and deliver a pretty convincing set of classic jam rock (Allmans, Dead, The Band, etc.). While the event drew a modest crowd, there were definitely people up and dancing. During the set break I went to get a beer and wound up talking to a hippie-looking woman who had been dancing up a storm in front of the stage - grey-haired, but an agile, high energy dancer. It turned out we had seen our first Grateful Dead shows the same year (1979), and were almost exactly the same age. Sort of a bonding moment.
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Here's my dancer friend with our sax player
(heavily blurred to obscure identities) |
As an aside (but not a tangent), I have a friend who has the weirdest collection of friends I have every seen. Generally, I would say that Washington, DC is the most straight-laced, bland large city in America, populated as it is by bureaucrats and various varieties of nerds, but this guy has managed to find and befriend every freaky person in the DC metro area, and when he and I played in a band together, the crowd he'd get to turn out was quite an experience. He once described himself to me as a "collector of interesting people." I, on the other hand, generally avoid anything but the most superficial interactions with other people, but I'm trying to be better.
So, at the end of the night I was loading out my gear, and there was my new dancy hippie friend sitting there out on the sidewalk in front of the brewery. She asked me if I wanted to come get high with her in her truck. While I made an excuse that I couldn't get high because I had a long drive home, I thought to myself that this seemed like an opportunity to observe one of the "interesting people" and so I said I'd hang out for a few minutes. Leaving her shoes on sidewalk (of course she was barefoot), we wandered over to her truck, just a few parking spaces away.
At first everything seemed fine. We talked about Dead shows, and about the old VW camper van she used to have. Then out of the blue she asked me if I had been vaccinated. I said that yes, I take any vaccine and booster that's available. She asked why. I said it was because I have medical conditions which put me at high risk if I were to get something like COVID. Well, that opened the floodgates. I got to hear that she absolutely refused to be vaccinated because mRNA vaccines alter your DNA (this claim has been
presented by some fringy researchers, but the evidence they present is suspect and the claim is generally
considered baseless). She said she's a medical professional (true!), and that she's been fired from multiple jobs for refusing to get vaccinated, but she doesn't care. She also told me that fluoride is added to our drinking water to make us docile and more willing to obey the government. And it went on and on. She said she's not a Trump supporter, but respects that he doesn't give a damn about what other people think, and about how excited her grandson gets when he sees Trump on TV.
There's always been a Libertarian strain among Deadheads, and in recent years Libertarians seem to have gone from supporting individual liberty and limited government to being fully captured by the craziest of conspiracy theories - John Birch Society-style paranoia for the 21st century ueled by too much ultra-right-wing media. I've heard kooky stuff like this before from other Deadheads, but as she gets increasingly energized I'm starting to get a little nervous. The woman is tiny and skinny and 62 years old and so at worst she poses no real physical threat, but I am starting to think about how to politely exit this conversation as fast as possible. She also starts to throw in comments about how she knows she's outspoken and maybe that's why she so often winds up alone, but it's OK if she does - she's not going to hide her true self. As I take in those comments I'm wondering if they're an invitation for me to save her from aloneness for the evening, or whether she is a psycho who is planning to do something like take my severed head home for company. Most likely, she was just indulging in a little narcissistic self-pity, but I figured it was time to bring this experiment in human interaction to a close. Once again mentioning my long drive home, I stood up, said how much I had enjoyed talking with her, and gracefully made my exit.
Yeah, "interesting people" are interesting, and talking with her made the evening much more memorable than it otherwise would have been. And having a cute hippie granny want to hang out with me was flattering to my musician ego. But next time, I think I'll stick with my usual practice of looking at my phone between sets.
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