It is a new day of the same here, and the next many weeks ahead look to be the same bad photocopy replica of a lost original, just like those band flyers one used to see on telephone polls back in the day.
As of this writing, the world has passed two million reported coronavirus cases and 127,000 deaths worldwide, with the US having over 26,000 deaths. Social distancing is now being said to have to be in place for some time, months, if not well over a year. As I have said before, we are still able to remember and have feel the way it used to be. This boat has many more miles to go before the new land is arrived at...and there is little room on it for Musicians.
Last night, I was having a talk with a very talented friend of my, a songwriter and guitarist I really respect. We were talking about how all this is going to shape what we do. The conversation soon shifted into how the entire Music collective seemed to have a new paradigm of that recorded Music has no value. You just have to make merchandise and do live shows. I have always, and forever will, despise that belief. It seemed the easiest way to surrender the intrinsic value of what one created. The film industry never said that. The fine arts never said that. It was the Musicians that seemed to surrender their souls first to the new technological gods.
One belief that burned with a deep anger inside me was that, what if you had an illness that made it impossible for you to tour but you still made amazing Music? Oh, please do not get me started on the money from streaming services, as that is beyond minimal for 99% of us who do this. We all got sold out by the belief that we could all be screwed over and somehow be the better for it. While it was apparent that, just as Baroque Music gave way to the Classical Period that gave way to the Romantic era and so on, guitar based rock Music had shifted away from the popular medium and into other styles. While it hurts to have perhaps stayed too long at the party, there were other people in the room.
The religious vigor of "PLAY LIVE OR DIE!" now seems to have ended like the last day of a doomed cult. No one is playing live and there will be no real live Music in the general sense for at least a year, so where does that leave us as a Musical community in this pandemic? There are some that are trying to do solo acoustic live videos and others who are trying a multi-person live band thing. I suspect this will either bloom into new and better ideas or die a quiet death. But, if there is money to be found in it, I am certain that it will grow.
There will now be a generation of Musicians who will never know what it is like to play live, even in a backyard or basement. It was becoming scarcer and scarcer over the years, at least around here, and now the tap is turned off, the forest burned to the ground. An any Musician worth their salt will tell you that playing live, even simply at a rehearsal with others, makes a huge difference. It never really dawned on me that such experiences had a deep value until after I wrote a book about my very odd life in Music, "Not the Yearbook You Expected". My friend and I agree that all those horrible gigs actually made a difference and had a value we never thought they did now that such things cannot be done. All those thorned experiences meant something, and we were both glad we did them even though we had spent the bulk of our lives cursing at what seemed abject failure.
Something new will come from this, some new creativity, to help us survive this time without the most basic primal human interaction. There will be beauty, to be sure. But the longer this goes on, the more the muscles from that experience will atrophy and the less number of new people will experience it. But, simply from a historical point of view, this has never happened before. Painters will paint. Writers will write. But Musicians, like actors and dancers, have something that must be performed live with others.
There will be beauty, and this surreal dark time will pass, but let no one ever tell you they knew how when this is all over.
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