For New Year’s Eve we went to the Southern concert venue in Charlottesville for Shagwüf and the Falsies. When I first moved to Charlottesville Fabian and I went there on 16 March 2018 to see Southern Culture on the Skids. Fabian had not been back since but I had gone there for concerts sometimes. Robin was visiting Laura who had been living in Chinchilla Café until she moved to Florida for a professorship. Gabriela was in Baltimore visiting family and friends there. That left me, Fabian, and Eli to go to the concert, and we met Taylor and Angela there.
Phoebe and Alaska met us before we went out. They had been traveling and Phoebe is not much for concerts, so they just wanted to visit us at the cafe to chat a bit. Conversations these days are congratulations to Eli on getting your doctorate and questions about what comes next. Eli says he just wants to take a break with no obligations for a bit, and he is planning to escort his father on a trip that he always wanted to take. Other than that, Eli is trying to relax and sort of checking options for next steps. I had mushrooms, some others did also.
We walked from home to the venue. People come up to me now and tell me that they had fun at Chinchilla Café shows. Hosting a venue has been a fun and weird experience because with our budget of $0 so many things could go wrong, but everything has been fine. We do these small private parties by invitation. If all of us living here and our friends were not contributing to this, then it could not happen. Evidently we are aligned with the cultural wave of Charlottesville because bands and cool people like the shows we have been able to host, and people recognize us in public because we host. The chinchillas are very popular and people know their names.
Shagwüf was amazing. I talked to Sally the singer after her set and asked her if she would play at the Chinchilla Café, expecting that I would have to explain to her that I had an events venue, but she had already heard of it because she had friends who had gone to our shows. She said that she wanted to play! We have had a lot of shows so far but during her set, I recognized her as a rock star, and we have not had anyone with that attitude yet. Her music is great, she plays the audience just as well as her music, she had technical problems with broken equipment but played it off by changing her plans and nothing was the worse for it, and she dresses the rock star part. We have had some great musicians play, and when they come everyone wants to look and act their best. Many of the performers have clothes they wear only for performing which are not typical street wear, but Sally really is a star plays the part.
Just a few weeks ago in mid December we had an experienced touring band over, blankstate. They were interacting with the chinchillas while talking with another band who had no live performance experience, and who was asking them for advice. The advice they wanted was how to feel about their fear of performing, and of not being good enough. The new band had just formed a couple of months ago, so the members were new friends just getting to know each other. They wrote some music, but had hardly had music education or experience. They practiced together, but they all were working and going to school, so they had limited time. Overall, they had in common their shared interests in other bands, and that they somehow had some childhood education in playing instruments even if that was limited. They all liked live music, and they thought to form a band together, but this was the first time for all of them that they had done their own thing away from school or other education, and if they performed anywhere it would be just them as friends and bandmates on their own. There are lots of people in the world with more practice, more education, more time, more money for better gear, and better support networks to help them get out at bands. They complained of social media – is it really worth the effort to make a profile of yourself to get booked, when you do not even know if it is going to work anyway? And what about doing cover songs – if they just play other people’s music, then maybe audiences would recognize that and like it either more or not know the difference, and it would be so much easier to use music that already existed and was proven to be good than take chances with writing their own music.
Blankstate replied – and this is my recollection, the band speaks for itself – that the newer band had to perform live as soon as possible with their own music. They did not need to spend a lot of time on media profiles, but they had to do the minimum to present themselves for a booking, even if the band might not last forever. They said that they could not do covers, or hardly ever and only with good reason, and they always have to perform their own music with their own lyrics. The reason why they have to do all these things is because it feels really good. Everyone in blankstate said that they got intense emotion both from playing live on stage and also from just living life knowing that they performed music on stage. They said regardless of whether attempt brings artistic or financial or any other kind of success, that on this earth and in our short lives we seek out things worth doing. The experience of performing in front of an audience with one’s own music, while doing one’s best to relate and make a connection, is one of the great experiences that life has to offer. Blankstate encouraged the new band to put themselves out there as soon as possible without being overly anxious about perfection, and to see how it feels and where the path goes. That they were asking these questions based on the preparation they had already made meant that they were ready.
I was thoroughly impressed with blankstate’s performance, which I thought was one of the best we had ever had. They were good with their music, but they also interacted really well with the audience, getting reactions, talking through what they were going to do next, and getting people to move and jump while they were playing. When they first walked in they said they did not know what kind of venue we would be, but when they saw the LGBT+ flag they knew we were cool, and when they saw the second rainbow flag in the same room they knew we were really cool. I had thought the extra flag was excessive but I guess we needed the second one to make the point we are trying to make.
That was weeks ago, and back to Shagwüf – I expect they will play with us some day. I started thinking about Charlottesville’s music scene, and how a performer can be world-class awesome here, but there are some opportunities that only come from bigger cities. Live audiences can be great anywhere, although being a good audience member is not something that people naturally know. The proper behavior is something that people must learn, and it can be taught. Good audiences react to everything the performers do, move to the music, make noise at the right times which are frequently occur, they dress the part, and they feel the music. Shagwüf can play an audience like that. I hope that Charlottesville’s good audience and music scene gets them to whatever additional opportunities they might want outside Charlottesville.
Next was the Falsies, whom everyone told me was awesome, but of whom I had not heard. Well they were amazing. They do great music. Their songs are kind of sing-along with repeating parts and lyrics are easy to understand, and most of their songs have scripted parts for audience participation. The band members improvise parts throughout the show also to get the audience engaged. The band is large plus they have backup singers, and they do costume changes throughout. I am not sure what these kinds of bands are called – “performance bands” maybe? In NYC I had been going to Pinc Louds shows, where every song has some weird performance ongoing while Claudi is singing.
I know of other bands who do music plus performance, but I could not find a Wikipedia article for the concept. Anyway, I was into Falsies music, then over-stimulated with whatever else they were doing running around the crowd, throwing things everywhere, doing skits on stage, demanding that people in the audience behave bizarrely and with bold familiarity to everyone else, asking for help doing things that disorient everyone and both tease the song while drawing attention to the space. Falsies are on another level for performing beyond music, and although their music is good, they have an in-person experience. All their songs were good and I could barely scream any more by the end of the show. Then when the end of the show came they were as loud as possible and the song they were playing would not end, it only got louder, and they all started screaming and made everyone else in the room scream while jumping around. There were like 20 Falsies on the stage and a few of them lied on the ground rolling around, then they got tangled into each other and could not move anymore. Other Falsies lied on top of them making a pile, and making the ones on bottom scream more because they were squished. Eventually they were all in a pile. I was at the front of the stage kneeling and jumping while I was screaming in their faces.
The Falsies do not have a wiki article. As a large ensemble which has been around for years they have had some turnover. Some of their songs could transcend particular performers if they wanted them to do so. I know how much money we are able to raise for bands to play at our venue, and that kind of money makes performing a labor of love only. For a band like the Falsies to go on the road they would definitely need money because there are so many of them, the leads play multiple instruments, they have several costume changes, they have backdrops and scenery, props are necessary for every song, and their performance is exhausting. Lots of bands get their high and low from performing but Falsies shows expend all energy. I do not think they have toured, which is unfortunate because I think they have something special that does not exist in many places. I would recommend that anyone who has the opportunity and who has energy to participate go to a Falsies show. It was not relaxing, and some of it was a lot of work as an audience member, but I enjoyed it a lot.
There was a DJ playing after the Falsies and I thought I was dead but we kept dancing, which is a trip going from anxious and wondering what the Falsies were going to make us do then transitioning to dancing with the music. No one stayed for the DJ except the people with me, so we had the dance floor all to our selves. It was wrecked with Falsies explosive material. Poor Falsies background singers packed up part of the stage, the leads grabbed their instruments, and a lot they left to collect whenever another time. I felt wrecked from everything else including going into the restroom throughout the night to freaking out over my reflection, which I still do as an indulgence sometimes. Eventually we walked home. That was new years.
Reflecting back over all this, I have been thinking about what kinds of experiences are possible to have in Charlottesville, what needs to come together for anyone to have these experiences, who gets to have them, how much it all costs, and what it would mean to engineer society so that if there are good experiences to have in this world, then how could someone with power issue the resources to ensure that more people get to have them. What makes certain experiences seem personal rather than manufactured at scale? When we went to this concert I had a great experience. The concert venue itself was under capacity. Many more people could have gone, but did not. In New York City for comparison, the venues tend to be over-filled, and although all the most in-demand performers all do shows for holidays like New Years, there are lots of NYC venues which are unable to book great acts. If this show I saw in Charlottesville had been performed in NYC, then it would have commanded the maximum ticket price, and everyone in attendance would have said that it was a best and perfect show. Because the show happened in Charlottesville, not as much money is here, and even not enough people are here to fill the venue.
I am glad that I got to experience this with my friends. I asked Fabian what he thought, and among other things, he mentioned that he was the only person in the audience who was not white. Shows like this are designed for people like me. The world is designed for me, or the world made me to experience activities like this as well as everything else that I do. I know there are people in Charlottesville who would want to go to shows like this. Tickets are not expensive exactly, and we saw this downtown which is as centrally accessible as anyplace can be in Charlottesville. These were queer performances but the audience was not necessarily queer. I screamed and jumped the hardest of anyone there which is typical for me at most shows, whether here or NYC or Seattle or anywhere else. Fabian rocked out second hardest even though he can be more intense than me, he usually tries to support me in getting more intense experiences because of his background as a club promoter in NYC and someone who has already done most of the things a city performance venue can offer.
Sometimes I wonder if I get more out of this than the performers, like, they are the stars and they are the celebrities. I am an audience member which is sort of mundane, but from another perspective, because I have a venue I get to go talk to Shagwüf which feels like talking to a star and transgressing a social norm that audiences do not have routine conversations with transcendent celebrity personas. Since operating the Chinchilla Café I have been having new thoughts about what it means for a city to have an arts scene, what it is like to be an artist, what it means to be an audience member, who has power over all these experiences, and how anyone can deconstruct all this to replicate it in other places and maximize the positive effects for everyone involved.