The phenomenon of a reunited band performing one of their old studio albums live in its entirety is not a new one. It goes back years or decades depending on how you define the craft. But now the practice has become not only ubiquitous but creatively stifling.
Bands which, often for good reason, split up and moved on to more individually expressive or stylistically various follow-up project are forced to regroup and pretend to recapture their younger selves, for fans who can’t imagine them any other way and who won’t let the artists expand and move on. More than that, the performances are rethought to mimic the convenient package of the music’s most popular packaged format, the studio album.
This retro-fitted formalism is even more apparent when the shows are of albums which grew organically over years of touring, and which were never intended to be performed as concept albums (the rock equivalent of scripted performances).
Two prime examples of such devolved, devalued rock theater are coming up in Connecticut in October.
The Lemonheads revisit It’s a Shame About Ray Oct. 13 at Daniel Street in Milford for a mere $15. Evan Dando’s commercial breakthrough was nearly 19 years ago.
The Pixies are performing their 1989 album Doolittle, with a third act of “related B-sides,” Oct. 29 at the Palace Theater in Waterbury, the same venue which gets the “Best of Broadway” theater tours in that area.
Ray was The Lemonheads’ second album and Doolittle was The Pixies’ third. Both were extensively reshaped in the recording studio. In the case of the Lemonheads, the album’s most familiar track—a hit-video cover of Simon and Garfunkel’s “Mrs. Robinson”—was added to the CD after its initial release. (Theater geeks know that the record also contains a cover of the Hair tune “Frank Mills.”)
As someone who still looks for spontaneity in live performance, I find this trend of constraining the time frames and set lists of once-uninhibited rock bands to be disillusioning and dispiriting.
The ultimate caveat for putting one’s creativity on hold in favor of crowdpleasing security was published over half a century ago, about a numbing type of performance from decades earlier:
That God-damned play I bought for a song and made such a great success in—a great money success—it ruined me with its promise of an easy fortune. I didn’t want to do anything else, and by the time I woke up to the fact I’d become a slave to the damned thing and did try other plays, it was too late. They had identified me with that one part, and didn’t want me in anything else. They were right, too. I’d lost the great talent I once had through years of easy repetition, never learning a new part, never really working hard. Thirty-five to forty thousand dollars net profit a season like snapping your fingers! It was too great a temptation. Yet before I bought the damn thing I was considered one of the three or four young actors with the greatest promise in America. I’d worked like hell. … I was wild with ambition. …
My good bad luck made me find the big money-maker. It wasn’t that in my eyes at first. It was a great romantic part I knew I could play better than anyone. But it was a great box office success from the start—and then life had me where it wanted me—at from thirty-five to forty thousand net profit a season! A fortune in those days—or even in these.
[Bitterly.] What the hell was it I wanted to buy, I wonder, that was worth—Well, no matter. It’s a late day for regrets.
—James Tyrone, in Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night.
Apropos and ingenious linking of James Tyrone’s lament with the Lemonheads and the Pixies new “retrofitted formalism.”