I am officially old. I have had
suspicions of this development for quite some time but this past
weekend provided irrefutable confirmation.
I ended up dipping a toe into the
Deutschtown Music Festival for the first time. Not because I had an
interest in any of the several hundred bands that played but because
my daughter had friends that were playing in a few of the bands that
were scheduled to play. Normally, I'm the one dragging her about
town to see bands that I'm sure she could care less about. With no
amount of uncertainty, I have been relegated to driver and ATM.
Earlier this century, I had sworn off
attending all day festivals in any capacity. My only exception to
this rule was if Iggy Pop were somehow coaxed into coming to
Pittsburgh to play one of these things. I won't even go to an
evening show out at whatever their calling the Starlake Amphitheater
these days because outdoor shows have never been anything but
frustrating to me whether I was working the show or just there as a
spectator.
I have always believed that live music
belonged in a poorly lit room. I have heard tales of larger metal
acts that have large scale light and pyro/smoke machine setups having
to play in the middle of the day because of festival scheduling. They end up looking like a bunch of dead guys having a cookout on
stage. How embarrassing.
Trying to piece together the logistics
of seeing two bands in a sea of stages and venues took a bit of
planning. Since I hail from the South Hills, traveling to the North
Side of Pittsburgh involves bridges and tunnels so I have never spent
all that much time in that part of town. I have no knowledge of side
streets, short cuts or places to park the car that don't involve
meters.
I'm more familiar with the side
streets around rock clubs in other towns than I am with the North
Side. I can't even get over to there without GPS.
The bands that the kid wanted to see
were playing an hour apart from each other on opposite ends of the
festival. Luckily the organizers of the festival saw fit to have a
shuttle bus running in a loop throughout the day.
The first stop was the parking lot of
a distillery that had what could theoretically be called a stage in
the back corner. We got there just as a band was starting their set. It was two saxophone players and a drummer that were bent on trying
to play hip hop covers as jazz songs. When they weren't slaughtering
current hip hop songs, they were trying to be a more upbeat version
of Morphine.
Needless to say, the day drunk white
hipsters were eating up this off tempo bullshit like it was the
second coming of John Coltrane. I've seen Morphine. Fuck these
people.
After a few minutes of trying to
politely stay out of the way, a food truck pulled into the parking
lot and I had to find a new spot. This made a not so crowded area suddenly heavily populated. Then the food truck fired up their generator so they could start
slinging tacos which made it more difficult to hear what the band was
trying to do.
I started having flashbacks to every
nightmare show that I ever worked. Those shows where the organizers
didn't really care about the music and only used it as a vehicle to
sell booze and food to people. Trying to lug equipment through a sea
of drunkards that are unaware of their surroundings.
I tried as much as I could to be on my
best behavior so as to not sour the day out for the kid. Luckily for
me, after saying hello to her friends she came back over to where I
was hiding and asked if we could leave. After dealing with the crowd and the heat for an hour, she had had enough and was ready to head home before her friends even played.
I did have a moment of pride on the
drive home when she mentioned how she felt a sense of community was
lacking in the crowd compared to the punk shows that I've taken her
to. That's when I had to explain that most music festivals aren't
about music. I also told her a few stories about Warped Tour, X-Fest and M-Squared that were more trouble than they were worth.
The Deutschtown Music Festival felt
like it was more about putting the North Side and the local businesses on display than it was
about putting music on display. And that's okay. It reminded me
of the street fairs and neighborhood carnivals of my youth. Only on
a much larger scale that immediately cranked my anxiety up to eleven
before I even left the house.
I was glad to see that she was smart
enough to recognize a crowd that she didn't want to be part of and
took action to get away from it.
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