Big Smith at the Show-Me Music Festival earlier this year. Photo by Alex Stocksdale.

By now the news isn’t “news,” really: Big Smith announced late last night via its Facebook page that it will cease to exist as a band early next year, presumably after its already-booked obligations are concluded. You can bet there will be some sort of last-hurrah show in Springfield, too, a fitting finish for a band that has come to represent a renaissance for roots music in the city as well as the latest in the city’s lineage of contemporary acts that maintain strong ties to local musical heritage. There is obviously a lot of sadness and shock among the public at large regarding the news, but the truth is, unpopular though the choice may be, it comes at a good time and could hold a great many positives to it.

I’ll explain that more in a moment. Let’s start with the band’s official statement via Facebook, in case you haven’t already read or heard it elsewhere. The bolding is my own:

“With heavy hearts we deliver the news that after 15 years of touring and recording, Big Smith will soon be calling it a day. We will continue playing through the early months of 2012, making sure to hit our favorite towns and venues, but will then cease performing and recording for the foreseeable future. We band members will be moving on to new chapters in our lives; new professions and new creative avenues, most of which will keep us closer to home for a while. We thank you, our listeners, for supporting us all these years and allowing us to take part in this great adventure. We encourage you to stay in touch and stay tuned for our schedule of final shows, and beyond that, for possible CD releases from our archive of live recordings, and for news of future projects that will inevitably emerge from the members of Big Smith.”

So what does “new professions and new creative avenues, most of which will keep us closer to home for a while” mean? It likely means a few things, really:

1. There are members of the band leaving music behind. Given the realities of the economy and the fact that I’ve never met a committed musician who wouldn’t rather make his or her living playing music, it seems fair to suggest that such a move is born out of a desire for some or more financial stability. “Stupid life getting in the way” to you; “I can provide for myself and the people counting on me” to them.

2. The members continuing to make music want to do something else. This should come as no surprise given that solo projects and other ventures have already existed within the band’s dynamic in the past. Add in the fact that 15 years is an extraordinarily long time to expect artists to keep creating in the same style and you appear to have a circumstance where it was time to acknowledge the need for change within the group before it became obvious outside the group.

Where do things go from here? The individuals will determine that in the weeks and months to come. Local roots music will inevitably find new leading lights if it hasn’t already. For Big Smith’s part, the band celebrated an important milestone—the 15th anniversary—together with another local act it draws certain parallels to, The Ozark Mountain Daredevils, and the members collectively chose that cemented legacy as the time to bow out rather than let the idea of Big Smith become an albatross. Now, for band and audience alike, the few remaining concerts in Big Smith’s history can be relished in a different light—not as another date on the calendar, but as one of a dwindling number of chances to say “thank you” to one another. Precious few bands get to leave on those terms, and this is one that should.

Lady Gaga, The Foo Fighters and more have made headlines lately regarding concert photography. The problem could be in SGF soon enough.

We’re in quite a boom period for concerts in SGF, with more venues than ever before bringing in big-ticket concerts this city would have thought impossible just four or five years ago. With big-time concerts come issues associated with big-time concerts, though, and I’m afraid it won’t be long before SGF comes face to face with one of the most prominent big-concert problems of today: Artists and their representatives snatching rights to concert photos away from photographers.

Who cares, DeRosh? Artists, photographers… as long as fans can go somewhere and see concert pictures it doesn’t matter who owns them. It’s not that simple. Concert photographers fall into one of two categories: staff photographers for publications or independent shooters working on a per-event basis, either for a company or for themselves. Shooting at major shows has always been understood among photographers as a give-and-take business–”first three songs, no flash photography” is a ground rule seemingly as old as concerts themselves–but when the pendulum swings to the “take” side the system breaks down. Faced with a waiver to sign when they arrive at a venue saying the photos belong to (insert artist here) now and forever such as the one Lady Gaga produced at a show earlier this year, more and more photographers are refusing to sign; either the publications they work for pull the plug (media people are notorious control freaks) or the photogs themselves back out, seeing not only their intellectual property but any chance to make a few extra bucks re-selling them for posters et cetera being handed over to someone who didn’t create it. A few go ahead and sign, not caring about the consequences; most concert photographers do it out of passion, not profit, and some choose to preserve the chance to do what they enjoy. As organizations such as The Music Photographers Network get their ideological dander up about it, though, such goodwill will fade away. Some of the artists behind the contracts suggest the move is meant to prevent them from being exploited when it’s time to put together photo books for box sets, for example, but countering exploitation with exploitation isn’t a cure. It’s only transferring the sheist.

As I said before, this problem is likely to come to SGF in time, which will likely mean fewer opportunities for you to experience the concerts you went to and want to relive or the ones you didn’t get to experience in the first place. It will also hurt photographers when bidding for other work; good shots can help build a strong portfolio to get work, say, shooting weddings, senior-class pics and other bread-and-butter events that keep food on a photographer’s plate. If the copyright to those amazing concert shots belong to the artist after the waiver is signed, how can the photog even lay claim to having taken them? I can tell you TAG won’t stand for such treatment of the work of its photographers, whether that of Photo Assassin Alex Stocksdale or others, and while I can’t speak on the Springfield News-Leader‘s behalf I expect the answer to be the same for it, too. Luckily, such a problem isn’t known to have arisen with big-ticket concerts at this tour stop… yet.

The irony in all of this is that the audience at the show–those who aren’t given access in the photo pit–end up being the ones with the fewest restrictions on what they shoot and what they can do with it. While working photographers with four-figure pieces of equipment leave the next Foo Fighters show in a huff, the guy in Section AA, Row 14, Seat 7 could have a field day with his Canon Powershot and dominate Flickr the next day. In other words, don’t be surprised if crowd-sourced photo galleries become a solution for publications and venues in the short term until the give-and-take pendulum swings back to normal with the help of the (seemingly inevitable) copyright lawsuit or two. You or someone you know could become the next great SGF concert photographer, then, without even meaning to. Just remember not to sign anything.

SGF’s inaugural big-ticket summer music festival, the Show-Me Music & Arts Festival at Springfield Underground, concluded Sunday night after three days of live bands, comedy, live cooking demonstrations and more. From the moment it was announced the festival was abnormally ambitious for a first-year event, combining top-shelf national touring acts with some of Springfield’s best-know local performers in a variety of genres for two stages of continuous music. Scheduling conflicts prevented us from attending the first day or night of the event, but TAG photographer Alex Stocksdale and I were in attendance for days two and three and kept mental and written notes of the performances, behind-the-scenes details and general observations about the festival as a whole. Here’s what we saw and how we saw it:

- By all accounts, crowds were sparse Friday and, from what we saw Saturday, were better but still felt a little underwhelming. Sunday picked up significantly during the day, approaching Saturday night’s size by late afternoon. According to members of the festival security staff, the organizers hoped for approximately 8,000 people on average each day. It was hard to get a reliable count with how spread out the crowd was, particularly during the day, but if they got there it was with an assist from OneRepublic and Tim McGraw as Sunday evening and night fell. Here’s hoping they did. A first year of of losing money puts a tough burden on an event and tests even resilient promoters. UPDATE: According to an email from Brittni Talley with Webster & Associates PR, the three-day aggregate attendance for the festival was more than 34,000 people. Very good news.

- Speaking of the promoters and organizers, a moment of props. As the performer names gradually trickled in throughout the spring it became clear this would be a big event, though I’m not sure anyone grasped its real magnitude until they arrived on site. I certainly didn’t. For a first-year event of this size, with all the infrastructure and agonizing amounts of planning required to pull it off, to go down without noticeable hitches from the fans’ perspective is commendable.

- Taken in greater context, this festival, more than any individual big-ticket concert I can think of, if proof positive that promoters are building faith that Springfield and surrounding communities can support bigger shows than its third-tier status within the industry initially suggests. Yes, the lineup played it safe in some ways, but booking so many expensive acts in the middle of summer, when any entertainment in the city competes directly with nearby lakes for people’s weekend attention, was a roll of the dice smart businesspeople don’t make without favorable projections, at least. It bodes very well for what SGF might be able to attract talent-wise in the future, though it will continue to be a gradual climb up the ladder in this economy.

- I mentioned it during the performer announcement process, and I still feel the same way after the festival is over: I hope next year the lineup can begin to branch out into more genres. I know country music carries a lot of radio backing and has had good financial success locally in the last year-plus, but it didn’t have to make up 17 of the 20 Main Stage acts during the weekend. (That’s counting the Xtreme Musik Tour performers together rather than separately, by the way.)

- I feel bad for anyone who had to man a sponsor tent for the weekend. Traffic on that side of the festival grounds was thin to nonexistent, meaning those people sat in the heat with little to no crowd interaction to get them through. At least the carvinal-food trucks were a shorter walk for them.

- The Show-Me Saloon Stage (aka the second stage) was consistently excellent throughout the two days we were there. The local act who stood out the most to me, though, was Candy Coburn. Really put a lot of personality into her performance, more than I recall seeing in shows of hers I’ve been to in the past. That band is tight, too.

- Country singer Joe Nichols is a dead ringer for actor Matt Dillon, according to Alex. I have a hard time disagreeing. Decide for yourself.

- Gretchen Wilson is going to be disappointed when she reads this. “I used to shoot pool at that place down on South Street. Is it still there?” she called out to the crowd late in her set Saturday night. Gretchen, I’m pretty sure you’re referring to the two pool tables in the north end of The Junk Joint, and no, it isn’t there anymore. It’s a library now.

- After the relatively extravagant set put together by the Xtreme Musik Tour of Wilson, Big & Rich, Cowboy Troy and 2 ft. Fred, with lighting built into risers, a bar counter onstage and more, the spare stage setup by Train for Saturday night’s final show was almost jarring. Additionally, there was a fair portion of the crowd that headed home after the former show wrapped up. In hindsight it might have been better to flip the two sets around and let Xtreme Musik headline to end things with more of a bang.

- Big & Rich put on a better live show than I would have previously given them credit for. They harmonize as well together live as they do on record. However, what I hadn’t noticed in hearing songs, but picked up on during the stage show, was how effectively each one covers for the other’s limitations as a singer. Big Kenny‘s relatively narrow range and John Rich‘s lack of low register are each beautifully masked when singing in unison, which explains why they do it so much. Here’s hoping neither decides pursue a solo career.

- I’m going to squash this right now before SGF goes on any longer thinking it had a below-the-radar celebrity moment: Jessie James was kidding with you when she said Chris Daughtry was playing bass for her Saturday. This was not the former American Idol contestant and current Top-40 power-rock singer playing said bass during the show. I checked into it and the tattoos on his arms don’t match. Then there are the subtle differences in head and ear shape. I have officially stared at Daughtry pictures for much, much too long trying to figure this out for you, SGF. Just take my word for it.

- Is there some unwritten rule I’m not aware of that says you have to do at least one cover in your live set? I don’t think 90 minutes of original music is a lot to ask of any musician who has at least three records to his or her credit, and all of the musicians present at the fest did. But every last one of them did not one but multiple covers at some point. Some did entire medleys. You have your own songs. They’re the reason you’re here. Stop. it.

- Silver lining of the covers beef, and winner of Best Cover of the Festival: Little Big Town doing a bluegrass-ized version of Lady Gaga‘s “Born This Way.” Better than the real thing, actually.

- Dear Little Big Town singer Karen Fairchild, thanks for playing to the photographers and making “great eye contact.” XOXO, Alex Stocksdale.

- Another surprisingly good performance, this time from Sunday night: OneRepublic. Singer Ryan Tedder‘s energy is formidable, and he sings with more vigor than 80% of the frontmen you’ll see out there. Good sense of theatre, both in music and in performance. They won some admirers from among the decidedly pro-country crowd, and deservedly so, even if their set seemed to wrap up about 15 minutes earlier than it had to.

- It hurt me a little to type that last paragraph.

- Memo to Tim McGraw’s tour handlers: Learn some class. If my calculations are right, working media shared a tent with VIP meet-and-greet crowds and musicians for 2.84 days without problems or intrusions. No photos of the acts except by the approved meet-and-greet photographer? Okay. No interviews? Got it. When it came time for Mr. McGraw to emerge from his bus and meet the line of contest winners and high-roller attendees, though, the media was escorted not only out of the VIP/Media tent but out of the entire restricted-access area, exiting through the Media Entrance in mid-job to wait until McGraw was done commiserating. Unnecessary and disrespectful. One photographer wound up sitting on the grass next to the gate, editing pictures on his laptop. There was no choice; there were deadlines to meet. The rest stood around and wondered what just happened. I thought of asking if I could have my red stapler back but decided to hold my tongue… Oh. Oops.

- Thank you, camera gods, for smiling on our troubled Canon EOS 400 long enough to get concert shots of Tim McGraw. Enduring the heat for so many hours Sunday and coming home without the biggest-name act captured for posterity would have turned Sunday night’s victory beer into several @&*!^%#$ beers.

- Thank you also to the camera’s owner, Alex, for giving it one more try when there was no evidence one more try would matter.

- That victory beer felt good. So did not sweating in the sun anymore.

I have no doubt you’re already aware that Springfield voters passed laws yesterday banning smoking in public places and the sale of beer and wine at movie theaters with lots of minors in them. Another blow against fun, some say. A violation of rights, others say. But this isn’t The Civil Liberties Blog, so I’ll leave such discussions for elsewhere. This is The Music Blog, so what do these laws–particularly the not-so-affectionately nicknamed “Smoking Ban”–mean for live music in SGF?

A whole lot of good.

As Grad School and J.O.B. Public House owner Daniel Schlink once pointed out in an interview, bars in Springfield are almost never simply places to walk into and have a drink; they have something else to help bring people in, some kind of hook. Therefore, you have sports bars, karaoke bars, Irish bars, piano bars, dance clubs and music venues. Music venues offer what is probably the most reliable hook, namely seeing a live concert. The people going to music venues do so either to see a specific band or bands or to be around music and fellow music lovers. Will they stop doing so because they can’t smoke a cigarette or pipe in those rooms? In a word, no, partially because drinking and smoking are secondary reasons to be in the venue and partly because there isn’t an alternative bar in which to smoke. What will happen instead is a quiet, gradual return of people who stopped going to shows because the physical effects they felt from attending–I have been told of burning eyes, coughing and wheezing and even nausea–became what they felt was too much con for the pro of the music. More people at the shows means more revenue for bar and bands alike, both of which are pluses.

Wait a minute, DeRosh. You’re saying the dedication of the smokers to going to shows won’t waver as a result of the ban while admitting the dedication of the nonsmokers did waver, since they’re “coming back.” So the more dedicated should suffer?

You can frame the decision that way if you so choose. Again, I’m not discussing fairness here. Each side works hard at protecting its own point of view on the matter. I’m merely saying the music-going experience will benefit. Case in point: The Rhythm & Boom concert series held each Friday evening at Lindberg’s, which is a smoke-free event in a venue that normally allows smoking. The series regularly enjoys excellent turnouts, and while you could argue that other factors such as earlier start time and lowered volume contribute to the numbers there can be little doubt the smoke-free environment plays its part. Other events such as the Queen City Shout month of showcases at Borders were created for the same reasons. There is demand for such shows.

If there’s so much demand for smoke-free shows the venues would have become smoke-free a long time ago.

Not true, and for one simple reason: Businesses are really bad at telling customers “no.” Saying “no” means losing business. As you can tell by the numbers in the polls, almost as many smokers voted against the ban as voted for it. In a world where smoking remained legal and the venues made the call themselves, they would have been sending away a lot of business to other bars that still let people light up. Now the businesses don’t have to say “no;” they just have to say, “The law says no.” The City of Springfield takes on the role of bad guy and the music venues–all bars, really–reap the benefits.

Let’s not forget another important benefit we can’t even quantify yet: better show quality, at least among bands with singers. The effect of the smoke on lung capacity, throat tissue and vocal cords certainly isn’t doing our frontmen and women any favors, so it’s more than possible you could hear some notes carried longer, a vocal range or two increase slightly and less late-show fatigue. This may not be a huge difference among bands playing 45- to 60-minute sets, but for a group holding down three or four hours around SGF it could be huge.

There are certainly parts of the new smoking law that range from confusing and seemingly unnecessary (the inclusion of open-air restrictions) to downright unlikeable (the potentially devastating effects on places such as The Albatross, a hookah lounge and upscale tobacco retail shop downtown that derives a significant amount of revenue from hookah smoking). But the local music community, while it will hem and haw in the short term, will experience a net gain from The Smoking Ban. Now if only we could get the City of Springfield to revisit another ban just one more time…

Logistics, you b****. News came down late yesterday on the Springfield News-Leader‘s website that this year’s I Love America festival, the annual fireworks display and daylong concert put on by James River Assembly near Springfield Underground every July 4, has been canceled for 2011. According to the article, the reason for the cancellation is none other than another Springfield Underground event: The Show-Me Music & Arts Festival–or, more specifically, the post-event cleanup time set aside for it. The two events were theoretically scheduled two weeks apart: SMMAF for June 17–19, I Love America for July 4. Between cleaning up after a three-day music, comedy and chef festival and setting up a one-day music and fireworks extravaganza there just isn’t enough time for the volunteer crews to do everything. With too much money and scheduling time already invested into SMMAF, I Love America lost the staring contest, so to speak.

That’s a pretty big scheduling oversight, to be honest, particularly when you consider there is only one day I Love America can happen each year so it has effectively been on the books since the end of last year’s event. However, it’s important to note the article doesn’t say the event is permanently dead, only that it’s canceled for this year. If I Love America returns next year, though, someone–James River Assembly, the Springfield Underground land donors, the SMMAF organizers–will have to make accommodations to avoid another events clash. That, or it may spell the end of using the Springfield Underground land for free, as it’s possible that if SMMAF’s organizers paid for the right to use the property for their festival it added to their leverage in the “which event stays” discussion. Maybe logistics isn’t the real b**** here, but just business.

So what can the closing of a bookstore mean for local music? In the case of the closing of Borders (3300 S. Glenstone Ave.), one of the 30% of locations the Wall Street Journal reports will be shuttered, the impact is two-pronged. On one hand you have the store’s local CD section, one of the larger and more diverse I’ve seen in the city. On the other hand is Queen City Shout, now in its sixth year of showcasing local acts in an earlier, family-friendly (i.e. no smoking or drinking) and often acoustic environment every weekend in February. Who better to explain where both of those things are headed, then, than Eddie Gumucio, a longtime SGF musician and the man who both ran Borders’s music department and created Queen City Shout.

Gumucio no longer works for Borders, having left the store in the latter part of last year to pursue a teaching career and to finish his master’s degree in teaching. He keeps in close contact with many of his former coworkers, though, and while there has been no announced day on which the store will close for good he says the speculation among the staff is that the closing will come sometime in March. Queen City Shout VI is already on to a new location, though, as the coffee shop area that housed the Friday- and Saturday-evening concerts closed last week. The last remaining performances for this year will take place at Big Momma’s Coffee & Espresso Bar (217 E. Commercial St.). As for the future of the series, it’s a safe bet Gumucio won’t let it just slip away now that it needs a new home. “It’s always been my baby,” he says, and because of that he has been out ahead of the news somewhat, talking to SGF music venues and coffee shops alike to expand and diversify the concert series in time for 2012. The room(s) will be different next year, but Gumucio says you can expect the early start times, family-friendly environment and nonprofit ties to local organizations such as The Kitchen to carry over unchanged.

What can’t currently be replaced with Borders’s closing is its local CD section, which, as I mentioned earlier in this column, was possibly the largest in the city. To quantify it a bit, Gumucio says the local CD rack at Borders held works from as many as 60 local artists at its peak, with between four and 10 albums from each, depending on the consignment agreement. Given that the average consignment was for about six albums, that makes for 300+ albums, all from or around SGF and from different times in the scene’s life, available for one to peruse and purchase during the store’s eight years in the city. Did they sell a lot? Not usually; according to Gumucio, better-known local acts such as The Ozark Mountain Daredevils and Big Smith moved a few CDs per week, while most others did a few per month or per year and some bands only sold a handful of albums during the entire consignment. Most bands sold more albums at their shows than they ever would in a store. But in spite of their sometimes-slow sales Borders kept them on the shelf, committing space that could easily have gone to something else had the store given in to bean counting. Gumucio says none of the local albums brought to the store were pre-screened and he never turned an album away in his time there. That openness, in his opinion, is the greatest loss to local music. “I think it’s going to hurt a majority of artists as far as feeling empowered,” he says. “It’s just kind of a limb for the scene that’s not there.”

It’s only natural that Gumucio feel a little biased toward the store he worked at and the department he ran, but even taking that into account I think he has a point. There are still a handful of stores in SGF where you can buy local albums, but SGF has few friends in the big-box corporate world where Average Joe America goes to buy things. The loss of one is a blow, and while the severity of that blow is open for debate the idea of an avenue closing–particularly for the no-budget homemade musicians without the affiliations or leverage to get distributed on other store shelves–doesn’t sit well with the idealist in me. Seeing the real impact will have to wait until musicians get all their CDs back from consignment. You may notice some taller stacks of albums artists have for sale at Queen City Shout VII next year.

Wanna know where you can still buy local-music albums in SGF? Here’s the list we’ve compiled.

You can blame Lil’ Wayne for this column. I was listening to a Drake mixtape last week on which Wayne did some guest spots and a thought rose through the muck of my brainwaves that made my stomach turn a little: Hip hop lyrics are falling into a serious creative rut, and the simile is a major culprit. Remember that little descriptive device? Grade-school English classes (or phonics, depending on your age) taught us similes are a comparison between two things, usually using the word “like” or “as” to do the comparing. Have you ever thought about how often rappers say something is like something else? I have, but it helps that I work with words for a living. Snoop Dogg practically rebuilt his career with the phrase “drop it like it’s hot” a few years ago. Lil’ Wayne drops a new simile in his raps an average of one every 30 seconds (yes, I counted). Can the man topping the Billboard charts and practically fawned over by other music mags such as Rolling Stone really be that dependent on one way of expressing himself? Yup. He hit an all-time rut with his hit “Lollipop,” in fact, using 27 similes in a little more than four minutes. Yeah, I know, “l-l-l-lick it like a lollipop” gets repeated a lot, but I’m grading harshly here, and let’s face it: Repeating a line over and over again doesn’t win you creativity points, no matter how you look at it. Nas‘s “Nas Is Like” tallied almost the same number when it came out in 1999, and he was once hailed as one of hip hop’s best lyricists. How did this happen?

Once I noticed it with Wayne I started paying attention elsewhere, even doing a little hand count. Most of modern mainstream hip hop seems to average about a simile and a half per minute–not as bad as the examples above, but a lot considering they stand out more than metaphors (where something “is” something else, rather than “like” it) because of the word repetition. It wasn’t always that bad, though. Going back to the beginning, more or less–to the longest, wordiest hip hop song I could think of, Sugar Hill Gang‘s “Rapper’s Delight”–I thought surely this would produce a high ratio. If you count “wave [your hands] like you just don’t care”–which I am, here, to be consistent–the song totaled six in six minutes. “I Ain’t No Joke” by Eric B & Rakim had four in four minutes. Public Enemy used almost none in its raps that I could find. In other words, the old school wasn’t leaning on any one lyrical device; they wrote rhymes naturally and let whatever was going to result do so. The similes were there, but they didn’t stand out relative to anything else. They were a handful of rain drops in a sea of words.

So when did that change? It appears to have started in a subtle way on the album that changed hip hop as we know it forever: Dr. Dre‘s The Chronic in 1991. With slower beats Dre and Snoop Dogg (hmmm… I typed that name earlier…) had less to pack into the songs lyrically and more time to say it all in, so the lyrics became less free-flowing and more truncated and impactful. Beat structure in popular hip hop has slowly but steadily gotten slower ever since, and lyrics have slowed, shortened and tried to become more memorable, too. Indeed, the most simile-packed song I found in my research was on The Chronic–”Nothin’ But A ‘G’ Thang,” which told us 28 times something was like something or as much something as something else. Even if you take out the “It’s like this, that and this” chorus, it still comes to about half as many instances, which was still an absurd number in those days. The arrival of what became known then as “underground” hip hop in the late ’90s–ironically led by artists who wanted to “take hip hop back to the old school” before gangsta rap changed its image–made matters worse. For example, Mos Def used 15 similes on his breakout song “Universal Magnetic” in 1997 and teamed up with Talib Kweli a year later for Mos Def & Talib Kweli Are Black Star, an album that continued the trend. As some have rightly pointed out, many of these particular similes were very good and the album won widespread acclaim, but, as often happens in music, the standard was set high early and those who followed diluted the idea. What started as the increased use of a device because it’s a key part of poetry became “make that a** jump like shczerp, shczerp.” I sense we’ve gone astray here.

I’m ready for what’s next. It’s time to bring real wit, originality and lyricism back to popular hip hop. Some artists are more or less guilty than others, but it will take conscious effort to move forward rather than complacently slide back. Lil’ Wayne and Snoop Dogg, I’m talking to you and everyone who has ever learned from you. It’s like that. Do something about it.

Now it’s your turn. Am I way off? Am I paying too much attention? Do I need better hobbies? Let me have it, good or bad, in the comments below. (Negative points for use of similes. I kid, I kid.)

Russell could be asking the same question at some local shows as he did in the arena.

Honestly, I hate KISS, but in an exaggerated way they have a point. As a teenager, when a lot of my musical opinions and biases were formed, I rebeled against KISS because I thought they were more about spitting blood and fire onstage and coordinated robo-swaying than they were about playing music. Really, KISS? No improvisation? No jammed-out guitar solos? Not even a shred of in-the-moment creativity? As a kid raised on ska and punk shows and their spontanaeity, it made no sense to me. Who wants to see a band be a living, breathing jukebox?

I still hate KISS, but now it’s mostly with the understanding that they don’t write interesting songs. The rest of their schtick I get, and I think that comes from the last six years of watching live shows in SGF. Love them or loathe them, the members of KISS understood–and understand–that their job is to entertain an audience, and the job of an entertainer often means doing more than his or her particular gift. Even the shows I grew up going to held an audience’s attention by moving around–even having people join the band just to do more of it, shout-out to Bosstone on the far right–and it never occurred to me back then that it was a different approach to the same thing. By contrast, I watch far too many local bands fall into the routine of playing their instruments with no motion, no sign of passion and no consideration of the audience’s attention. Want the people in the seats to pay attention to the show? Make them. Really get into what you’re doing and what you’re playing. Make the crowd believe that the only thing that matters to you for the next hour is getting it to enjoy your songs as much as you do. I have watched Shawn Eckels of Speakeasy play guitar solos from the tops of customers’ tables, carefully sidestepping drinks while stomping his feet, and Ran Cummings III do everything short of strip naked and light himself on fire during The Dirty Blondes‘ heyday. More recently, The BoogeyMen, whose music is already original and engaging, add in costumes and hilarious onstage banter while playing to complete their performance. The show doesn’t come before the performance, but the performance is only part of the show. There’s no need to go all Gene Simmons on it, but bands need to understand that they are not playing the show, they are the show, and if people don’t feel as if they got a show for their cover charge and beer money they will not keep coming back. KISS built an empire on this knowledge, and it would be nice to see some band that are actually good cultivate a following with it, too.

So what do you think? Should I be fed to the lions for my take? Is KISS the best thing ever to happen to your music-loving life? Let me have it, good or bad, below. I’ll put my Gladiator suit on.*

*Not really.