St-St-Stages

"Every time I thought I'd got it made, it seemed the taste was not so sweet..."

Recently, on the main stage at Mighty Sounds Festival in the Czech Republic (or, as those mercurial psychopaths are now insisting we call it, Czechia), I asked one of the stage managers if we could bring a couple of audience members on stage. His answer was a stern: “no, is not possible.”

You see, at our shows we often do this Wurzels’ tune called the Wurple Diddle-I-Do song. It’s an absolutely amazing tune. It’s so amazing there are no recordings of it on Youtube. But basically we get some folks from the audience to come up and sing it with no practice, ‘cause it’s just shouty stompy gibberish and who doesn’t love shouty stompy gibberish. It’s one of my favorite moments of the show, you never know how it’s going to go or what people are going to do, and usually they are super happy to be up there.

But on the main stage at a large-ish festival, the stage that Rancid will be gracing the following evening? Nuuoooooooope. That stage has to be aggressively sealed off from any direct audience interaction or participation. The barrier will be about 25 feet from the stage, and there will be bald, scowly guys, usually named Pavel, standing with arms crossed glaring at the audience the entire time.

I know, a lot of bands work realy hard to get up on stages like that, and it’s a privilege to be up there. But I cut my teeth playing three sets a night directly in front of sweaty drunk people at pubs for years. And back then, even my earliest experience with a big stage—Barrymore’s Music Hall in Ottawa as I recall—left me feeling a little strange.

Now, the sharpest contrast here is with the stage we played in Brooklyn the other night, where they crammed 200 people into a 100 person room and ran us through a sound system so bad you couldn’t hear the violin or accordion. Where the overcrowding and lack of ventilation meant that the congealed sweat was dripping off the ceiling into everyone’s shouting, open mouths. What’s the opposite of social distancing? That. It was that. And yeah, it’s hilarious and fun but it’s not ideal.

But if I had too choose? Brooklyn, 100 times out of 100.

Because look. We believe in the folk music and respect it, but many of our songs aren’t that hard to play. In a crowd of 200 people I could probably pick out 6 who, if they banded together, could do our set quite well with 3 months’ practice. So it’s weird to be hanging out around/before shows and have people come up to you and talk to you like you’re some kind of god. I always want to say: "um, good chance you could do this too, but, ok, whatever”. I know that’s not 100% true but it’s like… 76% true. We literally just released an album full of songs we didn’t even write. There is more than enough musical talent in the world for 1,000,000 versions of the Dreadnoughts to exist. (this is true of most bands and they don’t want you to know that; they want you to think that their sound is some kind of deep secret spitritual alchemical magic that they pull from the depths of their extremely unique artistic souls, even if it’s just “RARR RRARRRRR FUCK IMPERIALISM RARRR RAARRRRR”.)¹

So when you’re up on a big stage and you can’t directly talk to or interact with folks, it feels like a scam. Like we’re pretending this is a big deal when it isn’t. Like we’re pretending it’s a spectacle when it’s supposed to be a communal thing. Where you can frickin’ get in there, you know? You know, like this:

But you know, the big shows make more money. Sooooo…. if you guys could just all agree to pay $100US/ticket, we could just skip the big stages and roll through small to mid sized clubs all the time. Who’s going to pledge to do that? Come on, it’s only money.

Anyway, I’m off now, an idea for a song just occurred to me; it goes “RRARRR RARRRR [cider] RAARRRR RARRRR.” See you in the pit!

1. Yeah, that’s for you Justin, you shitbag.