For a week in August, the whole state of Rhode Island tried to guess which superstar was playing a free show on Narragansett beach, and the summer's biggest live-music story turned out to be one artist quietly building her own festival. Last Saturday at the Great Park in Irvine, Olivia Rodrigo opened the first Daisy Chain Fields, a one-day, all-women bill stacked with the people who cleared her road: Bikini Kill, the Breeders, Chappell Roan, Doechii, Mitski, Garbage. It raised $20 million for ten charities. Then she pulled the one thing nobody saw coming, walking Alanis Morissette out for "Ironic" and flipping "beautiful wife" to "beautiful husband" live, after Karen O had to drop out that week. In a summer of cancellations and hospital statements, somebody built the good thing on purpose.
The Long Take
Why the concert canon is really just a ranking of footage
Sixty years ago last Saturday, the Beatles walked off a stage at Candlestick Park in San Francisco into the wind and fog and never played a full concert again. Their last song was "Long Tall Sally." Eleven songs, thirty-three minutes, a ballpark that was not even full.
The greatest concerts ever played are not on anybody's list. The canon is not a record of the best nights. It is a record of the nights somebody filmed.
Every "greatest concerts of all time" list runs the same ten entries. Woodstock. Live Aid. The Last Waltz. The Beatles at Shea, where nobody could hear a note, the band included. Those shows made the list because a camera was in the building.
Rolling Stone marked the Candlestick anniversary this month with a feature and a 176-page book of Jim Marshall's photographs, the one shooter the band let backstage that night. It is a gorgeous record of a show almost nobody in the park could actually hear.
Two weeks from now another one turns round. Michael Jackson's two shows at Madison Square Garden hit 25 years on September 7 and 10, the last time the Jackson 5 stood on a stage together, with Britney and Whitney and Slash and half of pop in the wings. Taped for CBS. The second night was September 10, 2001.
The obvious answer is that those shows are remembered because they were great, and the camera just happened to be there to catch it. I do not buy it. The camera does not follow greatness. Greatness gets assigned to whatever the camera caught. The best show you saw last year had no film crew, no anniversary, no photo book. You were there. That was the whole record.
The Beatles quit the road in the fog and it took sixty years to matter. Your Tuesday night in a 200-cap room mattered that night. No footage required.
Concert Law #14: The best show you'll see this year is one you weren't planning to go to.
The best show you'll see this year is one you weren't planning to go to.
This Week in Shows
Maroon 5 played a free beach show as a stranger's birthday party. For a week, Rhode Island locals guessed at the "mystery superstar" booked onto Narragansett Town Beach; it was Maroon 5, hired by philanthropist Joseph P. Healey as his own 60th-birthday party and thrown open to the public for nothing. It is the third decade-marking beach blowout Healey has staged. A full headline set, a whole town on the sand, no ticket price.
Reading and Leeds went all-British and buried its best sets in a tent. The bigger story is not that the UK's biggest festival ran its first all-British-and-Irish headliner slate in a quarter century, Charli XCX and Dave and Florence and Fontaines D.C. up top. It is that the two moments people actually talked about were off the main stage: Royal Blood packing the Gallery tent for a "less than secret" 45-minute set, and Jamie T opening the main stage on a slot he reportedly asked for at the last minute. The billing is the ad. The tent is the festival.
Kehlani's canceled East Coast dates now have new ones. If you were holding a ticket, here is what you need: after a hospital visit for severe pain and difficulty swallowing, Kehlani rescheduled the Camden show to September 5 and the Columbia, Maryland show to September 6. The tour resumed as planned on August 29 in Richmond. Get well, and hang onto the stub.
Twisted Sister are ending a nine-year retirement in an Alaska fairground. Their first U.S. show since November 2016 is not a stadium or a reunion tour marquee. It is September 4 at the Alaska State Fair in Palmer, part of the band's 50th-anniversary run. The only-in-Alaska first stop is the whole story.
The date of the Moondog Coronation Ball in Cleveland, widely considered the first rock and roll concert, thrown by DJ Alan Freed. It is not on any greatest-concerts list either.
Fan Debate
At BTS's two sold-out nights at Soldier Field, somebody on the floor stood through the show in a full-size inflatable koala suit, trying to get the band's attention, and the clip split everyone who saw it. One side called it selfish, another pointed out he was off to the corner and hurting no one. It is the same argument fans have been having all year about boards and posters lifted the second an artist gets close, just with a better costume. There is a real question under the gag: what do you owe the people standing behind you? Harmless fun, or did the koala owe everyone back there a clear sightline?
B-Sides
Neon City Festival went the free route too. A free downtown Las Vegas festival lands November 20 to 22 with Fat Joe, Kaskade, Marshmello, Subtronics and The Fray, a rare marquee-names-no-ticket-price play in a year of cancellations. Two of the week's best-value tickets both cost nothing.
YENA got the band back for one night. She closed her "Smiley" encore run in Seoul in tears, with a surprise on-stage IZ*ONE reunion, the kind of moment you cannot stage on purpose.
Toni Braxton's Secrets Tour turns 30. The road run behind the diamond-certified album ("Un-Break My Heart") hit its round number this week, a quiet R&B anniversary in a summer short on them.
The Bit
Filed under service journalism: at a One Direction show in Philadelphia in 2015, Harry Styles spotted a fan's homemade sign reading "Hi Harry, Your so nice," stopped the show, borrowed a marker, and corrected it to "you're" before signing it and handing it back. A stadium pop star pausing to fix an apostrophe remains the platonic form of the fan-sign genre.
The best show you will see this year is one you have not bought a ticket to yet. If you have a memory of a night no list will ever rank, that is exactly the kind of thing Concerts Remembered exists to keep.
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