[Perry] To Be A Rock Star

It was a fairly random occurrence, but I caught a concert at the Air Canada Center with a friend last week.

Jack White was in town, playing a few shows. My friend scored a few tickets and asked me if I wanted to check it out.

I wasn’t too familiar with Jack White, but a little research and a little listening showed that he’s one of those artists that I hear all the time, I just never really knew their name.

And, it turns out that a song that I’d heard a lot and fallen in love with in the last little while, Love Interruption, was done by him as well.

So I agreed.

Once the end of July rolled around, we met up downtown to check it out.

It had been quite a while since I was last at a concert.

I’d forgotten what it was like.

The show was suitably awesome. Lot of flashing lights. Good music. Great crowd. Jack White puts on a good show. He wasn’t one of those ones who just got up on stage, played his sets and bailed.

There was a lot of audience interaction going on as well.

And as I watched this man gyrate and dance on stage, wailing away on his guitar…I couldn’t help but wonder, you know?

What must it be like?

To be up on that stage?

Gods, it must be some kinda thing, you know? I mean, being a well-known writer is something I aspire to…but from what I saw at that concert? Being a rock star must be some completely different level of fame altogether.

What must it be like?

To step out on stage and to hear over ten thousand people just losing their goddamned minds?

To be the object of all that adulation, praise, lust, and frenzy?

Gods, what must it be like to be the object of ALL of that communal energy? And to not just take it in, you know? Not just bask in that energy, but to take it in, transmute it into energy of your own and to reflect it back to the audience? To hear them take that amplified energy and feed it right back to you?

To be caught up in that cycle of recursive feedback, frenzy feeding creation, feeding further frenzy?

What must it be like?

To have SO many people so familiar with your body of work that their combined voices, bereft of amplification can fill the entire stadium? To hear them, singing your words right back at you whenever you give them half the chance?

What must it be like?

To command an audience of thousands, of thousands of people? Where all you need to do it clap over your head once or twice and get EVERYONE clapping in time with you as you launch into your next song?

Where all you need to do is zing that last chord change hard, beckon to the audience in a big “come on!” gesture and to HEAR them singing along the next line or two of your song?

Where you can cut off the guitar playing and hear the entire goddamned audience, chanting the choral accompaniment to the song you’re on?

Gods…what must that be like?

It’s art and creation…but it’s art with goddamned violent feedback. An audience of thousands, wrapped up in paroxysms of excitement at the simple fact that you’re standing there, playing the music they’d fallen in love with…

Thousands of people, hanging on your every word, hanging onto every note.

To be so overcome with that energy that you can’t help but dance about on stage as you play, taking the briefest of breaks to step up to the mic and spit out the next line of your song before you start bouncing.

To get to that point where you can’t HELP but to move. To bounce. To jump as you play. Just so much energy that you can barely contain it…that you can’t deal with it.

That you have to explode it out of you with your voice, with your fingers slashing down on guitar strings, with your legs propelling you round and round the wide expanse of the brightly lit stage like a drunk after last call.

…God, what must that be like?

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