While I was down in Buffalo last week, I had the pleasure of attending the Music is Art celebration on the grounds of the world famous Albright Knox Art Gallery. The festival boasted over thirty bands playing on four stages throughout the day, and while I only heard a brief sampling of what was being offered, I enjoyed the experience. My contribution to the Buffalo music community was to purchase a 3 CD compilation, for the bargain basement price of ten bucks, featuring Buffalo bands from the 2006 festival. There are over sixty songs in the set and though I have only listened to one CD so far, I liked many of the songs I heard. Buffalo has always had a vibrant music scene, and though we usually hear about artists who make the big time, such as Ani DeFranco or The Goo Goo Dolls, there are plenty of good bands who do not make it.
Back in the days when I was young and wild, I used to frequent a music club in Buffalo called The Continental. In the early eighties, when punk and new wave music were just becoming big, this bar was pretty hot. Maybe it still is. Back then, MTV was in its infancy, and music videos played on monitors around the bar. I remember seeing now-defunct Buffalo bands like The Elements, Electroman, Paper Faces, and my favorite, The Celibates. There were moments of extreme joy as we, the collective audience, fueled by beer and cheap mixed drinks, throbbed in a frantic wave of mutual appreciation to songs like “Whipped Cream Girls”. No one but a few forty to fifty year old Buffalonians are likely to remember those bands, but the point is this. Local bands rock, and even though the hair band Eighties was not my favorite decade for music, I was and continue to be proud of my city’s contribution to the national music scene. Many of the really creative local bands typically flame out after a few years, realizing that local popularity or a CD release party is not a guarantee of fame, fortune, or even a decent living. Still, I applaud the fireworks, and to this day enjoy these local battle-of-the-bands-yer-fifteen-minutes-onstage-are-up-bub music extravaganzas. Ninety-nine point nine per cent of those bands will never reach more people than can fill a medium-sized bar, but if you happen to be there on the night they shine, it can be magical.
Back in the days when I was young and wild, I used to frequent a music club in Buffalo called The Continental. In the early eighties, when punk and new wave music were just becoming big, this bar was pretty hot. Maybe it still is. Back then, MTV was in its infancy, and music videos played on monitors around the bar. I remember seeing now-defunct Buffalo bands like The Elements, Electroman, Paper Faces, and my favorite, The Celibates. There were moments of extreme joy as we, the collective audience, fueled by beer and cheap mixed drinks, throbbed in a frantic wave of mutual appreciation to songs like “Whipped Cream Girls”. No one but a few forty to fifty year old Buffalonians are likely to remember those bands, but the point is this. Local bands rock, and even though the hair band Eighties was not my favorite decade for music, I was and continue to be proud of my city’s contribution to the national music scene. Many of the really creative local bands typically flame out after a few years, realizing that local popularity or a CD release party is not a guarantee of fame, fortune, or even a decent living. Still, I applaud the fireworks, and to this day enjoy these local battle-of-the-bands-yer-fifteen-minutes-onstage-are-up-bub music extravaganzas. Ninety-nine point nine per cent of those bands will never reach more people than can fill a medium-sized bar, but if you happen to be there on the night they shine, it can be magical.
I was in one of my old Buffalo watering holes about ten years ago, and I saw the former female lead singer for one of those old Buffalo bands I remember hearing at the Continental. I liked her band and thought she was cooler than James Dean, but there she now was, no longer the skinny, sullen bassist for a new wave band, but instead something akin to a soccer mom. Her band was simply a moment in time.
There is a line in the Rolling Stones song “No Expectations” off one of my favorite Stones albums “Beggar’s Banquet”, and it goes something like this: “Our love was like the water that splashes on a stone/ our love was like our music, it’s here and then it’s gone.” Music IS art, and like sidewalk art, sometimes it’s here and then it’s gone. Some of the best music I’ve heard is spontaneous, live, and unrecorded. In the purest form, live music, if you’re listening, forces you to be in the moment. I am reminded of a great line in a book I just read, written by a talented Buffalo writer named Greg Ames … “If you have one leg in the past and one leg in the future, you’re pissing on the present.” One of these days, I’m going to figure out how to be in the present on a regular basis; I think it’s a good place to be. In the meantime, it’s nice to have live music to remind me what that’s like.
Written by Jamie Oppenheimer c2009 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
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