I’m about 1/2 hour into Peter Mulvey’s first set, my first in-person concert since BCE (Before the Covid Era), when I realize what I’ve missed most about live music in small places.
It’s not the woman behind the bar, lovely even behind her mask, though at my age a kind word and patient understanding about my hearing loss from a pretty woman with brown hair swept up into a messy bun goes a long way. Double when she suggests a good local IPA.
Not the quirky setting, the Yellow Cab Tavern in downtown Dayton, Ohio, home to art shows and food truck rallies, though I am psyched just being among the living in a place where the stage is just a few feet away and the audience only six rows of 10 chairs of various sorts scooted together for the concert.
Not the yeasty-mustiness you always smell in those old Midwestern downtown buildings turned into bars.
Not Peter’s songs themselves, as much as I love hearing them, watching his hands, trying to figure out some of the chords in his alternate tunings.
Not even even his stream-of-consciousness banter from which we learn:
1. he has just become a father for the first time at age 50;|
2. tonight will be the first time in months he’s gotten 8 hours sleep;
3. he is baffled that an infant with an undeveloped brain and no motor skills can so easily dominate two parents with many more decades of life experience between them.
“I’m so glad to be back up here after so long,” he says. “It seems like all of our lives ended in 2019. Now we’re in our second lives.”
And what I’ve missed most sure as hell isn’t the 3-hour drive from Crawfordsville to get here.
No, what I’ve missed most about watching live music I finally notice part way through Peter’s song, “The Trouble With Poets:”
The trouble with poets is they talk too much
They tell us it hurts them a little more
And we cannot tell if they make this up
We’ve never stood in their shoes, in skins, in their heads, on their shores
The trouble with you is you drive me nuts
I cannot tell what’s behind your smile
What can we find just to lift us up
Just for tonight, for a time, for the sake us of all for awhile
It’s during the little riff he plays off the chorus, before the next verse. I’m looking at his left foot and the toe isn’t just tapping, but the whole left leg’s going crazy to the beat. Bouncing back and forth, shuffling side to side, like it’s a whole different being hopping around that happens to be attached to, and driving the rhythm of, the guy playing that cool lead run to the next verse.
Later, as he plays the intro to the next song, “Everybody’s Gone,” it quiets down, keeping time to a tune in 6/8 as Peter sways back and forth.
“What really got me last year was realizing that the last time I saw my parents might really be the last time,” he says. “I told a friend this, and she said, ‘Does it help to know this is always the case.'”
But the leg leaps back to life when he plays “Shirt,” this upbeat once-in-a-lifetime kind of song that I’ve tried to learn—that he even showed me how to play once at a workshop—and I still can’t get right. Now I know why: I don’t have that crazy leg!
It’s the kind of thing you’d never notice in a virtual concert; the camera would be too close, or the videographer would see that leg going nuts and crop it out of frame. But here live I can hear Peter play and sing and watch him dance. I close my eyes when the lyrics or a guitar lick move me and still feel him clo
se by, still sense the energy from that voice, those chords, that crazy leg. And then I open my eyes and look around at the audience’s feet, notice all the different rhythms their feet are playing, or laugh my butt off and then stand with five or six other folks for an impromptu ovation when Peter finishes “Asshole in Space,” his parody of Jeff Bezos’ flight into the upper atmosphere in the Blue Origin.
“We should have moved the world
Before he came back down,” he sings.
“But we were too busy ordering a tripod.”
I don’t know the next song—not the name or even the tune. So my ears fix on the music and the man up front and my eyes go exploring, free to roam and absorb the entire room. And the symphony is all around me, bouncing off the walls and windows, and I can feel it on my face, vibrating the whiskers of my beard like I’m a damned walrus, like my body’s resonating with the Martin 000-15 Peter’s playing.
It’s a sonic massage, the words made fresh, as if someone turned on a lithotripter, one of those machines that uses shock waves to break up kidney stones: Non-invasive healing. And it’s cracking the crust of grief, fear, and resignation that has been hardening around me this past year and a half.
And pretty soon my right leg’s going crazy too, right along with Peter’s. A gentle shiver comes over me, just being back in this warm, rich, sweet smelling bath of sound I had missed so much and done without for so long that my body and all of its senses had forgotten what it’s like to be in a room with a musician and a guitar and 20 to 30 strangers all mixed into one by those vibrations. You know, present—both meanings—truly there and a great gift. He’s here for us, we’re here for him. It’s about as generous as the universe can be, and I had forgotten how it feels.
So, yeah, I cried. I wasn’t the only one.