here's why live music

You walk through double metal doors, plastered on all sides with old posters and advertisements thick and peeling like layers of caked-on makeup. The front room is dimly lit, cloaked in some kind of dark foreboding, musky with the smell of diffuse cigarette smoke seeping up from below. You buy your ticket and get your hand stamped by a large man on a stool who has stamped his own hand a dozen times, who looks at you wondering if music really is what gets you moving.

Your eyes turn down – narrow stairs lead to a small stage crowded with mics and amplifiers, a handful of guitars huddling around the maternal mass of a drum set. You take to the floor where fifty others – faceless forms gathered from all corners of the city – stand waiting to be moved, the smoke always drifting always shifting.

Out of the silence a lone drumbeat sounds – pounding and pulsing. Waiting. Calling for someone in the night, a beacon beating for the bruised. And then, an answer from somewhere deep, guttural: the bass guitar, smooth and confident – knowing his place, never wanting more never needing more. Then, as jealousy becomes the electric guitar she begins her lament – a single, fragile note tremulous and gossamer thin, but capable of turning without warning and cutting to the bone. And she cries now at the lights.

Through all of this you stand there, as the music builds – as the pieces fit together, as the voices flood from the microphones. You stand there, still at first – then slowly swaying as the music pulses through you, through the amps and the stage and the floor, up your legs and through your body until your own heartbeat is overpowered, overrun by this new rhythm. And you breathe, and bleed now to different time.

You stand there with fifty others – a brotherhood in the night, joined in this moment by the beat – moving together as one: one hundred hands, one hundred ears, two feet.