{"id":31905,"date":"2019-05-10T03:14:54","date_gmt":"2019-05-10T07:14:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.runkevinrun.com\/?p=31905"},"modified":"2019-05-10T03:14:54","modified_gmt":"2019-05-10T07:14:54","slug":"what-if-you-gave-a-concert-and-no-one-came","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/runkevinrun.com\/?p=31905","title":{"rendered":"What If You Gave A Concert… and No One Came?"},"content":{"rendered":"

You don’t understand the humiliation of it… to be tricked out of the single assumption that makes our existence bearable. That somebody is watching. We are actors, we are the opposite of people. […] We need an audience!<\/p>\n

-Player, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Friends, runners, Geneveans.\u00a0 I come not to bury Son of a Bach<\/a>… I come to kinda, sorta, back-handedly praise them?<\/p>\n

I had assumed this heavy metal styled cover band for the works of Johann Sebastian Bach were “a thing.”\u00a0 It felt like a thing.\u00a0 Read that description again — doesn’t that sound like “a thing?”\u00a0 The band consists of two brothers — one on guitar, one on drums.\u00a0 And they… well… try and out Falco Falco’s Rock Me Amadeus<\/em>, flip the symphonic Rolling Stones, and ultimately put on a show about Bach.<\/p>\n

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Doors were to open at 7 for an 8 o’clock show.\u00a0 One listing shows the duration as 240 minutes (!!) which had to be a misprint I thought.<\/p>\n

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But unlike the 3 hour 40 minute opera I opted out of due to length, part of me was intrigued by a Bach-metal-marathon of FOUR HOURS and felt like if it was going to be 4 hours that was definitely something to see.\u00a0 It wound up being closer to 95 minutes with a somewhat inexplicable 15 minute intermission.<\/p>\n

So I buy my ticket — 30 CHF or a little under $30 USD.\u00a0 The doors are open but nobody is there.\u00a0 Oh, sure, the ushers are there, checking my wristband just after I received it from the ticket booth and walked two steps.\u00a0 Inside there was… no one.\u00a0 I mean, literally no one.\u00a0 I was alone.\u00a0 In a giant foyer.\u00a0 Eventually a guy with a camera showed up — he was sporting a CREW shirt so I assumed (rightly it would turn out) he was the band’s videographer.<\/p>\n

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The theater doors opened around 7:40 and I went inside.\u00a0 It was a decent sized concert hall with pretty comfortable foldable theater seats arranged in rows.\u00a0 As a General Admission, open ticket I planned on getting here a little early to figure out a decent vantage point and not get smooshed into a mosh pit of Bach-heads.\u00a0 Turns out I needn’t have worried.\u00a0 I sat down in the 4th row, a little off center, figuring, that seemed about right<\/p>\n

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Slowly a few others trickled in but I got the impression everybody knew each other.\u00a0 Patrons 2 and 3 certainly knew patrons 5, 6 and 7.\u00a0 I texted family and friends giving them real time attendance figures.\u00a0 It was a big moment when we broke double digits with patrons 9 and 10’s arrival a few minutes before curtain.\u00a0 That they sat right in front of me in a cavernous and almost empty theater was gobsmacking.\u00a0 Seriously?\u00a0 Seriously?!\u00a0 But out of spite I refused to move.\u00a0 It would’ve been oh-so-easy for me to do so.\u00a0 I had a pick of literally hundreds of seats, and that doesn’t even count the balcony!<\/p>\n

As the bell ringer indicated the show was about to begin, I double counted the crowd — 14 of us were here to see Son of a Bach.<\/p>\n

Maybe they’re just not that big in Switzerland?\u00a0 I hear they’re big in Germany.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

How to describe Son of a Bach beyond the heavy metal infused coverings of JS Bach’s works?<\/p>\n

A quick bit of backstory: Twenty some years ago I wrote a stoner comedy spec script in a week’s time called “Two Guys and Bach.”\u00a0 It was about two guys (obviously), 20-somethings, who needed a new roommate… and got stuck with a Belushi-inspired never-explained eternally 45-ish Johann Sebastian Bach.\u00a0 My Bach was sick of his “old hits” and was always annoyed at people standing at his concerts for those “silly ditties” and sitting down for his new sounding work.\u00a0 He was kinda a heavy metal Bach too.\u00a0 But he also through the magic of storytelling made the two guys realize what they had to do to grow as people and learn valuable lessons and also outwit a drug lord (who also was a big Bach fan!).\u00a0 It was a surprisingly tight script for having been written in a week and I really thought in the era of “Dude, Where’s My Car?” I had a shot at it being “a thing.”\u00a0 It… was not.<\/p>\n

I kept thinking about that script and its place in the universe as I watched Son of a Bach.\u00a0 I was prepared to pooh-pooh and snigger my way through the performance.\u00a0 Even moreso as I came to realize that 13 of the 14 of us in the crowd knew the band or were their family and had probably gotten comp’d tickets and I was the only one who paid to see them.\u00a0 But then I realized how much these friends and family probably paid to support the brothers.\u00a0 Whatever my take on them — and to be honest, they were technically quite good I thought as musicians — they were out here, doing something they clearly loved, having spent hours and hours putting this together.\u00a0 And even though only 14 of us were in the audience, they still got out there and played.\u00a0 Not perfectly mind you — they could use some work on their banter for example.\u00a0 I say this because there was NO banter whatsoever.<\/p>\n

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They’d played a song or two and then they left the stage, replaced after a VERY long light fade out\/in on a solo violinist.<\/p>\n

Again, technically a marvel, Julian Helms used electronic looping of what he just played to create background tracks for his ongoing fiddlin’.\u00a0 It was a bit improv and a bit planned out.\u00a0 I had seen such techniques employed to great effect in Joe DiPietro’s Ernest Shakleton Loves Me<\/a>.\u00a0 Here, some of Helms’s tunes were good, some were “meh.”\u00a0 But he played with heart, feeling, passion and gusto.<\/p>\n

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As he wrapped up a short set, the lights dimmed, he left and the house lights came on.\u00a0 We all sat there.\u00a0 Confused.\u00a0 It had been about 40 minutes — 20 minutes or so for each performer.\u00a0 Was that it?\u00a0 Had I paid a little less than a dollar a minute of show tunes?\u00a0 Finally the house manager came out and spoke to us all in French.\u00a0 I’m pretty sure I heard “Pause” and “quinze” which I took to mean 15 minute intermission.<\/p>\n

I felt myself conflicted.\u00a0 Here were guys working hard to entertain, maybe even enlighten.\u00a0 And there were so few of us here.\u00a0 And I wasn’t even sure I should be there.\u00a0 I had this deeply philosophical internal debate on the meaning and meaninglessness of life.\u00a0 It was a true existential crisis of conscience… both personally and yet at a macro level as well.\u00a0 What’s it all about, Charlie Brown?\u00a0 What’s the point?\u00a0 Does it even matter?\u00a0 We sit on the brink of a global financial meltdown due to crazed trade war saber rattling and ill-timed tweets.\u00a0 We sit on the brink of an actual world war with geopolitical tensions and Santayana-ian repeats of history past with rising and unchecked authoritarian regimes.\u00a0 The natural world is threatened on a human scale — by that I mean, I believe the Earth will survive but I’m not sure we will given cataclysmic climate change created by our own actions.<\/p>\n

And yet… here were these guys.\u00a0 Doing what they loved.\u00a0 Giving it their all even though it felt like it was for 13 of their friends and families and one random guy who walked in off the street.\u00a0 Is there method to that madness?\u00a0 Is there not hope to be gained from that?\u00a0 Or is it just… words, words?\u00a0 Much ado about nothing?<\/p>\n

I had planned on writing this last night but I wasn’t ready.\u00a0 I’m not sure I’ll ever *be* ready.\u00a0 Maybe Son of a Bach changed me… if all of life’s moments are viewed through a prism that says choice A leads to one timeline and choice B leads to another, then everything we do matters in some way.\u00a0 Why not choose to do something we love even if all it does is spark our own internal joy?\u00a0 Because maybe, just maybe, we our choices impact the lives of others.\u00a0 Even if it’s just family and friends… and one random guy who walked in off the street.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

Before I go once more exploring, I sneaked some video of the performance.\u00a0 Who knows if I was allowed to or not.\u00a0 The band DID have their own videographer as I said.\u00a0 Still, I figured it unlikely they’d kick me out.<\/p>\n

So these youtube videos should give a flavor of the sound and vision of Son of A Bach.<\/p>\n

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