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July 13, 2006
Artiste, with an e
I forget which member of which band said that Toronto crowds always behave like they're thinking about what to do after the show, but it remains a very apt observation. There's nothing quite like hearing a club show drowned out by people shouting a conversation at each other that they could have conducted for $15 less without pissing off their fellow citizens, to say nothing of the performers.
A very different but no less typical Toronto crowd was in evidence at Wilco's terrific show at Massey Hall on Friday, which began with a brand new song, stuck mainly to mid-tempo material, and offered pretty much zero crowd interaction for 13 songs. It was the best I've seen them play, and that's saying something. Jeff Tweedy's vocals in particular seem to have gained clarity and intensity, and the energy from the crowd was far greater than the last time I saw them.
Tweedy didn't quite see it that way. He finally opened his mouth only to lambaste the patrons for not "giving anything back." (This was on balance in good humour, although the paying customers were referred to as "motherfuckers".) "What haven't we done?" he asked, jokingly threatening to walk off.
This brought the room to its feet and many of those seated in the orchestra to the front of the stage. I was half expecting management to cut the power. But all of a sudden there was more energy, simply because the Torontonians had been exhorted to provide it. It wasn't that they'd been given "an invitation," as Tweedy later suggested. It's that he guilted them into it.
Most sober Torontonians think it terribly unseemly to dance around, stand up when they could be sitting down, yell, cheer or just generally indicate that they're willing to go a little mental over something as frivolous as a six-piece rock and roll band (or a baseball game, for that matter — Tweedy can ask Dave Winfield about that if he's interested). It's not a good quality, but it's not really a bad one either. It's just the nature of the beast. All Tweedy did was replace those inherent Torontonian inhibitions with a new one: fear of offending someone.
To turn a diffident Toronto crowd into a relatively rambunctious one, just add alcohol. Massey Hall is a superb venue, but a dry soft-seater in Toronto is never going to give a band like Wilco the same vibe as a dry soft-seater in an American college town. If it really bothers them, not to put too fine a point on it, they shouldn't play there (though that's admittedly easier said than done for a band that can sell 3,000 tickets in Toronto).
I wasn't offended by Tweedy's little outburst, but I could understand if others were. By my calculations, Wilco and Massey Hall had about $145,000 to split just in ticket sales from that gig. Wilco's demographic now contains more than a few fuddy-duddies who stubbornly believe that a $52 ticket comes with an expectation of showmanship, and the right to sit down if they so choose. As three-digit ticket prices and Ticketmaster auctions (aka legalized scalping) become more and more common, this disconnect is going to become an issue for more and more acts.
(There's also the matter of Tweedy's rather famous diatribes against crowds that are too boisterous, but I suppose critical darlings can have their cake and eat it too.)
Posted by Chris Selley at July 13, 2006 10:00 PM
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