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Let's hear
it for the death of the encore; The big rock-show finish is as dated
as platform shoes Copyright 1993 The Dallas Morning News
The moment swells and bursts like an overripe berry and, as the singer proclaims his love for whatever town he happens to be in, his band mates assume their backlit postures of heroic exhaustion. Under a wave of hands and a shower of guitar picks, they shuffle offstage with the weary swagger of those whose job is done. You know, as if they were leaving. Yet most people in the audience, far from gathering their things and heading for the exits, remain in place. Some cheer the empty stage. Others slump in their chairs, hands propping chins, waiting. You know, as if the show weren't over. There is a word for this odd phenomenon: encore. For all of rock 'n' roll's reputation for chaos and nonconformity, rock concerts over the years have become as ritual-bound as kabuki theater. And crowning the tradition is that most cherished rite of the encore. In rock's giddy youth, encores were a product of a fiery, fresh spirit a celebration of all-night-long excess and anything-goes volatility. Performers always have been called back after brilliant exhibitions by audiences greedy, in their gratitude, for more. But unlike the curtain calls that were the norm in other, more refined, forms of musical theater (vaudeville, for instance), rock 'n' roll demanded a finale suiting the spectacle it was capping. Encores became big, loud, long, numerous, and, above all else, spontaneous - a gift given by the band to the audience for helping to make the show so special. But something happens to a spontaneous act when repeated time and again: It ceases to be a spontaneous act. Institutionalized spontaneity is a ruse, whether it comes from the fast-food clerk who asks if you would like fries with that - as if it has just occurred to him that french fries would be a delicious complement to your burger or a rock band that says, "Thank you good night," as if it doesn't have another half-hour's worth of material to play no matter what. Let's pretend Through years piling into decades of the same "surprise" ending, encores have devolved from a symbol of rock's freewheeling ways into a shabby pretension. Like the topless bar dancer/patron ritual - you pretend you want to have sex with me, and I'll pretend I believe you - encores are an act of mutual denial. You pretend to go away, and I'll pretend I think you're leaving. "Man, I'll tell you, I am really tired of all that," says Tommy Stinson, former bassist for the Replacements, who has been touring since he joined that band at 11 and is on the road again with his new band, Bash & Pop. "Me and the guys I'm playing with talked about this before we started, and we all agreed it was just too stupid to ignore anymore. I'm not going to pretend anymore. If the crowd is pumped and wants more, then we'll give them more, but I'm not going to do an encore just because that's what you're supposed to do." His former band mate Paul Westerberg, also touring with a new band, echoes that sentiment. "I'm from the old school," says Mr. Westerberg, "where the rule is still, If they don't clap, forget 'em.'" Such ultimatums from fed-up musicians reflect the stifling level of cynicism under which encores are played out. Encores are still routine in the mainstream forum of arena rock, where Metallica, say, will play two or three encores to a crowd that screams throughout as if manna were falling from the rafters. But go to any alternative concert, and you will likely find a group of young fans so jaded they don't even bother to applaud for the encore anymore - why bother? The band is coming back anyway. It's enough to make one wonder why bands don't give up and abandon an old gimmick that has outlived its usefulness. Perhaps the reason is that, for the audience, anyway, a concert is still judged by its length and the intensity of its encores. Punk may have shattered the music world, and rap may have put the pieces back together in different designs, but in this context things haven't changed all that much from the days when a Led Zeppelin concert was great, not because the performances were vivid, not because the songs were brilliantly reinterpreted, but because they played four encores ("man"). "Yeah, that's pretty much true," says Jason Ringenberg, the front man of Jason and the Scorchers. "If you didn't play any encores, people would think that they didn't get their money's worth, even if you were great and played a long time. Sometimes I think Elvis could come back from the dead and join me onstage, and if we didn't play an encore, people would walk out saying, They sucked.' You know, it's just one of those things. Encores are expected; it's become the way things are done." Doing something because that is the way things are done it sounds more like a bank's edict to its employees than a musician's prescription for rock 'n' roll. And what's such dutiful conformity doing in a rock concert? To the minute Again, the answer seems to lurk in denial. For an audience, an encore maintains the illusion that the concert is unfolding free-form, going this way or that, directed by the moment's incandescence. But if anyone still clings to such romantic notions, he need only listen to Ted Gardner, producer of the Lollapalooza festival, rattle off the evening's timetable. "OK, we've got, let's see,
it runs Rage Against the Machine, Tool, Front 242 at 40-minute sets,
15-minute changeovers. No, wait, there's a 10-minute changeover In its third year, Lollapalooza's multiband bill forces the production to adopt and maintain a procession of to-the-minute departures and arrivals that Mussolini would have admired for its rigorous punctuality. Critics have carped about the anti-rock atmosphere generated by such regimentation. And yet, ironically, it is precisely this format that has produced Lollapalooza's one truly progressive, even radical achievement: creating a rock concert without encores. The experience can be a revelation. "It benefits everybody," says Mr. Gardner, "because from a band point of view, you know you've only got 40 or 45 minutes, you know this is it, so we're really gonna pump. And from an audience point of view, you're out there going, Wow, that was good.' Boom. It's on, and then it's over; there's an impact. With encores, it's like you're looking at your watch, wondering when he's going to stop." Despite the seeming intractability of the encore's presence, cracks in the charade are beginning to break through. Several months ago, at a sold-out show in Reunion Arena, Morrissey - known for his contrarian inclinations - threw his fans into a tizzy when he didn't return for an encore despite the crowd's deafening enthusiasm. Other musicians are adopting slightly less provocative alternatives. When the crowd at a recent Caravan of Dreams show refused to let Jason and the Scorchers depart after its single planned encore, the band returned, and Jason observed, "It's nice to do a real one of these for a change." Mr. Stinson has his own approach. "At a show in Salt Lake City," he says, "we sat on the stage and took a breather. You know, had a drink, smoked a cigarette. I told everybody to just pretend we had walked offstage and weren't there." Another solution - this one from Mr. Gardner, who managed Jane's Addiction until it broke up and still handles its former leader, Perry Farrell - involves a return to the curtain calls that rock's frenzy of encores subsumed. "On our first run of dates, we only had one album, and (the show) was only running 50 minutes," he says. "And everyone would say, Well, what are we going to do now?' And Perry and I sat down and decided why didn't he just walk out there and take a bow and say, Thank you very much for coming to the show,' which was the original encore, when you go back to theater. "So we did that in San Francisco, and the crowd went nuts. Perry came out and said, Thanks, I really appreciate your coming, hope to see you again soon.' Boom. Kids walked away, and I think they were happier by the fact that he'd paid them that personal attention as opposed to coming back and doing another song." Hope lurks So are encores dead, or at least dying? The best answer is probably not, but maybe with a little luck. "I hope the encore done for encore's sake is dead," says Mr. Gardner. "When a mediocre band plays a mediocre show, the band knows it and the audience knows it. And when the band comes back for an encore it doesn't deserve, that's a farce. By the same token, if the audience is mediocre in its acceptance of a band's performance, I don't think the band should belittle itself by coming back out simply because that's what they are supposed to do." After a sigh-filled pause to consider the question, Mr. Ringenberg musters his own note of hope. "Well, maybe things will change. An interesting thing that's happening in the last two or three years is that the kids, the younger generation of music listeners, the first of the non-Baby Boomers, they seem to be less into conformity, less inclined to do what's always been done. Maybe they will change things around, teach us old rockers how to get along without them." Maybe they will. To paraphrase another old rocker: "Imagine there's no encores. I wonder if you can."
© 1993-2001 The Dallas Morning News — All Rights Reserved |
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