the mornin' sun is shinin' like a red rubber ball
It’s happening. It took 18 months, but it’s happening. I don’t think I realized just how much inbox real estate Bowery Presents, Bandsintown, Ticketmaster, and Live Nation were occupying until the emails started rolling in again:
It’s incredible how much life has improved in the span of a few short months. Re-reading my last post from December feels like consulting the fossil record from an ancient extinction event. Entombed here are the depressed, deranged scribblings of an obsessive concert-goer-turned-recluse, relegated to indefinite COVID hiatus.
On that subject, and in retrospect, I wish I had spent more of said hiatus writing instead of moping. (Even if the results would have been just as depressed and deranged.) I started this impeccably timed website/blog/newsletter/screed to chronicle my experiences as a fanatical live music junkie, and the absence of that experience was worth exploring, perhaps more so than anything else I will go on to write about. This was a historic loss, for me genuinely unimaginable, and one that cast the emergent, irreproducible magic of communal entertainment in stark relief. I never want to watch another livestream again, so help me god.
Understandably, creative inspiration was hard to come by, and motivation even more so. On February 1, 2021, my husband’s right lung suddenly and inexplicably collapsed, requiring a two-week hospital stay and major surgery to correct. (The medical term for this is, in fact, spontaneous pneumothorax. I would have preferred to go the rest of my life not knowing what that is. Adam probably feels similarly.) This was on top of his continuing gout woes from the summer of 2020, necessitating the occasional use of a cane; plus the resulting kidney stones, which remain teeny little crystalline pain bombs waiting to go off; and, last but certainly not least, the ambient terror that is your spouse recovering from thoracic surgery during a respiratory pandemic. So we’ve both been preoccupied.
But he’s fine now, he’s got some sexy new scars out of the ordeal, and he and the whole Buxbaum mishpocha are fully vaxx’ed and chillaxed, myself included. Those dark clouds are lifting at long last, literally and figuratively. It is a beautiful spring day. I can take a dip in the apartment complex’s newly renovated swimming pool after work. Most importantly, I can listen to the music I love and feel radiant, irrepressible joy, anticipation and hope, that had been so dreadfully and conspicuously absent. I had almost forgotten it. And if a studio album can sound this good, I tremble to think of my triumphant return to the world of amplifier stacks.
I’ve been buying concert tickets, man. So many! More in the past six weeks than I have in a year and a half. I’m once again struggling to identify street lamps on CAPTCHA, and my bank account is feeling the burn. I’m penciling dates in my planner as imminent as fucking July. Holy shit.
It doesn’t feel real yet. It probably won’t until I’m back in an East Village auditorium or a Lower East Side basement, wedged against a barricade when the lights go down. Gratefully, my most hallowed local stomping grounds have thus far survived. I’ve been saying for months that the day I will truly exhale is when I’m back “home,” which is to say FRC* at Bowery Ballroom; no mask, no social distancing, no fear. It is an apparent eventuality I am now actively fantasizing about. I am going to cry like a little girl.
This is what’s on the docket for 2021, as of right this second**:
The Sheila Divine @ Mercury Lounge, 7/23
Fastball @ Gaslamp in Long Beach, California 7/31 (weekend getaway with Dad! We’re both insane! HAHAHAHA!)
Bob Mould @ Webster Hall, 9/17 (It’s my birthday! BIRTHDAY BOB!)
White Reaper @ Music Hall of Williamsburg, 9/20
The Struts @ Irving Plaza, 10/8
Low Cut Connie @ The Fillmore Philadelphia, 10/14
Local H @ le poisson rouge, 10/27
Squid @ Mercury Lounge, 11/3
Dan Deacon @ Brooklyn Steel, 11/19
The Hold Steady @ Brooklyn Bowl, if all goes well, 12/1, 2, 3, 4
Low Cut Connie @ Bowery Ballroom, 12/9
Should I relapse into Bitchy Eeyore between now and the end of the summer, remind me to go sit by the pool and take a glance at the calendar. That ought to fix me right up.
That’s all for now. More substantive substance to follow, sooner rather than later. I mean it this time.
See you shortly (and hopefully standing next to me),
-Bux
*Front row center. Where the hell else would I be?
**I’ve gotten very lucky so far, but at this rate Gig Merge (two shows, same date) is looking… unavoidable. I ain’t even mad. I’ll pass the ticket to a friend and count it as a charitable donation. More $$$ to the venues!