Zip City wrote:I'd say that's the difference between 3DDers and other music fans more than between DBT fans and new Isbell fans, though. There are certainly a great many DBT fans who fit your profile of Isbell fans, they just aren't the ones who make their way here. Likewise, I'm sure there are new Isbell fans who live and die with music.
In the Isbell FB fan group (the good one not the crazy one which I am no longer subscribed to) there was a thread the other day about the music people listened to before getting into Jason. The answers largely matched Bubba's hypothesis; these were mostly mainstream music fans. A lot of old classic country was mentioned (to Lotus' point), a lot of classic rock and really very little music on the fringes of any genre. You didn't see much of cult rock bands or even lesser known folk/country singer songwriters. No Townes Van Zandt, John Prine, Steve Goodman, Guy Clark or on the Rock side Faces, Iggy & the Stooges, Big Star or the like. It was mostly Boston, Cheap Trick, ZZ Top, etc. As far as more recent stuff the few people that mentioned Slobberbone, Centro-Matic, Son Volt, Bottle Rockets, Dexateens, etc. were DBT fans who follow Jason as well. I've known a lot of people like this over the years, people who basically just listen to the radio and might have one or two favorites that they follow a little more closely and make a point to see them when they come to town once a year or so. There's certainly nothing wrong with that but the fact that there's a bit of a conflict between those of us who basically treat music as a religion is really no surprise is it?
To me the point that "There are certainly a great many DBT fans who fit your profile of Isbell fans, they just aren't the ones who make their way here" is really not correct. Sure there might be a few but DBT doesn't quite lend itself to that kind of Rock fan and neither do most of the bands we discuss. It takes a little work to really like DBT and even more work to like some of the other bands discussed around here and in other "music evangelist" circles. Those people that you talk about do exist but they come to DBT for the party hence the shock from some of those folks when it became clear just how overtly political the band is. They weren't listening very closely. With DBT a lot of us heard something we couldn't quite reach on first listen and almost literally studied the music. I'll use my wife's experience as an example. She got into DBT while getting a massage. In conversation with the masseuse she mentioned " the duality of the south" to which he replied "Oh, you're a Truckers fan". She had no idea who DBT was and immediately questioned him. He had SRO handy and put it on. After the massage she went to the local record store and bought every album she could find and the rest she bought online. She listened to them non stop for weeks, spent her free time studying and learning the words and when she happened to see that they were playing two nights in Asheville a few months later she convinced a friend to drive the ten hours to North Carolina for the shows. Once there she got into conversations with people about other bands and discovered a different world. While I don't think that every DBT are drawn to them like this I can't imagine say a Boston fan having this experience. I also think it's unfair to just look at DBT fans. Over the years we've met people from other scenes that run parallel to ours. A lot of Centro-Matic fans came from the old server list "Postcards from Hell" and many of those people are the folks you'll find at Holiday Hangout or the private Wigginstock festivals. There other scenes like Lucero fans (lots of overlap) as well. This is how you get several hundred people to drive hundreds of miles to Nashville for a Glossary show.
Now I don't want be exclusionary here so when we talk about "music evangelists" we're not talking about just Rock & Roll. These people exist in the worlds of jazz, classical, opera and just about any form of music you can find. They also exist in a slightly different form among art fans, film fans and just about any kind of artistic expression you can name. These people are all searching for answers through art.
To examine the other side there is a popular meme:
The majority of folks don't really listen to music. Oh they might like a song or two, or even a band or two but they aren't looking for the answers in songs or in live shows. For those of us who do it's hard to understand them. My parents were this way, a lot of our parents were probably this way. My mom was 27 years old when the Beatles were on Ed Sullivan and it didn't mean anything to her. She doesn't remember where she was and while she might like a Beatles song or two she doesn't remember even watching it. A lot of these folks look to religion for their answers. Some of them look to more practical concerns. To them music, film, art etc. are diversions from life not doorways into its meaning. They don't understand people like us anymore than we understand them.
Some of the points you bring up, Zip, do give me pause though. We shouldn't show intolerance towards these people any more than we should towards people of other belief systems, faiths or cultures. We all exist together and we shouldn't be thumbing our noses at them. I'm a little embarrassed that I might be guilty of this from time to time. That said I'm probably not ever going to react differently to things like my post in this thread where I called out Isbell fans, on the front row, looking bored as hell when he was playing as poignant and important a song as
Room at the Top written by a recently deceased American Master. Sactochris called Petty the Mark Twain of music recently so try to imagine people being bored listening to a reading of Mark Twain. I would hope most people would be disturbed by that as well, but my lens might be narrow and that might not be the case.
So anyway given all this isn't easy to understand how people whose hearts and souls live for music might not feel comfortable with some of Isbell's newer fans who clearly don't? I don't think it's snobbery although I can see how it comes off that way. It's like a microcosm of our world in general to be honest isn't it? The thing is as much as we should respect another religion if you're a Baptist you probably won't meet your needs going to a Mosque (leaving alone the fact that all of us should jump out of our comfort zone and do these types of things but that's a conversation for a different time and place) so why wouldn't we feel a little like fish out of water as a Jason Isbell show in 2017?
PS.
The fact that Jason Isbell is a "music evangelist" in his own right shouldn't be ignored. Maybe in the end he's doing a huge service by leading the way with the people at his shows. Maybe the next time they won't be bored when he plays
Room at the Top or some other great songwriter's song. That point has to be not only considered but Jason's willingness to play these songs knowing who is audience is has to be respected and admired. Frankly my respect for him is growing by leaps and bounds lately and I'm going to try to give his last couple of records more of a shot because of it.
We call him Scooby Do, but Scooby doesn’t do. Scooby, is not involved