Live Through This: rock nyc’s Top Concert Picks For The Week Of April 27th, 2020
On the fifty third of New York Pause, live concerts don’t exist except as a streaming from pop stars homes, an increasingly tedious and uncomfortable situation and one I, an inveterate concert goer, find so uncomfortable I can’t watch them. The only two I saw that actually worked was Code Orange and Dropkick Murphys and those despite the pure weirdness of watching a full concert with no audience at all as opposed to a quarantine based Zoom mash up.
Perhaps, and as at least a form of the positive in negatives, bands in early opening to business Georgia, Alaska and Oklahoma might want to meet up and perform a full concert for live streaming. Don’t get me wrong, I think all three states are extremely dangerous in their decision, but if the citizens of those states want to perform together perhaps they can.
In an alternative reality, I would be making Rufus Wainwright’s performance on Friday, May 1st, at City Winery, my choice for the concert of the week. Ever since 2010, since the death of his mother, his work hasn’t been what it was. I’ve seen him three times since the Carnegie Hall All Days Are Nights evening, and even a return to Carnegie for Rufus sings Judy, didn’t work for me. The last time I saw him on stage was 2014 at Town Hall (here) I compared him to a stripper hustling you into the champagne room, a good not great set where the audience were invited to singalong to “Hallelujah” for a C note a pop.
But I was gonna go on Friday because for one thing it was a Friday and who stays home on a Friday night?
That isn’t gonna happen but in the world of “Live Through This” it is.
