I’m Not Ready to Perform

Dave Grohl: The day the live concert returns

But the actual performance; the rebuilding of the sonic cathedral, as Dave Grohl wrote last spring; communally reaching for rock-and-roll transcendence? I’m not there yet. I’m not concerned that I’ll get sick. I received my second vaccine shot at the end of March and am ready to high-five strangers on the subway. My hesitance has an element of crowd-shyness, which we’ll all get over. But in my own performance, I don’t know how to meet this moment. A great rock-and-roll show means openness, confrontation, and a kind of danger, and those ideas right now feel too heavy to lift.

I used to think of performance in purely aesthetic terms. In the movie La Strada, a clown wearing angel wings does a high-wire act across a crowded piazza. For his finale, he brings out a table on the wire and, while balancing, tries to sit and eat a full plate of spaghetti. The heroine of the movie watches him with an almost religious ecstasy. When I first started performing, I strove for transcendence and stupidity, high concept and low art. My focus was on keeping myself in the air.

When my band Arcade Fire was playing mostly to people who hadn’t heard us before, we felt that the best way to get them to open up was to blow the windows and doors out. At an early show in Lawrence, Kansas, my brother, Win, bashed Styrofoam tiles out of the venue’s ceiling with his mic stand. We pushed as hard for an audience of six people (two of them my parents) upstairs at AS220 in Providence, Rhode Island, as we did in front of tens of thousands in the desert at our first Coachella show (during which I accidentally cut Win’s guitar cable in half by repeatedly smashing a cymbal into the ground).

At a certain point, as people got to know our music, my relationship to performance changed. The energy from the crowd was greater than anything coming from the giant speaker stacks. The audience wasn’t a challenge to overcome, or an opponent to conquer. We became a team. Not in an abstract, lovey way but how a sports team operates—pushing one another to do better, sometimes failing, sometimes frustrating one another, sometimes just joking around.

The high-wire act of live performance—Will the music come together?—was still there. I’ve even sometimes tried to make the metaphor real, climbing arena scaffolding with a drumstick in my teeth and a drum strapped over my shoulder to play 30 feet in the air. Some of our crew members hate it—“Will! You have children now!”—but climbing up there doesn’t actually feel that dangerous, and a little nervousness is good. I’m reaching for primate simplicity and catharsis: The crowd needs tension to experience release.

But now I have no desire to make tension. I want people to feel safe and comfortable, and I wonder whether creating a feeling of danger and openness is antithetical to that. I know that cultivating a perception of safety and actually making people safe are different. On tour, in a big venue, every night our management and local security have a briefing. It’s partly to set a vibe—People are here for music. Everybody be chill. If some teenager sneaks into a closer section, please let them. But the briefing is also serious—where the medics are located, what the escape routes are. Most of the time, these safety measures are invisible. I worry that post-pandemic precautions, as welcome and necessary as they are, will be depressingly visible. Some elements, such as temperature checks, will be inane. Some, such as requiring vaccination, will be important. Regardless, they will also set a tone—not You are entering a place for music, but You are entering a secure location. Dancing is hard when you’re looking at your feet; singing is hard when you’re thinking about everybody else’s breath. I bet the crowd could get over this. I’m not confident I could. With limited capacities and tight procedures, I worry that the stage will feel like the VIP section of the VIP room at a members-only club. Sterile, lonely, all of us chillingly aware that we are part of a ticketed event.