Carolina Chocolate Drops | 40 Watt (Athens, GA) | 6.12.10

*I meant to post this back in June, but it’s just been sitting around in my saved drafts. My procrastination knows no bounds.

A couple of weeks ago I went to see The Carolina Chocolate Drops at the 40 Watt. If you haven’t heard them, I highly recommend you check them out. They play old time music–banjos and fiddles and jugs and bones, the kind of stuff your body just moves to involuntarily and you feel like you could join in on if someone would just toss you a washboard. It was a great show, and I don’t remember ever seeing so many old folks getting down at the 40 Watt.

There were some young girls standing behind me during the show. They were talking loudly in that cadence so particular to sorority girls about how so-and-so was an asshole, and how they couldn’t believe he did that. They would break only to turn toward the stage, take the occasional photo and say, “Oh my god! This is so good!”–and then they’d go back to talking about what’s-his-dick and whatever it was that he did to Ashley. I finally turned around and said, “Oh my god! SHUT THE FUCK UP.” And you know what? For once I guess it paid off to have a screwy haircut and visible tattoos, because they did indeed shut the fuck up. I make a conscious effort to be courteous to the people around me, and it actually takes a lot for me to go off on a stranger. But I’ve silently put up with that sort of thing for far too long, and those girls just happened to be the ones who pushed me over the edge. Hell, if I’d known it was that easy to get results I’d have started telling people to shut it years ago.

But the thing about this brief victory over assholery is that it highlights a trend I’ve noticed at shows in recent years. People seem to be less interested in experiences as they’re experiencing them and more concerned with collecting evidence of having had the experience. I’ve personally never been a photo person–Bill Pullman has a line in Lost Highway that’s something like, “I prefer to remember things the way I remember them, not necessarily the way they actually happened.” I took the photo above to see if it would in some way enhance my enjoyment of the music. I can’t say that it did.

I could listen to a recording or see a video of that show, and I’m never going to precisely recapture the moment as it occurred. You get the experience once, folks. Have it. Be present for it. Enjoy it–or don’t, as the case may be. But please have the decency to just shut the fuck up.