Live Unplugged
The Egg
Albany, N.Y.
2/27/24
I ran into a work friend — a fellow civil servant — in the Egg’s subterranean entrance before the Live concert. “I feel very young,” she said, because she didn’t.
None of us did. None of us were. The crowd was overwhelmingly gray-haired Gen Xers and bespectacled elder Millennials. We were all here to see Live, a band whose name lends itself to “who’s on first” jokes, a band whose heyday happened when Clinton was president. The ghost of my 10-year-old self vibrated with excitement to see “Dolphin’s Cry” performed in person; my current self acutely felt my age.
“Tuesday is kind of a weird night for a concert,” admitted frontman Ed Kowalczyk, the sole remaining member of the original lineup. He was backed by a crew of new musicians. The rest of Live has fallen into drama and legal strife, as documented in an astonishing Rolling Stone article a year ago.
But there was no sign of trouble on Kowalczyk’s face. He pranced energetically across the stage with a goofy grin, shredding on an acoustic guitar, as playful as a kid — or a dad in the process of unrepentantly embarrassing his self-conscious teenaged children.
“We’re gonna work our butts off to make you wanna dance so bad,” he promised, before commanding us to our feet for “All Over You.”
A tall order. It was a weeknight and we were tired and our knees do not work as they once did.
But we stood. We sang along. We knew all the words. We memorized them from the CD liner notes 30 years ago.
“There,” Kowalczyk said. “Now it doesn’t feel like Tuesday anymore.”
The band performed a 2019 country-tinged track “Turn the Radio On” from one of Kowalczyk’s side projects, and the 2001 ballad “Overcome,” which took on special resonance to American listeners after 9/11. But it mostly stuck with beloved ’90s alternative hits like “Selling the Drama,” “I Alone,” the caustic “Lakini’s Juice,” and the melancholic “Ghost,” whose refrain — “Where did I go wrong?” — hits different now that I am old enough to start planning a mid-life crisis.
The band saved the best for last. While the crowd danced as best as our creaking joints allowed, Live strummed the opening chords of the 1994 mega-hit “Lightning Crashes,” a top-forty song about an old woman dying in a hospital while a young woman gives birth in another room. To stand in a giant concrete egg while hundreds of fans sing in unison, “A new mother cries/ Her placenta falls to the floor,” was a magical experience.
It’s what we were there for. Kowalczyk knew it.
How do Generation X, which prided itself on authenticity and cynicism, and elder Millennials, who built an identity out of being the youngest people who ever lived, reconcile themselves with the inherently unhip act of seeing a band that was popular decades ago?
Coping with the loss of our youth, and our coolness with it, is a problem our species has always faced since we evolved enough sentience to understand our own mortality. A group of increasingly inebriated middle-aged fans in the row behind me tried to bury their discomfort with lazy ’90s Beavis-and-Butthead-talking-to-MTV cynicism: snarky observations, limp quips about Live’s irony-free lyrics, and placenta jokes. And yet, they sang along full-throated to each and every song.
No, sarcastic Albanians, you are not too hip for Live. Because you paid to see Live — at least $89.50 each based on your seats.
The one most liberating aspect of aging is losing the expectation that you are supposed to be cool. You’re not. You have a mortgage. You probably work in civil service. Embrace it. Let your irony fall to the floor.
Where I’m going next: seeing “In the Blood” at the Saint Rose Theater.
