Opening Acts, Narrowcasting, and Whether Our Music Really Says Who We Are (or, Porter Wagoner Plus Nick Cave Kinda Does Equal Jack White)

The White Stripes played Madison Square Garden Tuesday night, which in itself might be worth a post--e.g., Can two people make a sound big enough to fill a place that large? Yes, if they're divorced and sound like concentrated Led Zeppelin--but what fascinated me most were the opening acts.

I got an email the day before the concert telling me that the Stripes would be going on after 10. I noticed that Porter Wagoner was opening for them, backed by Marty Stuart and his band, but my eye skipped over the fact that there was a second opening act, Grinderman. Only when the frontman of the band started singing did my friend say, "Oh my god that's Nick Cave." The juxtaposition of the tidily entertaining Wagoner and Cave's willfully chaotic new band was odd to say the least, but most of the audience probably didn't notice. The seats were half empty at 8 and barely more filled at 9. At 10, though, everyone was in their places and on their feet for the next two hours. Clearly, they had gotten the email.

I actually look forward to opening acts. (Yes, as a matter of fact, I do like the trailers before the movie too.) I like the fact that I got a chance to hear three different styles of music in one long evening. I was especially happy to hear Wagoner, a number of whose songs I like--especially "The Cold Hard Facts of Life"--but whom I never would have gone to see just by himself. Nevertheless, I was reminded again that I would never want to be an opening act. I've performed in restaurants while people are eating, and even that threw me off my game. When you perform, there's a certain expectation that the audience at least wants to pay attention. After all, they came there to see you. If they're not paying attention, then you work harder to make sure that they do. But when you're an opening act, there's a built-in resistance that must sometimes seem insurmountable: I do know who I came to see, mister, and it sure as hell ain't you.

There seem to be three or four theories behind the selection of opening acts. Sometimes, they're mostly there to provide variety, the way Frank Sinatra and other old school Vegas singers would have comedians open for them rather than musicians. Other times, the opening acts are meant to serve as more obvious stylistic appetizers for the star attraction. Over the years, the Rolling Stones have caught at least a dozen rock bands just before they were about to break wide and gotten them to open for them, most notably Guns N Roses in the late 1980s. Many times, the not yet-broken acts are on the same record label as the main attraction, and the label is using various opening slots to simply get them known outside of their familiar regional base. Back in the early 1970s, for example, between his first and second albums, Bruce Springsteen opened for The Beach Boys, Chuck Berry, Blood, Sweat, and Tears, Paul Butterfield, Chicago, The Eagles, Hall and Oates, Richie Havens, New Riders of the Purple Sage, Lou Reed, Sha-Na-Na, and Stevie Wonder, all in the space of a few months. One can argue that Springsteen's music shared specific traits with each of those acts, but the sheer musical range of the performers within that list, particularly within the popular music industry back then, is a little daunting. This was obviously about exposure pure and simple, about getting him on the road and in front of people who wouldn't listen to him otherwise.

My favorite opening acts, though, are the ones that the main attractions themselves choose on purpose in order to educate their audience. You like us, we like these people, why don't you see if you like them too? This is especially true in cases like Tuesday night when the stars are trying to get their audience to listen to something a little bit different. The most infamous case of this was back in the 1960s when the Monkees asked Jimi Hendrix to open for them for a number of dates. (Eyewitness accounts suggest that Davy Jones fans were in fact not yet ready to kiss the sky.) Even if the artist is established, however, mixing genres can still meet with audience indifference at best or hostility at worst. One of the hardest working performances I've ever seen was Kanye West opening a stadium date for the Rolling Stones last fall. Unlike the Wagoner/Grinderman/Stripes bill, I'm not sure that West has much in common with the Stones musically, but he openly embraced the challenge of performing for an audience that almost certainly knew his name more than they knew his songs. He saved the one they were sure they'd know ("Golddigga") until about 2/3 of the way through the performance but alternated styles and arrangements for over an hour, building his act as the stadium filled. I'm not sure how many fans he won over that night, but if he didn't he sure went down swinging.

The truth is, most successful musicians have more eclectic tastes than their fans. In the late 1970s, when rock fans were shouting "Disco Sucks" and burning truckloads of allegedly offending vinyl in public, many of the acts to which they pledged their allegiance (like the Stones or Springsteen) were listening to, loving, and openly promoting dance records, even wondering whether the 12-inch remixed single was a format that might enhance rock music too. When a hip-hop performer like Nelly collaborates with Tim McGraw, fans of both acts may scratch their heads. What the typical country fan prefers is not an open collaboration between generically separated artists but rather a more stereotyped usage of markers from one musical genre in another, as when Big & Rich positioned themselves several years back as ersatz "country rappers."

Think how often people listen to music without listening to it: they catch a repeated phrase, a rhythm, a combination of instruments. The impression matters more than the substance, especially the first impression. For the last twenty-five years, our whole system of radio stations in the United States has been based on this premise. For the most part, satellite radio has not represented an advance over these conditions. Fans of satellite radio praise it as a way to find music that you'd never hear on terrestrial radio, but your options are inevitably divided up by genre, by sound.

Except for rare personality-based radio shows (like the one Bob Dylan has been doing lately on XM), you don't get the sort of mix that was more common on radio in the 1960s and 1970s. Those madly eclectic shows, vestiges of which you can still find on some college stations, flourished in that accidentally golden age that fell between the time when television made radio seem irrelevant and the time when demographic breakdowns taught ad executives how you could make money off niche culture as well as mass culture.

But it's not just The Industry that is to blame. The same complaints, I believe, could be made about Ipods. Yes, people have all this music at their fingertips, but how generically varied are the contents of most of the Ipods you've seen, particularly of users aged over 35? We find our niches, be they generic, chronological, or both, and they all too frequently become ruts. Our musical taste, to a certain extent, is betrayed by our guilty pleasures, not the patently good stuff we embrace in all genres but the mediocrities we still enjoy even though we can't defend them. Like our larger lifestyles, all our music appears to fit together; we accept that Paul McCartney, Joni Mitchell, and books by refugee African child soldiers all fit together with strong coffee; and I'm not entirely sure that all this assumed neatness is such a good thing.

Particularly when dealing with older audiences, our popular culture frequently perpetuates the myth that all subcultures are separate and somehow individually "pure," but the truth is that all American mass culture springs from common sources and reflects the presence of multiple strains. Even though so many commentators have insisted for the last forty years that ideology trumps all, Clint Eastwood can direct Tim Robbins and Sean Penn in a film like Mystic River and everyone can get along famously, because familiar forms and genres can contain and even dilute ideology. At their most widely popular, male-dominated crime films can enlist both conservative and liberal sympathies to their cause. In fact, many of the most successful works of all kinds of American popular culture bind seemingly opposed ideologies together within singular mythic structures.

In an aesthetic form like film, this sort of ideological containment occurs on the level of story, mixing characters, scenes, and narrative outcomes. In a more abstract form like music, the containment is much harder to tease out. Sometimes, lyrics and music can appeal to different segments of the audience, as in Martina McBride's 1994 recording of Gretchen Cryer's "Independence Day," a song that mixed a familiarly rousing country arrangement with an ironically patriotic title to tell the story of an abused wife who stands up to her spouse. At the time of its release, the song didn't meet with the backlash that would greet the Dixie Chicks' "Goodbye Earl," which dealt with the same theme, five years later. The Chicks rocked murder in self-defense a little harder and made it sound like a blast. Cryer's music and McBride's performance on the earlier track, however, gave the clear impression that this was a solemn business. The lyrics were different on the two tracks, but the music was more different, and that made the controversial subject matter more or less respectable.

Most of the time, I love my country and I love its culture in all its varied messiness. As I hope for its future, I dream of a nation where that messiness is clearer. I'm not talking about "diversity" here or "multiculturalism," two words that have lost their initial utility as each has come to mean "pluralism" rather than something more wonderfully swirling and mixing. If we are a rainbow, it is not the sort of rainbow you see in a kindergarten classroom, in which each of the seven colors (ROYGBIV, remember?) is sharp and distinct. We are a rainbow as it exists in nature. Each shade blurs into the next, and when you truly see it, you know it's not seven things but one thing. You can't see where one of its supposed segments ends and the next one begins. To say that we're one is not to say that we're monochromatic, but we're not just two colors either. We're all the shades, and we are always modulating into each other.

If, as my musician friends keep telling me, the old New Orleans will probably never exist anymore, then we need the virtual equivalent of that world, maybe even in cyberspace. We need people bumping up against each other and listening to each other's music, whether they want to or not, finding the lost root chords and the potential for counterpoint. Culture may be based in ideology but only in stasis. When ideology changes, it is usually because it is following culture's lead.

Is it too much to think that a revolution like that can begin with listening to Porter Wagoner, Grinderman, and the White Stripes in one sitting? Maybe all you need to listen to is the Stripes' version of "Jolene," one of the greatest songs by Wagoner's even more talented ex-wife Dolly Parton. I don't know where the Stripes' version would find its proper home, but I can tell you it's not in a red state, and it's not in a blue state either. The way I hear it, it's pure purple.