Matt Burke

Published in the May 2012 Issue

Thursday Night, Philips Arena, Atlanta

It's a strange thing not knowing a band. It's especially strange when it's a big band, or a band that's been around a long time — it's like not knowing one of the seasons, with all of its associated weather. Imagine having lived through the Beatles or the Stones, or Zeppelin or the Who, and not knowing their songs or, for that matter, anything about them. Your life would be off by a couple of calculations, either lighter or heavier than it was supposed to be. And you would never know it.

Now, I don't know if Widespread Panic is a big band. I do know that it's been around for a long time — since 1986 — and that it's known as a "jam band," with a big following for its live shows. I also know that I don't know one other damned thing about it. I couldn't name a single song or member of the band. I couldn't even tell you what the band sounds like.

I went alone to see Widespread Panic at a repurposed old church in downtown Atlanta called the Tabernacle. I spent a lot of my time before the band came on wondering what was worse: going alone to a restaurant or going alone to a rock 'n' roll show. I hate eating by myself, but I also hate standing around and, well, grooving by myself, with nobody to be embarrassed by me or to forgive me for their embarrassment. So I decided to do what I generally do in both situations — that is, to drink — and in this I was not alone. Widespread Panic's "Wood" tour was a farewell of sorts; the band was about to take an official break from touring for the first time in its quarter century of being. "Wood" was a reference not to tumescence but rather to the acoustic instruments the band had chosen to play, in small halls such as the Tabernacle. I expected to leave before the encore.

I didn't. I didn't because they wouldn't let me — the band, the crowd, or some plurality of the two. The Tabernacle wasn't just sold out for Widespread Panic; it was, before the band came on, seething, with the customary feeling of expectation crossing over into something like raw appetite. It wasn't a feeling of danger; the crowd was too well behaved for that, too clean-cut, with its frat-house aggressions soothed by its frat-house respect for authority. Everybody was standing, but when the band walked onstage and then sat down and began noodling on its acoustic guitars, I expected everybody to sit down. Nobody did, because all their seething energy wasn't psychic; it was almost purely physical, and as soon as the music started, it broke in waves of dancing, hugging, and the most doggedly extravagant air-guitar gestures I'd ever seen. I'd been to acoustic shows, but this was an ecstatic acoustic show, and soon what I feared — the spectacle of the solitary man grooving — gave way to the spectacle of the solitary man dancing, and then that gave way to the spectacle of the solitary man getting tapped on the shoulder and repeatedly high-fived until the solitary man wasn't solitary anymore. Sure, I tried to do my job, and took the occasional note on Widespread Panic. But I still can't tell you the names of any of their songs, because their songs didn't belong to them; they belonged to — were given to — the crowd roiling the dark of a departed church in downtown Atlanta, and Widespread Panic, on the eve of its sabbatical, had done what another band wrote a song about doing: It had learned How to Disappear Completely.

That band, of course, is Radiohead, and I saw it a few weeks after seeing Widespread Panic, in a repurposed basketball arena a few desolate blocks away from the Tabernacle. It was a big show, because Radiohead is a big band, with a great singer, a virtuoso guitar player, and twenty years of songs unforgettable for their soaring and dismal beauty. How big is Radiohead? Well, big enough for its great singer, Thom Yorke, to have gone to another great singer, R.E.M.'s Michael Stipe, for counsel on how to survive the demands of the crowd seething in the dark. "Tell yourself, 'I'm not here, this is not happening,' " Stipe advised him, and those words ended up as the gorgeous refrain at the heart of Radiohead's first attempt to disappear completely, Kid A.

I went alone to see Radiohead. I didn't have to worry about being the solitary man grooving, or even the solitary man spasmodically dancing, because at a Radiohead show the solitary man spasmodically dancing is Thom Yorke. He is the one design element out of place on the Radiohead stage — the one human being who does not have an immediate match in a band of bald drummers and lanky, dark-haired string players; the one human being who's free to move and, on rare occasions, to speak. He has spent twenty years singing about being broken, even as he is reassembled in the extravagances of Radiohead's art; but now he has become a reassuring presence, a trouper on the edge of his own alienation. What Radiohead shows you at a Radiohead show is both the art and the brokenness, in the form of stage lighting that rigorously color-codes every song, and twelve screens suspended over the stage that allow you to glimpse but never quite see the faces of the band, like shards of a busted mirror. But what you see is what Radiohead has been pursuing single-mindedly since Kid A at least — the professionalization of distance.

I liked the show, because Radiohead, to me, is like a woman with overwhelming beauty and radical politics — I am willing to subject myself to the one in order to be exposed to the other. But not everybody did, and I met them at an Atlanta hotel bar on the way home. They were a married couple, and they were angry because they had driven four and a half hours from Nashville in order to see a band they didn't know anymore. It played three songs from Kid A. It played one song from The Bends. "And the worst part," the husband said, "is that Jonny Greenwood didn't play one guitar solo. Not one! Come on! The next time we think about driving to see Radiohead, we're going to demand a written guarantee: We'll buy a ticket, but first you have to agree to give us what we want."

I didn't think they were going to get that kind of contract from Radiohead anytime soon. I did, however, know a band that offered exactly what they were looking for — that guaranteed three hours of ecstatic communion, even when it was playing an acoustic show. But that band wasn't as big as Radiohead, and besides, it was taking some time off, trying to disappear.

Plus: concerts from Guns 'N Roses, John K. Samson, and The Twilight Sad

More from the Esquire 2012 Music Issue: Live Music Edition >>

This content is created and maintained by a third party, and imported onto this page to help users provide their email addresses. You may be able to find more information about this and similar content at piano.io