As the return to normalcy begins to stall with the Delta variant taking hold and the prevalence of unvaccinated citizens remains stubbornly high, it might be a good time to revisit a genre of YouTube video that arose early on during the pandemic. Once it sank in that we were going to be locked down for the long haul, lots of musicians started doing performances posted to YouTube. Some of them were quite slick, due to the professional quality of iPhone video capabilities, many artists shot their own official videos as they dropped singles in 2020. What I want to highlight here though is the more homespun performances, often with various players beaming into Zoom from their homes, often quite far-flung.
Before the obstinance of COVID-deniers, anti-maskers, and now anti-vaxxers curdled much of the can-do spirit that arose from COVID, these videos stitched back community among the musicians from various bands and often friends and family. They offered the rest of us at least a vicarious feeling of participating in that community that, I don’t know about you, but I found quite powerful.
Often, the bands putting these performances together were a bit on the old side, which makes sense. Members had moved away from each other over the decades and were now proud of themselves for mastering Zoom and other apps and gadgets. Maybe the YouTube algorithm just thinks I’m old and sentimental (for some crazy reason) and that’s what it served up to me.
The geeziest of the geezers were the Rolling Stones, performing one of the few multi-player performances for the W.H.O. and Global Citizen’s One World: Together At Home series. The big pleasure here is watching Charlie Watts, sans drum kit, sitting on a little amp or something, swatting his drumsticks around in space only marginally in time with the drum track that’s playing.
Next up among the geezers is The Doobie Brothers via Zoom for a crisp and clean, with no caffeine, rendition of Black Water.
I have to admit that I normally think of The Doobie Brothers as a relic of the 70s, a good, but not great band. They were a band that captured the zeitgeist of that era’s longing for simpler times, channeled into a string of hits taking the counter-cultural roots vibe of bands like the Flying Burrito Brothers and The Band and turning it into a string of irresistible pop hits.
Well, they are still that and there is nothing wrong with that. Here, they’ve stripped it down just a bit to pure roots music in a way that I think elevates the song a bit. And then they bring in family, friends, and fans at the end to bring it all back around in a goofy, heartwarming pop ending. Pat Simmons has grown up into such fine old hickory stick of a picker and he seems so down to earth, it’s impossible to be cynical or dour about manipulative pop done well. It just makes you feel good and part of something.
For more in this vein, check out Listen To The Music (Live in Isolation).
Next up, in the semi-geezer category is Modern English bringing back their seminal one-hit-wonder and soundtrack to the courtship montage in Valley Girl (1983), Melt with You. We find a cadre of cloistered, hipster dads and one outre bohemian, his face covered to toe in tattoos and a mad twinkle in his eye. You very much get the sense of comfortably middle-class guys who still love their vinyl collections and have made decent money producing other people’s records or perhaps simply as real estate agents. Nothing sad or wistful. And just as happy to be knocking away at everyone’s favorite Modern English tune as they were in 1983.
Also hailing from 1983 comes Curt Smith and his daughter Diva with a lovely rendition of his Tears for Fears hit Mad World.
In the non-geezer category, I present Thao and the Getdown’s performance of Stay Down featuring eight dancers performing in unison in their bedrooms into their webcams. The video brilliantly captures the sense of culture lived through the portal of webcams and video chat apps organized into some pretty elaborate choreography.
On a similar note, Tove Lo’s Mateo (Quarantine Karaoke Video) leverages crowdsourced footage of fans in TikTok and selfie-mode, lipsyncing the song edited into a single engaging music video.
From the Quarantine Nerd Hall of Fame, we find the Ukele Orchestra of Great Britain. They churned out a seemingly endless supply of delightful quarantine covers. I’ll share my three favorites.
The Cure’s Lovecats …
… and Tom Waits’ Shiver Me Timbers ...
… and Grace Jones’ Slave to the Rhythm.
Although not quite in the same category as these DIY videos (and to be clear, Stay Down and Mateo were professionally produced on the backend, official videos for those singles) I offer a few highlights from The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, which produced a bunch of fine, beamed in performances. My three favorites …
Elvis Costello’s duet of Hey Clockface with Jon Batiste is shot in a wonderfully, goofy amateur fashion on Elvis’s end. As usual, Jon Batiste is infectiously, dee-dee-deelightful company.
What Shakey Graves’ Roll Them Bones video lacks in community participation he makes up for with the can-do spirit of lockdown, delivering a four-way split screen of himself from different angles, beautifully picking away like a mild-mannered madman.
For the definitive version of this song, check this out. If you’d like to deepen your appreciation of Shakey Graves' talent, check this out.
Yo-Yo Ma Amazing Grace / Goin' Home.
Sublime.
And finally, what I consider to be, far and away, the greatest live from lockdown performance of them all … The State, reuniting to perform Porcupine Racetrack. If you’ve never seen the original, it will make more sense (relatively speaking) if you watch that first. You can do that here.
And if you are a glutton for State-sanctioned punishment, here’s a remake of The Jew, The Italian, and the Redhead Gay updated for the pandemic.