“I can’t even remember / If we were lovers / Or if I just wanted to…” - Violent Femmes

I remember standing at the back of the Unicorn, a small club in Boston, in spring of 1967, watching Jefferson Airplane do a set. They were so tight and so free, a rushing mountain stream of liquid music pouring forth from Jack’s bass, bright notes from Jorma’s lead guitar sparkling as in morning sunlight, Paul’s rhythm guitar adding intensity, fullness, commitment, Spencer’s drumming stretching to surround it all, supporting, accepting, holding together, and Paul and Marty and Grace’s vocals rising, one atop the next, soaring and diving and breaking free like waterbirds feeding and playing in the stream of music; but what most stands out in my memory are the electric glances that went from Grace to Marty and Marty to Grace as all of this exploded together and redoubled or quadrupled in power as they really took off on “It’s No Secret” or “The Other Side of Life”, purity and strength and joy and the fire of sheer hatred with all the negativity taken out of it, just scream it out!, cascading off each other and riding the music, riding each other, up, over, around, through, a waterfall of guitars, voices, percussion splashing over the stage and all of us like we were standing in it, behind it, and in front of it all at once. In one sense I don’t think they even knew we existed, and in another sense they physically and actively loved each one of us just for the fact of our being there, accepting, receiving, inspiring their joy.

Bill Thompson, the Airplane’s road manager, was standing next to me, every bit as mesmerized and excited as I was. And I thought, here’s a guy who watches them do this twice a night, the same songs, month after month, show after show, and he still can’t get enough of it, he’s standing here like me, transfixed, hanging on every note. I admired his power, to put himself in a position to soak up so much spiritual energy, and to be wise enough, innocent enough, free enough to keep feeling the full passion of it, appreciating it, surrendering to it, letting it in. And I guess I was inspired by his example, because for the next nine months or so I went to see the Airplane night after night in New York, San Francisco, Toronto, wherever they were that I could get to, every chance I got.

A gal I knew went to a Patti Smith Group gig in the spring of ’75 and ended up traveling to every show they did anywhere in the northeast for the next five or six months. I was almost like that with Springsteen in ’74-’75, and I was far from alone—there was a gang of people, some from the music biz and some totally unrelated to it, who’d be there show after show after show. Coming out of Yoko Ono’s concert the other night I saw a woman in a Translator jersey whom I’d seen standing near the front of the crowd a few nights earlier when Hüsker Dü played the Fillmore, who’d also been at at least the last three or four Translator shows I was at. Translator has a hard core of fans in the Bay Area who come to virtually every show, there’s one bunch of ’em who live way out in Chico or somewhere and drive hundreds of miles to get to the shows, and I know the guys in Translator feel like it’s the support and love of these fans that’s kept them going when everything else (except the music) seemed to be against them. And from the fans’ point of view, Translator supports them and keeps their spirit renewed by coming through, creating miracles of musical improvisation and unpretentious, heartfelt communication, night after night. Their friends think they’re crazy (the fans’ friends, probably Translator’s friends too), but it doesn’t matter—it’s just so satisfying to discover how much energy and commitment and caring you’re able to put out when you truly find somebody to love.

I went backstage after another exceptional Translator performance at Berkeley Square last fall, and told the band how great it had been, and Steve said, “How could we do any less with all that love coming at us?” And, maybe because Translator’s last encore had been a Beatles song, I suddenly had a picture of the Beatles standing on stage in the Cavern in Liverpool in 1962, feeling all the love coming at them from their passionately loyal fans, and responding with something a little better than the very best they could do, transcending limits, the energy building on itself until performers and audience were in this uncharted territory where no one had ever gone before.

That kind of love is a source of power; I’m sure it played a big part in making the Beatles ready to go out from Liverpool and conquer the world.

We as audience, and we as performers, have one message that we repeat over and over again, it’s completely timeless and the Beatles said it just about perfectly: “Please please me, oh yeah, like I please you.” When Translator sings “edge of the sea, edge of the sand, edge of the future in the edge of our hand,” I hear the same message—something about the need for love bringing us into the moment and how being here together in the moment we feel the presence of and responsibility for and excitement of what will be.

To create consciously, to love honestly, we have to feel the excitement and the responsibility both at once. In this respect, one of rock ‘n’ roll’s jobs could be to sell us the future, to sell us on the value (in spite of the pain) of being alive and awake, to show us how exciting and fulfilling it can be, to tempt us, as it were, into choosing life. (Sexual attraction does a similar job in a similarly crude and subtle fashion.) But this cannot be done through a pollyanna approach, trumpeting the good stuff and ignoring or covering up what’s unpleasant. Rock ‘n’ roll generally takes another tack, that of acknowledging pain, anger, self-pity, injustice, fear, getting down to the dark and hidden stuff and embracing it, shouting about it, acknowledging its presence and welcoming its truth and thus releasing us from the pressure of what can’t be looked at or said.

Donna points out that another Translator phrase, “It’s all right to feel what you feel” (from a song called “Friends of the Future”), seems to be the basic statement rock ‘n’ roll is making and has always made. I agree, and it mostly does this not at a distance, as in assuring you it’s all right, but in a participatory fashion: you hear your own anger, fear, desire, self-doubt expressed in a song (the words, the beat, the sound, the loudness, or everything together) and you immediately feel less alone and probably start shouting along with it. It must be all right to feel this if someone else feels it and is willing to say it, sing about it, publicly; and it isn’t buried inside you any more when you’re shouting it at the top of your lungs.

Now to some extent the situation I’m describing is an ideal. Most rock ‘n’ roll fans and critics, like most people anywhere, won’t acknowledge the “like I please you” part; they’re passive, they want to be pleased, period, and they figure they did their part when they paid their money at the door. And the band may try to go along with this, try hard to please ’em and give ’em a good show for their money, but it’s not gonna work very well, there’s just a natural limit to how much you can feel when you’re not actively participating in the experience, or put it another way, love’s much more profound when you’re giving and getting at the same time. There is such a thing as one-sided love, I guess, but you can’t create the future with it.

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