Climbing Up The Walls

On newsletters and blogging and Radiohead bootlegs.
So what are we doing here, exactly?
The past month or so at Noise Floor – a blog I started as a college freshman in 2012 to exclaim about new tour dates for bands I liked – has been the site’s most populous ever thanks to new contributors and a renewed (/re-forced) interest in writing for me. Despite having a journalism degree and a naive college pipe dream to become a Music Journalist, I haven’t written a whole lot beyond show review blurbs and the occasional profile in the past few years, but suddenly it feels like the only thing to do.
I’m not the only one. I guess it’s partly pandemic cabin fever and partly the imminent demise of full-time music writer at a full-time music publication as a career, but seemingly everyone is starting a newsletter, a Patreon or a directly reader-supported effort of some other kind as of late. The presentation has changed, but at heart, 2020 is the year that blogging comes back into vogue. This is not an announcement that Noise Floor is pivoting to a subscription model or abandoning its sturdy WordPress foundation, but rather a sort of…mission statement for what I’m hoping to do in that landscape, which is to share pieces like Terence’s tackling of the “Ding-Dang” Discourse or Nick’s lengthy chat with Mikael Jorgensen and foster some small oasis from this ongoing misery to indulge our inner music monologues. I think it’s going okay so far!
Which brings me to what I actually wanted to talk about this week: bootleg Radiohead concerts.
We’re all feeling nostalgic for shows right now, as Terence and I riffed on already, and contemplating the value of the live stream or the live album as stand-in. Barring an exception here or there (I’m intrigued by the promise of deep cuts on Nick Cave’s upcoming Alexandra Palace thing), I kinda threw in the towel with live streams a couple weeks into pandemic life. Watching Ben Gibbard bang out some covers from his studio was good fun, but bands performing whole sets from homes or empty venues just doesn’t scratch the itch for me. Without the reciprocal energy (or occasional disruption) of a crowd, the proceedings feel bloodless and alien; a Xerox of the experience that makes me feel worse about lacking the real thing.
I’ll not wade into the adjacent debate on the recently-released live album by Japandroids, one of the past decade’s preeminent had-to-see-’em-live bands (though speaking of newsletters, Jeremy Gordon’s is a good read on the topic), but focus rather on the live album’s druggy older brother: the audience bootleg. I’m no Deadhead or tape-trader, but I am a huge nerd who loves Radiohead, and from my teens until the present day they’re the one band whose fan-sourced live recordings I will consume with the fervor of a jam-band aficionado.
Officially, Radiohead’s live output is limited to I Might Be Wrong, a 2001 EP capturing some solid renditions of then-new Kid A and Amnesiac songs along with an essential document of the rarity “True Love Waits” long before it would be reinvented to close A Moon Shaped Pool. It’s a good disc, but held against the typical 25-song-plus Radiohead show, pretty obviously lacking. Luckily, there’s no shortage of audience recordings floating about the Internet of the band at various stages of their career, and gems aplenty to be mined from them.
A stack of these dominate the almost embarrassingly large Ra- section of my stubbornly maintained iTunes library, and it was a 2006 show from right here in Boston that sparked this Bootleg Appreciation Post last week. I honestly can’t recall where I downloaded this particular one from (I’m sure it could materialize for you, dear reader, with a few minutes of creative Googling), but it’s a peak of the unauthorized recording artform. Captured on the second of two nights at Boston’s waterfront pavilion – whichever bank it was named after at the time – the show was part of an atypical trek for the band that saw them taking up short residencies at much smaller venues than they were capable of filling. The major exception on the route was one of their most storied gigs ever in a headlining slot at Bonnaroo, documented quite professionally by Danny Clinch and thoughtfully offered up as a full stream on the band’s YouTube channel during the pandemic, but for my money there’s a more interesting snapshot captured by this night in Boston.
In Rainbows would drop the following year, and with it the band’s pioneering pay-whatever model, but for now, Thom & Company were roadtesting those now-classics with a charming sense of humility. A thrashy “Bangers + Mash,” still presumably a contender to make the album proper at that point, and a groovy “15 Step” absent that distinctive children’s chorus sample, follow up the night-terrors of “Climbing Up the Walls” to open the set. The long-gestating “Nude” swoons before divebombing into the grungy splendor of “Just,” punctuated with guitarist Jonny Greenwood’s haunted surf-rock instrumental “Spooks” (which would eventually pop up on the Inherent Vice soundtrack with members of Supergrass). Hell, they even play “Knives Out” – a rare occurrence before or since.
At the second encore break Yorke offers a final thanks the ravenous crowd, “especially for listening to the new stuff and shit,” in one of the many moments on this particular recording where your fellow Bostonians feel like a real part of the show. The bootleg hallmarks of people being audibly shushed during a quiet number (it’s “Videotape” here), dudes of a certain age cheering heartily for every 90s-era rocker the band breaks out and someone loudly asking around for their friend Suzanne during the dark of the encore break are all here; annoying, probably, if you’re hoping for an unblemished soundboard recording, but weirdly precious reminders of the actual experience of being at a show, if you’re anything like me.
Shows are wonderful and transformative and all that, but they often are annoying, too. During this listen, chained to a desk in a bedroom-office where I now spend all of my waking hours, I found myself struck by how badly I wished I could experience this minutiae right now. Bring on the way-too-talkative drunk guys and long merch lines. I dream (literally, this weekend) of overpaying for a comically tall draft beer. All the mildly annoying shit we deal with to be in the same place as hundreds or thousands of other people to see a band play is the trade-off for what makes the experience worth it. Even through somebody’s amateur recording setup, the mass singalong to “Fake Plastic Trees” is cause for a genuine spine-tingling.
It’s still, of course, Not The Same, but I’m clinging to my bootlegs for dear life right now.