Backstage, PASS!

Friday is about music, and usually links and playlists. Today, a bit of backstage myth puncturing. Enjoy…(Or endure…)

“We went backstage!”

“It happened backstage!”

“It was all the rage!”

“You shoulda met us backstage…”

People have asked over the years about ‘going backstage’, about meeting people that perform on stage. People have quite strange knowledge and reference points around this, perhaps movies, perhaps ‘tell all’ bios, perhaps just a complete lack of actual knowledge. When Bob Dylan last played in Wellington in the mid 00s, I reviewed it for the newspaper. Someone asked me if I would be meeting him after the show.

No such thing ever happens, but maybe films like Almost Famous have sat in the minds of viewers.

As a reviewer you not only don’t go backstage, and shouldn’t, you often don’t see the end of the gig! In the old days, when newspapers had readers, and cared about them, they’d want a review the next day, which meant an 11pm deadline, which meant leaving early to write the piece in a few minutes only.

Someone also asked me if I would get to meet Leonard Cohen. No. But also, what would anyone do there? It would be like meeting a mountain.

Fortunately, I’ve always been very uninterested in being backstage, but it has happened once or twice; usually because an interview had to take place before the show. But again, in most cases the interviews happen over the phone months in advance, or even via email back in the day, though more likely over ZOOM these days.

My first memory of being backstage was in the early 90s, at a concert by The Seekers. My dad’s mate was a co-promoter of the show, with that fink Gray Bartlett. We attended the show, largely against our will, I got paid $20 to sell programmes — a rort, but because I was 13 I kinda thought it was awesome. Anyway, we went backstage and I met Athol Guy. He looked miserable and full of himself all at once, and there was a banquet of food that sat untouched.

This was my impression of how awful backstage truly is — a doctor’s waiting room, an airport gate, a holding cell.

It has been a lasting impression.

In the early 00s, I met and interviewed Wayne Coyne in the Green Room at The Big Day Out. I was incredibly nervous, and I had been told I would be interviewing any other member of The Flaming Lips. The interview time kept changing, it was meant to be a phoner the day before. It was only when I was in the elevator at the stadium, heading up to the ‘backstage’ holding pen that I was told I’d be talking to Coyne. He, of course, was charming, and beyond affable — he really helped me to relax, and forget that anyone else was watching. We were essentially sitting on stools chatting in front of whoever was around, as if we were doing a radio or TV chat-show interview or early podcast. I didn’t even have anything to record it, I used my memory and a few slips of note paper.

But Wayne was so nice to me, all but holding my hand through the process, and then after he hugged me in public — thanked me for the conversation, and it felt earth-shatteringly sincere. He invited me to dinner before they played their set, but the record company rep jumped in and said that was not required actually.

The Herald on Sunday was an Auckland weekend newspaper that called me out of the blue one day asking if I’d be going to see The Police at the Wellington stadium. I said that I would. They reckoned they wanted an interview with incongruous opening act, Fergie — of Black Eyed Peas fame. She was just newly engaged to Hollywood hunk, Josh Duhamel, so I guess that was the angle? Anyway, some gibberish about needing someone with a ticket to the event already, but they’d organise the access for the interview. I agreed, because it seemed like a potentially hilarious experience. And, back then, any chance to do any sort of writing assignment was met with enthusiasm too.

Backstage at the stadium was so underwhelming, they didn’t even ‘dress’ the dressing room. I sat between concrete pylons. Fergie and I shared a fist bump because she was newly engaged and I was newly married. She was impossibly tiny, like an leaf, and her bodyguard was impossibly enormous, like how South Park draws Satan. He presented like that towering Satan, staring through me and ignoring my feeble attempts to connect. Then the interview was over, and it had gone well enough, and on the ride out from under the stadium, the bodyguard was finally human; the threat over. He told me all about his time with Whitney Houston and Mariah Carey and Janet Jackson, and all the women he had worked with — it was more interesting than the actual interview I had been sent in to gather.

When we were invited to see Patti Smith in Melbourne, and meet her after, it was an obvious requirement to go behind the curtain after. We stood there with members of the self-appointed Melbourne Music Cool Crowd, fashion junkies with phoney bravado — and I felt like a sore thumb. We waited, and waited, and then Patti Smith’s assistant came out and told us we were all welcome to attend a DJ set in a club by Patti’s longtime guitarist, friend, and producer, Lenny Kaye. Lenny is a punk rock legend, but the idea of standing around in a bar after midnight with the wannabe tastemakers, listening to him play the “Nuggets” he’d compiled decades earlier on a formative box-set, meant nothing to me. We declined, and shuffled awkwardly out a side door after confirming that Patti had in fact gone to bed.

True story: She emailed me the next day to say she waited around a few minutes to meet me but determined I wasn’t coming. Heartbreaking because we were standing on the other side of the door, just a few ply away from her, but the backstage wrangler was trying to make all the hucksters form an orderly line.

Even more heartbreaking, reviewing Patti’s email while I was on my way to the airport to fly out. She was offering me tickets to the next night’s show, and the possibility to meet.

Suzanne Vega and I did get to meet — we sat in a hotel for nearly an hour, the day after her show, and I recorded her for a podcast episode. She signed my records, and my book of her poetry and lyrics. And I felt like 10-year-old me would have never believed my luck.

“Backstage” is a myth. It is built up as the place where blowjobs are given for free passes — a way to get ahead, just by giving some. It is fictionalised as being where friendships between the ordinary and the legendary are forged. But actually it’s just a grotty and unromantic place where human beings sit and wait, getting dressed (and/or drunk) in order to turn into rockstars for an hour or two.

Thanks for reading, and because it’s Friday, I do have a playlist for you of course. I hope you enjoy: