Frank Fairfield and Fleet Foxes at the Grand Ballroom

    When I walked into the Grand Ballroom at the Manhattan Center, I might as well have walked into a circus. The smell of popcorn cooking behind the concession bar was enough to even block out the body odor of the dozens of unwashed hipsters touting moustaches of carnie-proportions.
    “Look!” My friend grabbed my arm and motioned towards the merchandise stand, speaking in hushed tones as if trying to turn my attention to a bearded woman, “The bassist!” I turned to where he was pointing, trying to discern to which of the shaggy-haired men he was referring. “Come on!” Before I knew what was happening, he was dragging me over to the stand under the pretense of looking at overpriced posters and t-shirts.
    “Dude,” an obscenely tall twenty-something behind us muttered to his painfully thin blonde girlfriend, “I hate that all of this shit costs so much now. At least I could actually afford it before they started playing venues like this.” As the couple walked away I began to wonder whether I had accidentally walked in on some perverse exaggeration of our cultural milieu.

    Frank Fairfield, the concert’s opener, didn’t help to stave off that thought. Dressed in slacks and a button-down with parted and oiled hair, Fairfield embarked on a one-man set embodying a period that can only be referred to as the antebellum American South. Fairfield was undeniably skilled—I had never seen a musician with more finesse at finger picking—but something about his histrionic performance begged the question of validity. As he plucked away at his banjo and violin, I couldn’t get past the ludicrous notion of a kid from Los Angeles sweating and grimacing like a specter of someone’s great-grandfather. Even during his banter he spoke in a warbled southern whine, having perfected the art of performance to the smallest degree.
    I began to ask myself about the true importance of validity in music. In a world infused with the oversharing of bloggers, had I come to be able to accept nothing less than the truth? Has the function of stage personas become completely eradicated with that of privacy and subtlety? When I researched Fairfield and listened to his “degenerative records” radio show , I was dismayed to find that his voice was hushed and Californian, showing no hint of the Southern drawl of his stage persona. He spoke with the quiet intelligence of an armchair musicologist, but despite how knowledgeable and interesting his commentary was on the records I couldn’t help but think about the disparity between the Frank Fairfield on stage and the Frank Fairfield on the radio.
    When the Fleet Foxes finally came on stage, however, I knew there would no longer be a question of stage persona involved. Quiet and nervous with the air of shell-shocked veterans, the band’s five members (playing guitar, bass, percussion, keyboard, and occasionally other various strings) stepped on stage and looked out towards the large crowd. Guitarist Robin Pecknold—looking strangely ethereal despite his flannel shirt and unwashed beard that only a Hassidic man could make look natural—remarked that this was the band’s first time playing in such a large venue. Although I had paid money to access the event, I suddenly felt self-conscious and out of place, like I was encroaching upon some sort of musical ritual and violating the intimacy that said environment should hold.
As uncomfortable as the band members and I felt at first, the second they slipped into their opening song I felt immediately comforted by a strange sense of transposition. Unlike Fairfield’s performance, Fleet Foxes’ did not try to force me into a time about which I do not know and with which I do not have any experience. Rather than becoming a novelty cultural snapshot, Fleet Foxes encapsulated the harmonics and instrumentals of folk music without imposing any false pretense upon it.
    It was the same effect that Frank Fairfield had been trying to achieve, but in lieu of the snickers that Fairfield received for his performance there was simply hushed awe.  The members of Fleet Foxes had a way of wistfully harmonizing, invoking a haunting fugue for their polyphonic “White Winter Hymnal” that was even more tonally striking on stage than it is on record. The crowd kept so quiet, in fact, that Pecknold was able to play a solo acoustic two-song set for “Tiger Mountain Peasant Song” and a cover of traditional American folk song “Katie Cruel.”
    As Pecknold’s raspy, warped voice rang through the crowd, his face gave way from being that of a heavily bearded twenty-two-year-old to that of a man much older and more weathered. It was easy to see that this transformation was too intricate and subtle to be a stage act, but was rather a direct connection between Pecknold and the music. Whether we were in a large venue or a small one appeared not to matter; his eyes were closed, and even though he was within arm’s reach from where I was standing, we might as well not have been in the same room let alone on the same planet.
    The entire band slid back on stage for the last two songs of the set, the second of which, “Blue Ridge Mountains,” which relies heavily on keyboard and a repetitive guitar part, pulled me back into the reality of the concert and the venue in which I was standing. As Fleet Foxes played their last note, I began to resent having to go back to a world in which I was not constantly surrounded by live music. As my friends and I stepped out onto the crowded streets of midtown and began to separate, I realized that even Frank Fairfield’s unsubtle performance had been a welcome distraction from the small realities in the non-musical world. The concert hall may have been just as crowded than a rush-hour one train uptown, but something about every one of us in that room collectively having reveled in the escape afforded to us by music made the stench of popcorn and sweat bearable, if not welcome.
    Fairfield and Fleet Foxes, although using different performance techniques, proved to be surprisingly complementary acts. Together, they worked to transport what I am sure was almost the entirety of the audience into a different time, or at least a different mindset: Fairfield by acting as a living relic and the members of Fleet Foxes through an indescribable onstage connection to their art. As easy (albeit cynical) as it would be for me to simply thrust this aside as a gimmick of the former performer and a happy mistake for the latter, their success at making me forget the outside world is enough to laud their attempts, accidental or not. To make a room full of teenagers, twenty-, and thirty-somethings forget their generationally inclined brash natures and stay quiet is, after all, no easy task.