Mars Red Wine
Mars Red Sky reps Bordeaux at Middle East on Saturday, 7 December 2024.
Howling Giant, Black Lung, and Kind open the fourstack bill.
Bathrobe Guy in the house.
Ace the Quiz, Win the Tix
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Hump Nights
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Ace the Quiz, Win the Tix 〰️ Hump Nights 〰️
Hump Nights
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Ace the Quiz, Win the Tix
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Hump Nights 〰️ Ace the Quiz, Win the Tix 〰️
A real throwback rock n roll night at Middle East. With headliner France’s Mars Red Sky, joined by Howling Giant, Black Lung, and Kind.
You could have rolled back the clock by twenty years, and the same faces would have walked through the door then as now. It’s comforting, it’s eerie, it’s whatever. One of these days the Sater family will finally turn the club into the bottom floor of a new luxury hall, like they’ve been trying to do for years, and you won’t have Middle East to kick around anymore. Get your nostalgia in now.
For the rest, I’ll defer to the writeup at my Cambridge Day gig…
Bordeaux is a city in France that is known for its namesake wine, soaring Gothic cathedrals, and impressive public gardens. Less so for the kind of psychedelic stoner rock that residents Mars Red Sky make. But the French trio was looking to alter your perceptions about their hometown at a Middle East gig last Saturday, lighting up the stage with all your favorite rock tropes on their North American tour.
It feels sometimes like rock n roll is on its way out. As a musical zeitgeist, “rock” must have peaked at some point during the 50s, 60s, or 70s, depending on how you measure it. We have been living for decades in an era of hip hop as the culturally-dominant form of popular music.
But “rock” lives on, in a quasi-zombified form, because Boomers have the requisite wealth to purchase cultural influence through a desire to live dangerously close to their memories.
Bands that should have long since hung it up are still on tour at major arenas.
Halls of Fames are built to commemorate the rock bands that are gone but never forgotten.
A new Bob Dylan, or Janis Joplin, or Elvis Presley, or Brian Wilson, or John Lennon biopic gets released every year, along with endless merch.
It’s not a passion for music that moves all these units – it’s the insatiable, vampyric hunger to live within a kind of ageless hall of mirrors, which reflect only what a certain generation looked like, or thought they looked like, when they were young.
More importantly, the heavy cultural patrimony eats into the wallets of subsequent generations, who have more debt and less buying power than their parents and grandparents, and spend a greater percentage of their music dollars on music to which they have no living, breathing connection.
It’s hard to fathom what it means when you see a 12-year old wearing a Doors t-shirt. It might inspire a young kid to form a band. Maybe. At any rate it’s $30 dollars that never found its way into the pocket of a living musician.
If you want arts and culture to remain vibrant, you’re going to have to pay the piper. And that piper needs to be a living, breathing human being, not an estate. The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single stoner rock trio from Bordeaux.
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A concept record. Who makes “concept” records anymore?