Slim and The Beast: The Touring Diaries Part III
Day 3: Paris — Zenith
6:15pm
I think we knew what he was trying to say, the kid last night in Lille who said we should have existed in the 1970s. It’s hard to enjoy life without immediately searching for some form of comparison. This is a good reminder to be excited for tonight: Rouen is not Lille is not Paris is not anywhere else. These moments are all sacred for their own individual reasons. The meditation is to find that joyful happy place that exists within each song. Because La Villette is massive. Remember the size of the arena during the sound check. And if I’m not nervous I’m not being honest with myself. Henry Fonda always vomited before he went onstage. And until you do it and understand why you’re doing it, there’s no real way to explain or prepare.
The nerves began in the morning like those same nerves in the locker room before a big basketball game. You can hear the crowd outside. I’ve never done this before, played to such a big audience. Granted, I could have said the same thing yesterday, and the day before.
Soundcheck was not ideal. The size of the venue means everything reverberates up to the metallic ceiling, which makes it harder to hear individual notes, let alone individual harmonies. Also, because the Zénith doesn’t provide its own staff (it’s really just an event space hired out by other companies), there were about 8 different sound guys helping us with the sound, but too many cooks is as bad as having none. Aurelien’s guitar, which worked to perfection in Rouen and Lille, mysteriously had terrible feedback in Paris, and after switching out the battery the high-frequency pitch persisted, so he had to ditch his own guitar for the biggest set of our lives (he would use Aaron’s jankier guitar instead). Soundcheck came and went and we were all a bit disconcerted about the prospect of something going wrong. But what can you do. Pray to the music gods, that’s what you always do.
7:47 pm
I don’t know what makes me more nervous: the prospect of fucking something up, or the prospect of not being myself onstage, the prospect of not recognizing the moment for what it is.
I need to lose myself in the music. I know this. This is why we have rehearsal. This is my chance to show who I am to thousands, little old Samuél, the kid at the piano closing his eyes, the twenty-one year old wailing on his harmonica in his 7th floor 11m2 apartment. It’s a chance to show who we are too.: twin brothers, and Aurelien the third brother, and Thibaut the newest member of our family; our fourth brother, too. This is our chance to show everyone else what it’s like to be in rehearsal with us, to play and laugh and share as much of ourselves as we can via our instruments and words and voices.
Sharing something so personal with so many people … maybe that’s where the nerves come. The songs we are performing were not written for La Villette. They were written for the young man who’d just fallen in love in Audubon Park; the young man who’d just met a beautiful woman outside of Lisbon; the young man who wondered what it is, the thing that keeps close friends together; the group of men who wonder what their former selves would think of them today. And if this is what we hope to share with the audience, it’s also what scares us, the male tendency to shove the deepest emotions further down, to try and run away or hide behind the lyrics, behind the piano, behind the stage, behind the bright lights, behind a thousand other things that might take us away. To perform a good set without living it, together … that’s what I’m scared of. To be exactly what people expect: a band with nice songs and good harmonies, but no heart, no soul, no humanity, no surprises.
I know we’re more than that. We’re brothers. And this is what makes me most nervous as the clock ticks towards 8pm: that we will betray ourselves and our deepest truth when we are on such a big stage.
Meat and Potatoes — 9:15 pm
One of the ironies of playing in the biggest venues in Paris is that you aren’t treated like you’re playing in one of the biggest venues in Paris. The Zenith is an empty shell of a space that is rented out to various companies who want to help put on a show. So the sound teams are different than the beer vendors, who themselves aren’t connected to the people running merchandise, who on paper take 25% of all, but in reality take less because they’re human beings who understand that the opening act has been skeezed before and will be skeezed again. Thibaut ate before the show because he, unlike us three, doesn’t seem to feel any nerves before heading to the stage. He said the food was good but that they counted the individual pieces of beef in the boeuf bourguignon. Fair enough. There were a lot of family members backstage.
After the set there were no beers left in our room, so we had to scrounge around for a half-a-beer each. Our meal was tasty if a bit cold. It had been kept in those orange Styrofoam kebab boxes — meat and potatoes and a few greens — but there wasn’t any silverware and so Aurelien and I ate like cavemen wearing our white rock band suits. The security guards saw this spectacle and were kind enough to try and find utensils. They didn’t find any. We licked our corona fingers anyway.
After our set we all wanted to go out to see our friends in the audience, including S — and M — , who’d come from London, and Y — , who came from Boulogne . I asked one of the beer vendors if there was any way I could get a beer, seeing as how there were no beers left in our backstage fridge (there were only about 10 small bottles to begin with, for a 4-person group + their entire management team). The guy at one stand seemed apologetic but said he couldn’t serve me, told me to ask at another stand further down the way, and so I went. There, the manager looked at me and might as well have laughed. “It’s not possible,” she said. And so we drank and danced anyway, listened to Caravan’s killer set and the after party backstage was mostly a chance to decompress over a glass of wine or a beer — I think I saw some champagne — and chat with the friends and family that had come to support us.
As we were leaving, Aaron had the wise idea to collect all of the un-returned plastic cups throughout the venue. He found 8 of them and made 16 Euros from his scheme, which was 16 Euros more than I made that night. Good move.
The Next Day(s)
Many of my friends sent me a text message to ask how the show went. It’s as honest but also as insufficient of a question as “how are you?” All of us ask it, inevitably. It’s harder to answer honestly. And so my answer to one of my friends who lives in New Orleans is as close as I could get to giving an answer that felt true:
[03:36, 3/8/2020]: it’s honestly something I will need to write about to try and comprehend
[03:37, 3/8/2020]: because I just played songs I wrote in front of 5000 people and now I’m in front of my space heater eating a Clementine because it’s the only food in my apartment and I feel on top of the world
[03:37, 3/8/2020]: and that seems like something worth writing about.
So what does it “feel like?” It feels like an acid trip. It feels like that moment when you get into the rhythm of making love. It feels like the first time you stand up on a surfboard on a six-foot wave. It feels like that moment in front of the speakers during an EDM show when all of your friends are dancing with you, and you’re in sync with every single person on the dance floor. To give you an idea of “what it feels like” to play in front of 5,000 people is to say it feels like a dream, something you can only start to recognize the contours of in an abstract way before it evaporates into a general feeling of something good that you only know you hope to return to someday.
And then, as soon as its over — not unlike a DMT trip, or a dream — it feels like a memory. One that you know may never be repeated again. And the friends and family that were there — the people who shared that moment with you, specifically — are people that you now share a deeper connection with you, one that will glow warm for the rest of your life. Those people who were with us on the biggest night of our lives now share that glowing understanding of what it meant to us, and that specific night will never be re-created again. This is why we search. This is why we chase. We are looking for something that can only be accessed in memory. The solace is in creating new memories to support the older ones. The solace is to keep dreaming.
A bit more on that though. “It feels like a dream” is a bit of a cop out. Standing in front of thousands, you don’t realize there are thousands. All you feel is their energy and a deep love for where you are, in that exact instant. Something resembling grace., a recognition that there’s nothing more than this, and that there can’t be, because this is everything. And whether it’s your poet friend in Paris who came at the last minute because he has always believed in you, the man you met at a book swap ten years ago — you gave him The Amazing Adventures of Cavalier and Klay, he gave you The Martian Chronicles — and whether it’s your best friends from your university days who came over from London just to see you, two people who as soon as you met you knew would be family for the rest of your life; and whether it’s the producers who’ve brought your music to a place you never dreamed was possible; and whether it’s your twin brother on the stage, standing right next to you, smiling; and whether it’s that friend you haven’t seen in two years who first saw you playing in the dimly lit stuffy cocktail bar in the Latin Quarter; and whether it’s your band mate, your brother, the one you first met setting picks and rolls on the basketball court; whoever you see in there or out there, and all of the unknown faces who have now become part of you because they are part of that memory, it’s a memory that will remain alongside an eternal smile for the rest of your life.
Back to Reality
There’s something to be said about the creeping feeling of loneliness in the following days. I watched Hook because after being surrounded by the energy of so many people, taking in that energy, it felt strange to be in a small apartment by myself. It wasn’t a sad feeling, just a quiet one. Being alone in a forest, maybe. The realization that once you’ve tasted that amount of human warmth swirling around you, it’s very hard to imagine a feeling that can compare. I watched Hook because it reminded me of something magical. It reminded me of the Lost Boys, of playing as a kid, of adventure, of community, and given the beginning of the quarantine just one week later, it felt like the right move, in retrospect.
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