I saw the Grateful Dead perform about 90 times. I have a less accurate count of how many times I’ve seen String Cheese Incident, but I’m sure it’s over 100. I have sometimes had conversations with people who were utterly baffled by this. “Why would you see the same thing over and over?” The answer of course is it’s not the same thing. To me, improvisation is the whole point of live music, witnessing the creation of something brilliant that has never occurred before and never will again. I would sometimes reply with the “baseball” analogy that Deadheads sometimes use: after seeing a baseball game once, would you then avoid seeing those two teams play again, because you’ve already seen it? Of course not, it’s a different game every time, with different plays and the possibility of seeing skilled players do something amazing with the situation presented to them.
By contrast, I saw a Steely Dan concert a few years ago, and it was utterly boring to me. The music was good, but it was performed EXACTLY as it appears on their albums, very precise and very sterile. It was no more interesting to me than watching a record player on stage playing their songs.
As a songwriter and audio engineer I love good work done by technically excellent musicians and producers in the studio. I try to do the same in my own recording work.
But there is nothing to beat the energy of live music played in the moment by a great band. I would never claim to be a charismatic frontman… but I will say I’m a damn good driving bass player, especially if I have a compatible drummer to work with…
I watch a decent amount of live music by local acts. Typically tribute bands for 1970s/1980s big names. So I’ve seen some of their acts multiple times. ISTM the whole point of those performers is to minimize the need to improvise across an unplanned situation. ISTM all these folks know the music cold and try to deliver it without surprising their bandmates.
There certainly may be preplanned solos built into a particular tune where the drummer or bassist or lead guitar gets to run wild for a couple minutes. But are they running wild, or playing the same seemingly free-form run of notes / beats they do every time? I don’t have a good enough musical memory, nor do I see the same band often enough to tell which.
Certainly things like Jazz are largely built around improv. I used to see a lot of local jazz combos, and although each group had a certain sound, how they played on any given night was quite variable. A treat every time, and a surprise in every tune.
I don’t know how much that’s true of a rock group like the Dead. My ignorance is vast enough that I don’t trust my first-glance skepticism.
Probably a good hypothesis, but as @markn_1 notes, some bands, especially “jam bands” like the Dead, are known for improvisation, as well as playing “deep tracks” from their catalog as part of their sets; that seems to be a big part of what makes each of their concerts a unique experience.
Others, as has been noted, tend to play mostly the same songs every time, and more-or-less exactly as those songs had originally been recorded.
I know people who have gone to see dozens of concerts by their favorite (non-jam-band) artists, including Bruce Springsteen and the Rolling Stones. I don’t know enough about those groups’ live shows to know how much one show differs from the next, but these acquaintances of mine – who are fairly well-to-do – build vacation trips around going out of town, and even out of the country, to see their favorite groups.
I also used to know some people who were big in the Parrothead (Jimmy Buffet) community, and went to a lot of his concerts. A lot of that, as I understand it, was to be part of the party-like atmosphere (including partying in the parking lot before the concert), and to hang out with fellow Parrotheads while enjoying the concert.
On the other hand, I’ve been to four Styx concerts over the past 20 years, as they’re one of my wife’s favorite bands. It’s essentially the same show every time, not unlike when I’ve seen other 1970s/1980s bands touring more recently; one thing I do notice is that those bands often incorporate one or two of their lesser-known, non-hit songs during their sets. Without fail, you can feel the energy come out of the audience when they start playing a song that no one but a hardcore fan would recognize, and it becomes a “time to run to the bathroom” break.
There’s gotta be an exception to prove the rule. Classic Genesis (1970–1977) always played their songs in concert note-perfect from the album, no improvising. Their fans loved it that way. It was like classical music in that regard. The special thing about their concerts was the wild-ass surreal stories Peter Gabriel told while the band was tuning up for the next song.
When I saw them in ‘77 Phil Collins improvised a long list of medieval punishments the roadie would be subjected to if he didn’t repair Tony Banks’s keyboard power in a hurry when it suddenly failed. Gotta think on your feet in showbiz.
I suspect that that was pretty typical for first-generation 1970s progressive rock bands, like Gabriel-era Genesis, as well as Yes, ELP, King Crimson, etc. Their musicians were, as a rule, extremely talented, and they wrote complex music, which was often challenging to perform – meaning that their fans appreciated the artistry which came from such a “perfect” live performance of the work as it had originally been written and recorded.
BTW, I’ve seen a group that takes the jamband concept to the extreme: Everyone Orchestra is a constantly changing group of musicians whose performance is 100% improvised. They don’t play any previously written songs, not even fragments of songs. Matt Butler, the “conductor”, is the only constant. He gives direction to the players via hand signals, body language, and sometimes scribbled whiteboard notes, and the players just improvise together. It has been some of the most thrilling live music I’ve ever seen.
There’s a comic book artist named Steve Rude, and on anybody’s list of comic book artists, he’s in the top ten (Top 3 for living comic book artists). He has issues, famously for deadlines and less famously for everything else in the world, but there was a period when he had burned his bridges with all the important comics publishers and he tried his hand at what we might call “gallery art.” His painted comics covers were legendary, up there with Alex Ross and Adam Hughes, but he reasonably thought he was meant for bigger things.
He tried his hand at abstract painting and, my God, it was awful. It looked like painstakingly-rendered crumpled tulle paper and gum wrappers, it was really that bad. He honestly thought that fine art was “anything goes,” but this sure didn’t go anywhere.
He’s doing what he should have been doing, self-publishing NEXUS comics that compete directly with the self-published NEXUS comics of his co-creator Mike Baron (Wish those two could play together). In his lane the guy’s a genius, but I don’t think they’ll be showing his exhibit at the Whitney.
