On Saturday, I got to do something I hadn’t done in a long time: go to a concert.
At a special physically-distant drive-in show, Canadian country singer Brett Kissel rocked the Richmond Fairgrounds in Ottawa’s West End, with hundreds of people watching from the roofs and windows of their cars and pickup trucks.
Usually, I spend my summers going to lots of concerts, often travelling out of town to see some of my favourite bands. Before Kissel’s show, the last concert I had been to was a co-headliner featuring Simple Plan and Bowling For Soup (and opening act Not Ur Girlfrenz) on Feb. 15, at the Brighton Centre in Brighton, U.K.
This past winter was supposed to be my semester abroad in France. Simple Plan is my favourite band, so I decided to spend the weekend in the U.K. so I could see them live. At that point, I was aware there was a coronavirus in Asia, and a few people in Europe had contracted it, but I wasn’t thinking about it when I saw the concert.
The concert was everything I hoped for. I made friends in the crowd, I sang my lungs out to all of the classic Simple Plan songs I grew up listening to, I moshed with the people around me, and I crowd surfed my way out of the show as Bowling For Soup finished with “1985.”
That day, I was living my best life.
A month after that concert, the world changed. COVID-19 turned everyone’s life upside down. I came home from France, and like everyone else, I had to get used to life in the new world.
We all lost a lot because of this pandemic. Some of us have even lost loved ones. As someone who loves live music and goes to a lot of concerts, I also lost something important to me.
Before the pandemic, I spent much of the past two years going to concerts on almost a weekly basis. Whether it was a big band like the Foo Fighters or Weezer in front of a massive festival crowd, or a friend’s band like Hopper or Selfish Things at House of Targ or the 27 Club in Ottawa Concerts have always been my happy place. Live music has brought me so much joy and losing it was devastating.
While fans lost their happy places, musicians lost their entire livelihoods. With tours and festivals cancelled, musicians lost the intimate and direct contact they had with their fans.
They had to find other ways to make their music work. First, they did virtual concerts on Instagram Live and other platforms, but it lacked the feeling that comes with having hundreds of people in the same space, enjoying the same music at the same time.
In the spring of this year, several artists tried a new format for live music: the drive-in concert. A fun take on the concept of drive-in movies, these concerts meant fans could social distance and enjoy a live show with minimal risk of spreading COVID-19. Brett Kissel was one of the artists who embraced the concept, and he decided to bring his band back together to play drive-in shows in select cities across Canada.
This past Saturday, exactly 217 days after my last concert, Kissel’s drive-in tour came to Ottawa. Because his evening show sold out in minutes, he added two matinee shows.
I was able to catch the 1 p.m. show, and it definitely felt different from the regular concert experience. I was probably 100 metres from the stage, I wasn’t able to make friends with the people standing beside me, and I wasn’t able to get close and feel the force of the speakers at the front of the stage.
Nonetheless, it was still live music! I went with my mom, and it was fun to sit beside her on the roof of her car and enjoy the show. It’s definitely a unique concert experience I won’t forget any time soon.
On top of all that, Kissel put on an incredible show. It wasn’t as intimate as the last time I saw him at a packed Algonquin Commons Theatre in 2018, but it was definitely a reminder of the positive vibe he gives through the music he makes.
The cold weather is coming soon, and the drive-in concerts will come to an end for the season, so I’m once again preparing for another concert drought. But through it all, I see the light at the end of the tunnel. I believe live music will come back to the masses in the future, we just need to be patient.
As Foo Fighters frontman Dave Grohl said in an essay for The Atlantic about the loss of live music: “I do know that we will do it again because we have to. It’s not a choice. We’re human. We need moments that reassure us that we are not alone.”
I need live music to come back to my life the way it used to be. Although I’ve managed well without it, this past weekend reminded me of the feeling of joy concerts have brought to me throughout my entire life.
I can’t wait for the day we get to pack clubs or festival grounds to unite and enjoy live music like we used to. Until that day comes, I don’t mind watching from the roof of a Honda CRV.
Featured image by Jeff Pelletier.
