If the month of March came close to doing me in, then the week just past should by all rights have been the last straw: five plays, three deadlines, and countless other chores, all coming on the heels of a week-long trip to Washington to attend my first National Council on the Arts meeting. Too much of a whole lot of good things, in short, and by Thursday I was feeling the strain, not least because somewhere along the way I apparently forgot how to go to sleep–though I did finally remember to fill my ice trays. (Thanks, Ali!)
So what on earth possessed me to cram one more item into my schedule? Because I did: I went to the Beacon Theater to hear the Pat Metheny Group perform The Way Up, the new Metheny-Lyle Mays composition about which I spoke
last month on Soundcheck. Short of going on a fifty-mile overnight hike, it was the dumbest thing I could possibly have done, not least because Metheny and his band are notorious for playing really, really long shows. This time around, they started out by performing The Way Up in its album-length entirety. Then, without benefit of intermission, they launched into an extended greatest-hits set that went on for yet another hour and a half.
That is, to put it mildly, a hell of a lot of music, and the Pat Metheny Group doesn’t go through the motions, either: I don’t know when I last saw so much energy discharged in the course of a single evening. I was already tired when I got to the theater, and once I realized that Metheny was going to keep on rocking until eleven at the earliest, my heart sank. “A little too much is just enough for me,” Ned Rorem
says, but I’ve always begged to differ. I like art songs, small paintings, beautifully wrought novellas, one-act plays, and concerts that leave you wanting more. (I don’t believe I’ve ever shared my Drama Critics’ Prayer with you: Dear God, if it can’t be good, let it be short.) Besides, The Way Up is a complex piece of writing that demands of its listeners a substantial amount of sustained concentration. Because of this, I’m not so sure it was ideally served by being presented as part of so long a program. I know I didn’t want to hear anything else after it was over, any more than I care to see another ballet after watching New York City Ballet dance Jerome Robbins’ eighty-minute-long Goldberg Variations, despite the fact that NYCB always follows it with a chaser.
All this notwithstanding, I stayed to the bitter end, mostly because my companion for the evening was a Pat Metheny buff who would have been more than happy to spend the whole night listening to his music. I didn’t want to leave her high and dry, so I stuck it out–and sure enough, I got my second wind before long and came roaring back to life. What’s more, the next-to-last song, a trio version of “Farmer’s Trust” played with feathery delicacy by Metheny, Mays, and Steve Rodby, turned out to be one of the high points of the evening.
By then, of course, I was wound up tight and thrilled to pieces, and I would have gladly stuck around for at least another hour or two. It was, alas, a purely temporary buzz, one that wore off as soon as the music stopped. By the time I finally made it home, I was too tired to do much of anything, even fall asleep. Instead of going to bed, I collapsed in a heap on the couch and stared numbly at the TV until half past way too late. Still, I wasn’t sorry to have spent so much time with the Pat Metheny Group, not even slightly. Nothing in moderation: so reads the epitaph on Ernie Kovacs’ tombstone in Forest Lawn. I’m not sure how wise a rule of life that is–Kovacs died at forty-three–but even those of us who believe devoutly in the gospel of proportion in all things should occasionally make a point of spending an evening traveling the road of excess, if only to remind ourselves of what we’re missing out on by being so damnably moderate.
Speaking of, er, moderation, I’ve got yet another deadline waiting in the wings, so I’ll see you tomorrow, or whenever….