The Steamboat Pilot & Today

I’ve never agreed with the idea that you have to know a band’s music to review how that band plays in concert.

Sure, it helps to know all the words and chords to an especially complex song so you’ll notice if a lead singer stumbles through the lyrics or if a new backing band hasn’t quite figured out all the changes.

But the best way to review a concert is to just watch how everyone else in the audience reacts to it. The tactic doesn’t work for every genre — “shoe-gaze” crowds gaze at their shoes no matter how well their favorite band plays — but in most cases, if more than a few people are singing along, the musicians are doing something right.

That tactic works especially well in covering concerts for MusicFest, where the fans at the private concerts are dedicated to the music to a point where they’ve spent at least $199 on a festival pass.

This is a completely different concert experience than I’m used to: Here you have thousands of people who know all the words to all the songs. These are people who are on vacation and don’t need the music to escape, but who love it so much they escape into it anyway.

MusicFest sells an experience and a style as much as it does any individual act in its yearly lineup. Where an individually ticketed concert appeals to a fan of a specific band, a weeklong music-themed vacation appeals to the fan who wants to live like his favorite musicians, rather than just listen to them.

It makes for an abnormally happy concert experience, one that’s as much about prolonged entertainment as it is about how well Robert Earl Keen played “Feelin’ Good Again.”

In any other circumstance, I’m not sure I would know how to judge a country band’s performance, because I’m not that up on country music. That’s not to say I have anything against the style — country musicians are, as far as I’ve heard, better lyricists than most anyone else — it’s just that I tend to forget it’s there.

But the producers of MusicFest have decades of experience in pulling people in, and every event I’ve been to during the past two festivals has done that frighteningly well.

So how do I review a MusicFest concert? Count the beer cups swinging in the air, and go from there.

Check www.steamboatpilot.com in the next two weeks for reviews of MusicFest and Ski Jam concerts.

— Margaret Hair, 4 Points