Lately I’ve been binging on live solo performances from early in the careers of songwriter/musicians who went on to bigger, flashier things. (Elton John, Old Gr

Lately I’ve been binging on live solo performances from early in the careers of songwriter/musicians who went on to bigger, flashier things. (Elton John, Old Grey Whistle Test, 1971; Greg Lake, Cal Jam, 1974; etc.) A recurring comment has been the expression of gratitude to have been alive in the same “blip” of time as the creator/performer and to have seen them perform during their prime. There’s a sense that in the history of the creation of music, the living presence of the creator/performer wasn’t huge until recently, surely due to acceleration of distribution and access via broadcast media, and remained so for a decade or two (bobby sox, fainting at the sight of Elvis, Beatlemania, etc.). Then, as music has become more mediated through electronics (click, autotune, synth, DAW, etc., etc.) arguably the importance of the presence of the creator/performer themselves has increasingly been buffered, muffled or otherwise reduced. This helps me understand SETI and the Fermi Paradox. We’re not just looking for music, we’re looking for the pure signal of Elton between Reg and Captain Fantastic, maybe a 3 year window out of his 60 as a performer, and out of billions of years on the cosmic timeline. Before that he wasn’t on the radar; after it he became part of the background noise.