Now, Voyager

If I had to describe my childhood in a nutshell, I’d say that it was the kind where your dad would take you and your siblings to the airport on Saturdays just to watch the planes takeoff, and boy does that date me. Looking back, I suppose it was a way to get us out of the house so my mom could have some peace and quiet – or maybe my father was still close enough to a time when watching airplanes was a little bit exotic. Either way, my siblings and I used to love going to the airport just to hang around, and when I got a little older, my dad used to pay me in frequent flyer miles for picking him from his business trips.

In those days, you had to park and go to the gate to do that, and the result is that I know SFO like the back of my hand. But I seldom actually park now since the advent of cell phone lots, and so it felt really weird to do that last Monday, and even weirder to go through security and into the terminal and up to the gate without actually having a boarding pass – not to mention hand baggage, a bottle of water, or a brain full of travel anticipation. To be clear, the last time I did that was pre-9/11. Back in the 1900s.

Since the coming of TSA, it feels really funny being inside a terminal without a destination, but there I was on Monday afternoon, in order to see a band perform at Gate B4 in Terminal 1. Terminal 1 - the Harvey Milk terminal - is, as the name implies, the coolest of SFO’s terminals, so cool in fact that it almost seems like a skit on a comedy show highlighting how insufferably hip the city of San Francisco is. I mean, honestly: a Ritual Roasters, A Green Apple books outlet, and the SFO Museum display on Afrofuturist women artists? Even if you love it, like I do, you can’t help but feel like it’s all a big prank on that sector of America that thinks California is way too woke.

Terminal 1 also contains a yoga space and a magical handless water dispenser, and, as hundreds of Outside Lands attendees were dispersing themselves into it, it achieved peak chakra for its accidental denizens by hosting an hour-long live set by the New Zealand band the Beths.

The Beths are playing a couple of other shows in the Bay Area this week, but this one was free, so it was my first choice of venue. It was booked by the Stern Grove Festival, who have teamed up with SFO to present Terminal Sessions, a series of concerts in the terminal taking place all summer, and I think it’s genius. As with the bookings at Stern Grove, the choices are stellar, and the Beths seem particularly well chosen for this affair. They play a type of music – dreamy, clever, Byrdsian, pop – that is acceptable to everyone, and they are also New Zealish, and that says it all, because there was a time in my life when that kind of music glowed in my ears, day in and day out.

Ah, words can’t describe how my friends and I felt about all the bands on the Flying Nun label: when I lived in the Haight in a big Victorian with a bunch of roommates, we had a giant poster of the band the Chills in our living room and I once scared the life out of one of their members by yelling “CAROLINE!” in her face in the middle of Manhattan.

Yeah, we felt about those Flying Nun bands the way that LOTR fans feel about the country as a whole, and while I no longer go around muttering verlaines, verlaines, verlaines, verlaines under my breath whenever someone says a word like ‘kiwi’ or ‘haka’, I guess a feeling akin to that sacredness must linger. To be a band from New Zealand is to be from the island of the blessed. I recently read that the New Zealand government actually funded the Beths’ first three American tours, and that tells you something about the island’s priorities.

I thought I’d be the only person who was there just to see them, but in fact there were others who were clearly just there for the concert, as well as the expected set of curious travelers bearing backpacks and roller bags: all told there were maybe 100 to 150 people standing around the gate, about half the amount for a flight to Manhattan. There was a small stage, and a sound board, and at two o clock on the dot the band climbed onto it and began playing, and it wasn’t long before the entire crowd had fallen into that second head space, so seldom achieved at rock concerts these days, where you melt into the music and your brain goes to its happy place.

In fact, this was probably one of the best shows I’ve been to in this, the 21^st century, and you know me, I am experienced. Best show performed in an alternative space? Well, yes. Best by a band I was none too familiar with? Absolutely. But also, just: best.

That is high praise and reflects in part my own deep personal affection for bands with male/female vocals (Pixies, Reivers, the XX, and so on), but there were other unbiased factors going into this decision, including time of day and the excellent sound system, and I swear to you that if someone had dropped a set of imaginary absolute value bars down around the audience, this assessment would still stand for everyone who fell inside them. I know, because of the invisible bliss that wafted off it, the nodding heads and vacant smiles, the children on shoulders, the security guards with their cell phones up, the dropped luggage of the aged, mouths open, exuding happiness, the actual cheers at the end of each number.

I ask you: When do you hear cheers at the airport? But, as the band played the title track to their latest album “Straight Line Was a Lie,” there was this palpable sense that the minds of everyone present had stopped dead in their tracks and were bouncing and bouncing on the balls of their feet, dancing inside their hearts and for the first time in ages, in a way they had forgotten they knew how to do. It was like there was a sense of remembrance of some kind that had come over this random assortment of people, and what they were remembering was both individual – a private narrative of their own high points in life - and a collective one. And it was made all the better because it had come unexpectedly and anonymously, as when you are in an airport you are not the same person as when you are not: you are no one, in a way; in a liminal state, neither here nor there, but in transit. Sic transit, even: Sic transit gloria mundi, which is a good description of how I feel about the world of music, and the world in general, these days. Like its on its last legs.

But never mind! The fact that we are at the end of our own golden age and heading into darkness is future me’s problem! And as the Beths so truly sing, sometimes present you just has to go forth and incur things:

Future heartbreak, future headaches
Wide eyed nights late, lying awake
With future cold shakes from stupid mistakes
Future me hates me for, hates me for…

At least future me will look back on this gig as I look back on so many others, with fondess rather than regret, unless you count the fact that parking cost $16. But if that money goes towards more terminal sessions, it’s well worth it. Thanks, Stern Grove Festival people! And SFO of course.