The Future is a Little Lonely: Marc Rebillet’s Drive-in Concert

We’re in a strange time right now. I realize that might be the most mind-numbingly obvious thing you’ve ever read but I’m also sure it’s something you’ve said at least once to someone in your life in the last week, or it was said to you. Because it’s an all-over kind of strangeness we’re dealing with right now, it is far more than one thing. It feels as though almost everything about modern American society is in flux.

There’s been the COVID-19 pandemic (duh) and the quarantine that followed, bringing nearly everyone’s life to a more noticeable halt than anything in the last fifty years. Unless you’re an essential worker in which case your day-to-day life has stayed somewhat similar but grown exponentially more dangerous. There’s been the worst economic downturn since at least the Great Recession of 2008, if not the actual Great Depression that showed how fragile our economic growth was already. Then a racist cop in Minneapolis murdered George Floyd in broad daylight and cities across the country and the world erupted into mass protests that have defied expectations in both size and staying power and the incredible, unexpected, and wonderful thing is they might actually be working and do not seem to be spreading the virus as yet.

And that’s just been the last few months and skips over the whole thing where some states are reopening in a decent position to combat the virus going forward while others are reopening right in the worst of a spike of new infections and others are still in lockdown. 2020 has been strange enough that we almost sparked off World War 3 in January and then all collectively forgot about it. This year has been crazy enough that I got through all of that without mentioning the wanna-be authoritarian hidden in a bunker down in the White House basement who is clearly both miserable in a job whose responsibilities he is incapable of meeting and is in the midst of some kind of major mental decline.

So on Monday, my friends and I drove up to Fort Collins, Colorado to attend Marc Rebillet’s drive-in concert.

It was strange.

Much like 2020 itself, the concert was strange for a lot of reasons. For one, it was a Marc Rebillet concert. No matter the time or circumstances, any Marc Rebillet show is going to be at least a little weird. I doubt the LoopDaddy would want it any other way. He is an improv electronic musician in which only maybe two songs at the end of any show are at all planned, everything else is made up completely on the spot. The songs; comprised of looping phrases he comes up with as he speaks to the crowd (most of which involve genitalia to some degree), keyboard beats and drums, surprisingly soulful piano noodling, and his crazy just-way-too-into-it dancing; are this extraordinary mix of being hilarious, genuinely impressive, and really fucking dance-able. So even without COVID, it would have been a…unique experience.

COVID made it all stranger though.

Part of that was just the fact of Colorado going through our slow reopening. After months in which staying in your house was encouraged if not required, in which weekly trips to the grocery store were your biggest social excursions and even those felt oddly fraught; going to a concert felt momentous. It felt quite similar to the way going to my first concert without parental supervision felt, almost twelve years ago now: this jittery excitement, feeling bold and adventurous and looking at the world through fresh eyes, finding it both more and less alive, and more and less dangerous than you had imagined.

For myself, a good concert experience is rarely just the concert itself. There’s planning with your friends, prepping your intoxicants and pre-gaming, actually driving to the show (thanks to my friend, who will be referred to as ‘J’ from now on, for playing DD on Monday), usually finding a place to eat, and then the concert. Marc Rebillet was no different, despite the circumstances.

Skipping over the planning and pre-gaming, the drive to the concert (from southwest-metro-area-Denver up to Fort Collins) was a long one. There were four of us on our way to the show: J, driving; myself, quite pretentiously observing and trying to convince myself I was David Foster Wallace on assignment; and L and N, who had just gotten married last year and for whom this concert was their first major recreational foray back out into the world after lockdown.

It’s odd how important the car becomes during a respiratory pandemic. The car becomes your prep area, where you put on your mask before going to face the world. It becomes a little bubble of health and cleanliness, your windows rolled up as you watch all the mask-wearing pedestrians fly past. Cars were already incredibly important to Americans, I’m guessing this virus will only strengthen that going forward. It makes sense that drive-thru’s experienced a major surge in usage during the coronavirus, just as it makes sense that other businesses are trying to adapt their products to keeping customers in their cars, like strip clubs. Which, while applauding the ingenuity, strikes me as more comical than sexy. But then, I have yet to experience a drive-thru striptease, so it is entirely possible it will turn out to be the future of ‘in-person’ erotica.

That was honestly something I was wondering about a lot that night. Not…you know, the erotica stuff…but what is and isn’t going to stick around after we have the virus under real control. For example, when we arrived at the Beau Jo’s Pizza on College Ave. in Fort Collins, how long is the requirement that customers wear masks whenever not sitting at their table going to last? Should it go away or are we as a country going to become health-conscious enough that mask-wearing becomes second-nature and pragmatic? When L worried that she was being rude for not wearing her mask when our waitress came to take our order, was she just being overly-polite or is that going to become an actual point of mannered society, being nice enough to keep your germs to yourself? Will menus now only be QR codes that direct you to websites on your smartphone? Will outdoor seating become a much bigger deal? Am I going to stop wondering if that other customer had a fever when he passed noticeably close to our table?

It’s hard to tell the answers to any of those questions. We are within the point of flux, we can’t see outside it. But those questions stay with you when you go outside now, this feeling that you’re watching culture change in front of you. The pizza was great either way. Beau Jo’s has the best pizza in the state and Colorado Mountain Pies deserves to be talked about as much as any other major American pizza style. Fight me.

The line to get into the drive-in theater where LoopDaddy was hosting the concert was long and another point of strangeness. Every major concert-goer knows the routine of actually getting to a show on-time and then getting stuck waiting in a mile-long, never-moving line for well over an hour. For the drive-in show, we got to do the exact same ritual all in the comfort of J’s car. The line was now probably over three miles and there was not a small amount of exhaust fumes from all the idling vehicles. But we rolled the windows down anyway and felt a light evening breeze, the sun just beginning to set behind the mountains and painting the cloudy sky in soft hues of glowing violet and orange. It was a beautiful sight that we got to experience in comfort and isolation and air-conditioning if we wanted. Cozier for all the introverts in our car but clearly worse for the environment.

Is that going to stick around? Those huge un-moving lines of idling cars that formerly only existed when everyone tried to leave the same baseball game at the same time now common sights around any public event. Will car manufacturers start designing cars to be even more home-like than they already do? For many different reasons and for many different kinds of people, the pandemic moved the idea of living in your car much closer to reality.

We got a good spot only three or so rows back from one of the two screens that would be showing Marc Rebillet and started to set up our tailgate. Lawnchairs, music, cooler full of beer and snacks. All of that was unchanged from before. The difference from say, the party-lot at Red Rocks before a show, and this, was separation. When tailgating at Red Rocks or in some parking lot before a football game, there’s a noticeable rowdy sense of community you can feel. Everyone’s there for the same purpose. People talk to people they don’t know. Even un-social people like myself and most of my friends will smile and say hi and occasionally one group of ambiverts at the show will mingle with a group of introverts and it’s all surprisingly pleasant. Any kind of drug you want is sold. Maybe a friendship is made, or a trashy romance begun. An unhurried and unworried socialization.

You didn’t quite get that feeling before the drive-in show. People did dress like they would for a concert, but of course they also wore masks and respected social-distancing. These were obviously the correct things for people to do, but it meant there was no real inter-group interaction. There was very little mingling and most of it had to be impersonal due to distance and lack of privacy. There were fewer surprises in the night for everyone. You really only spoke to the people you came with.

Which is good, I love my friends and I’m not a super social person. But it’s different, and you wonder how long it’s going to last. Is the whole world going to become a little more introverted, a little less willing to go try to talk to someone across the lot who caught their eye? Who you meet in life and who becomes your friend or lover or spouse would become just a little less surprising, a little more predictable, wouldn’t it?

If you wanted concessions you had to order it online through the theater’s website. Once you placed your order you were sent a text confirming the order and giving you an estimate of when it would be ready. When J ordered waters and popcorn for us, the first text told us it wouldn’t be ready for half an hour. Twenty seconds later he received another text telling him the order had been fulfilled. There was a lot of that, of people clearly prepping for the bad and then finding that while things had changed, they hadn’t changed as much as they’d been worried. I got the feeling this was especially true for L and N. It seemed as though L had been prepared to wear her mask for the entire show, but then was willing to take it off as long as she stayed in or near the car, after we saw most of the other concert-goers doing the same.

The trip to the bathroom was an interesting experience. For possibly the first time I’d seen at any public event, the line for the men’s room was far longer than the line for the women’s. I have no idea why that was or what it means but it seemed worth noting. Waiting in line for the bathroom was one of the few times I spoke to people not in my group. Everyone in line wore a mask of some sort (I really only saw maybe two people in the whole show who didn’t when they left their little bubble around their car) and there was this strange feeling of both solidarity and distrust among us. We were all out together, experiencing this mix of dystopia and mid-century Americana due to the fact that we were at a fucking drive-in movie theater. And yet I know if anyone had started seriously coughing, everyone else would have reacted to it like he’d just unveiled a bomb on his chest. You watched someone behind their mask and wondered how careful they’d been during quarantine. And you knew others were wondering the same about you.

The show started right as darkness fully fell and people were snapping glow-sticks and unlimbering rave-toys that looked out-of-place not in a sweaty club but on a gravel lot outdoors. Three short films opened the show and the first and third ones both concerned the apocalypse in some way. I remember thinking while watching those, admittedly far from sober, Marc Rebillet gets it. He knew the feeling of this show and he was leaning into it.

LoopDaddy was then driven around on a modified and glowing golf cart. He visited every part of the very-large complex and everywhere he went he got the energy up. Mostly he just screamed “Yes” in rapid intervals while growing ever-more excited and dancing like he was on ecstasy with bees in his hair. It shouldn’t have worked but it genuinely fucking did. This has to be due to the incredible energy of Marc Rebillet. Monday was the third time I’d seen him live and every time I have I come away even more convinced that he might be the best and most ridiculous showman alive.

Then the actual concert began. The way the setup worked was LoopDaddy had a little area to himself in the center of the place where he played. This was then projected to both of the screens in the complex and the sound was ported to a private FM station we were told when we entered. Every car in the theater became another speaker and we watched Marc Rebillet like a movie.

The music was genuinely great. It was a little less energetic than it usually got during a normal Marc Rebillet show. He spoke about creating ‘vibes’ a lot and the way he could noodle on the piano over his beats and loops was hypnotic. He had call-in sessions in which he had hilarious and awkward conversations with fans where he’d zero in on a phrase of theirs and make a song out of it. He’d put his mask on and walk amongst the crowd and interact with a bunch of extroverts clearly starved for both attention and communication. Songs were requested. A couple girls came up to one of the cameras planted outside his little performing space and twerked for him and then flashed everyone in the theater via the movie screens. All the fan interactions had this desperate excited energy that felt a little dangerous but also obviously fed Marc Rebillet’s own energy.

Yet, despite the music being great and every car being made into a speaker, it never got nearly as loud as a normal concert. The movie screens gave you a bigger and clearer picture of LoopDaddy doing his job than you would have ever seen at a normal show, yet it felt palpably distant, something you watch. You could dance to the music (concerts, especially concerts like this one, are literally the only place in the world I feel mildly comfortable dancing in public) but you were very conspicuous when you did. There was no crowd to hide you. At most there were the three other people from your car that danced with you and self-consciousness spreads fast in a group that size. Most people I saw watched the concert from lawn-chairs or stood around drinking beer and nodding along to the beat. The glowsticks and rave-toys were put away before the end of the show.

The truth is that LoopDaddy pulled off the show overall. It was an incredibly enjoyable and unique experience. I can think of very few performers in any medium that could have made something as entertaining as he did while so handicapped by circumstances.

But the question I asked myself as we started the long drive back from Fort Collins to Denver, the mountains like sharp black teeth in the night, was would I want this kind of concert in the future? Should this stick around when we are no longer so in flux?

There are some things I would be okay with if they stayed. Masks really don’t bother me that much. Online ordering and more outdoor seating at restaurants and bars seem like a great idea. Worrying more about our health and our healthcare system just seems like the obvious, pragmatic option going forward.

I do not want this to stay, as much as I did enjoy it, and as much as I am still just blown away by the very fact that Marc Rebillet actually fucking pulled it off. A great concert is a communal experience. A punk show where you’re thrown around so much by the mad shifting of the crowd your feet don’t even touch the floor half the time. Everyone singing and dancing at the same time, hidden by the crowd and part of it at the same time. A great concert leaves you feeling like you and everyone around you both witnessed and did something that will not ever happen again, that could only happen because of the exact people there at that exact night. That is not quite the feeling I had on Monday. The other concert-goers were extraneous for the most part.

I had a fantastic time, but I left feeling a little more lonely, if anything. Marc Rebillet did something amazing with this show, but if this is the post-virus future for live music, then the future is going to feature a lot of awkwardly dancing by yourself, and then stopping, embarrassed, when someone at least six feet away notices you and says nothing.