So, I went to a Dave Matthews Band show, and while I wasn't necessarily super into the idea, I do enjoy some of the band's music. I was of course dreading the utter abundance of douchitude, but it wasn't terrible, crowd-wise.
What caught my attention was that this was very different from the other improv-oriented rock band that I like (Phish.) Phish structures their shows into two sets. No opening act, just about 2.5 hours total of Phish. The first set typically contains more songs, with creative soloing but not necessarily a lot of improv that changes the musical structure of a song. The second set, on the other hand, tends to have longer songs that are broken open and which completely depart from the song's original mold. This makes sense to me: you start with the familiar, you play around with it, and by the second set, you see openings, cracks in songs, that weren't there before.
One of the endearing things about Phish, though, is that sometimes they have no idea how to structure a show. Because these concerts are often held in sports arenas, a friend of mine once referred to them as "a sporting event for hippies." That's not entirely off, though I don't thing likening anything to a sporting event is pejorative (I think Doughboy did when he made that statement, though.) And sports in America are - generalization alert - largely about the ending of the game.
Michael Jordan, John Elway, Doug Flutie, a pre-injury 2006 Gilbert Arenas - they were all inspiring and engaging to sports fans because of late-game heroics. Even Landon Donovan gets on that list now, with the miraculous finish against Algeria. Now, what does this have to do with seeing Dave Matthews at Nationals Park? Well, for starters, the crowd was sitting down for most of the show. I like sitting just as much as the next person, even if it will kill you, but I also enjoy standing quite a bit. I'd say I'm 50/50 on the sitting/standing thing. But at a show? I believe firmly in standing.
So, I noticed that the crowd was basically very complacent - sort of like a first quarter basketball crowd, or a third inning baseball crowd. Why get up? Why get into it? What happens early doesn't matter. It's all about the finish. And of course, as it became clear that the band was playing the last song, everyone was standing and behaving as though they were at a rock show.
What this has to do with soccer is that, in the context of how much ink has been spilled over the question of whether there is something fundamentally un-American about soccer or not (whatever the hell un-American means, right? Harvey Pekar was radically American, and so is Dick Cheney) and one thing that I think most scribes have missed is that in soccer, what happens in the first minute can make all the difference. In American football, there are so many possessions (and the possibility for half-scores in the form of field goals) that a good team can put themselves in position to remain competitive. Same in basketball, where a team can go on a sudden 12-2 run and make a game suddenly competitive. But in soccer, there are no half-scores, and no linear progression.
Put differently: a good drive in football that takes you 80 yards down the field can get you 7 points or 3 points. Unless you mess up, you'll get one of the two. A great possession in soccer can only result in a goal or not result in a goal. There's no reward for good effort - there's only the goal or not the goal. Similarly, a goal scored in the first minute of a game can be decisive. If you believe that the important stuff needs to wait until the end of an event to take place, you may find yourself sorely disappointed by a game where you can be locked into a bad outcome in the first minute, and spend 89 hapless minutes fighting to change that.
Besides thinking about this stuff, I also overheard a great conversation in the men's room, but I'll save that for later.
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