Ted Leo's vision of things to come

Ted Leo and the Pharmacists tore up the Pearl street Club in Northampton. I mean they took the place apart; Ted Leo cut his forehead open, and threw sweat and blood into the audience, and played like a hellion--and we all helped, in our own way, singing and dancing (waltzing in one case) and even moshing, and screaming out requests and questions and nonsensical cries. I took a friend of mine who I turned onto Ted Leo's music a few years before, but who had never seen him live. I was worried for a while that he would put on a mediocre show, and she'd come away feeling let down; but no way—his destroyed. Or no, he created. His music isn't nihilistic destruction. It's soaked, steeped, painted with the kind of idealism that seemed to attract the crowd that he had.

After we left the show, my girlfriend commented that we were probably some of the oldest people in that club. Ted Leo had been giving a button by an audience member sometime during the show, and she told him that it was her birthday. When he asked her how old she was, she told him she was sixteen, and he blanched a little at the difference in their age. She was not alone either, as maybe 75 percent of that audience was under 20. I think there's something to that, because being a teenager, as much as it sucks a whole lot of ass, is one of the few times in your life when you feel urgency about almost everything. Once you hit college, it's all job training and (for the most part) you don't have parents peering over your shoulder, and you fall in love in a real way, but you also track and process yourself into being an adult. When your sixteen, as that girl demonstrated, you feel oppressed by everything, and everything seems to be a way out—everything is urgent. And everything is about getting somewhere better than where you are. It's that kind of idealism that makes adolescence both inspiring and ultimately tragic.

Of course, idealism isn't enough. Everyone's idealistic to a certain extent, I think. We all see the shit piling up around us, and we all complain about the smell, but then what? And this is where the Bolshevik communists and the enlightenment rationalists had it wrong—they thought, all you have to do is reveal the contradictions of society, make them clear, teach and educate “the people” (they never define that term very well) of their own ignorance, and they'll come flocking to your banner, overthrowing the powers that be and bringing us all into a new horizon. I think a lot of so-called ''liberals'' today think the same thing—all you have to do is say ''Bush lied, kids died'', and that will somehow be self-evident reason for his tar-and-feathering. What is often forgotten is that life, from wandering in animal skins to wearing them on your Ipod, asks a whole hell of a lot of us—it's huge and fast and powerful, and disorienting, and more than a little depressing a lot of the time. We've gotten really good at living with contradictions, because life has gotten really good at breaking us, and the natural response to that kind of pain is to turn inward, put your nose to the grindstone, let things that aren't in your immediate radar pass by you without notice.

Ted Leo goes further than that, at least in whatever small way a rocknroller can. His relations with his fans are some of the best I've ever seen, and his constant conversation with the crowd is almost as entertaining and fulfilling as his music. His albums (The Tyranny Of Distance , Hearts Of Oak, and Shake The Sheets , plus some great E.P.'s) are all fantastic, loaded with killer rockandroll of most energetic stripe. Plus, unlike most modern rockers who put three 10 words over a drop-d guitar riff and call it a song, Ted Leo fills his songs with huge soliquays, and long spiraling verses. When sung above his quicksilver downstroke picking, he sounds desperate to get so many words out, and the energy with which he does makes him all the more enjoyable and worthwhile.

What Ted Leo does, with his music, with his relations with his fans, is to construct a vision of the future that might be less horrible than what we currently have. He does reveal contradictions, but he also offers solutions—he makes a path to a better world, and he struggles with us to walk down it. It is only through being together that we arrive out of darkness—education and revelation are a beginning, not an ending, and after a certain point, we have to move from complaining to envisioning, and then from there, to creating. Ted Leo does all three of these, and he wants you to do the same and make a better world. His music is righeous and idealistic in the best way possible—it asks for more than world as it is, it envisions an idealistic world that could be, that should be, if the stars were right, and the Gods were smiling, and all of us weren't so hung up on guns and fear and buying things. Let's hope some of that righteousness is contagious like the plague, and we all of us rats spread it the far corners of the globe, and turn this ball of mud and rock and a few twitching carbon-based things into a great and beautiful place to be.