Story
Live Energy
We’ve all been there. Covered in sweat, sending out screams and lyrics as loud as we can, happier than any serotonin rush we could imagine; all facing the stage, watching the band play faster, harder and louder than anybody’s got a right to.
It is the greatest joy, the biggest thrill. Not just the power of live music, but the energy that moves from the stage, through the crowd, all the way back, building and feeding on itself. When it hits that back wall, starts rolling back to the stage, you can feel the waves rush over you again – and see the musicians almost ride the energy to new heights.
When Bruce Springsteen took the stage at the Cleveland Agora on August 9, 1978, it was a watershed moment for the soon-to-be legendary live performer. A free show to celebrate iconic AOR radio station WMMS’ 10th Anniversary, it was an underplay for a few hundred from the arena-sized rocker that fairly blistered the walls of one of America’s most famous rock clubs.
Broadcast live on eight stations across the Midwest, The Cleveland Plain Dealerreported that close to three million people listened to the three-hour show. When released as The Agora, Cleveland, 1978, Rob Sheffield wrote in Rolling Stone, “This is simply the greatest live LP this greatest of live rockers has ever officially released.”
Relentless, joyous, fraught with stories that offered tension and humor in equal parts, it poured out of your radio with real brio – enough to make it one of the most bootlegged concerts in history. But just as intriguingly, the waves of people “claiming” to have been there would’ve more than filled Springsteen’s sold out August 30th show at the Richfield Coliseum.
Those vibrations – literally – traveling as waves create what the ear feels and perceives as sound.
Traveling at 343 meters per second, its frequency is determined by the wave’s length – and its volume is the product of the wave’s height. The higher the waves rise, the louder the sound will be, just as the longer the wave, the lower the pitch of the sound.
And the way it all comes together, the waves overlapping and aligning has much to do with the harmoniousness, the seeming expansion of the sound coming off that stage. As importantly, the sound waves hit harder surfaces and bounce cleaner and louder, while they tend to be absorbed by, well, us. So, literally, whether it’s high mountain bluegrass harmonies, searing blues guitar, cool jazz vocals or hard rock’s crashing rhythm section, what you feel is literally the waves of sound moving through you and transforming your spirit.
Even more powerfully, though, it binds us to the music and the moment. The collective energy from the cheering, the stomping, the dancing and singing along at the top of our lungs blends with the sound waves coming off that stage, twisting into an energy field that only exists in that moment, transforms everyone sharing the experience and lifts the players and the audience by the waves rolling over each and every square inch.
– Holly Gleason