Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance: the five stages of grief. We’ve all been at one stage or another since March. Sometimes in tandem, dualities of loss and mourning for things large and small due to the COVID-19 pandemic, including live music.
Since spring, I’ve thought frequently of one warm evening in a wilder, freer time, when I walked with a friend visiting from Portland from one concert at Luckey’s to catch a bit of another show at WOW Hall.
“Eugene’s music scene, you can really throw your arms around it,” my friend said, and he’s right. Live music in Eugene is often claustrophobic, sometimes underachieving, but always resilient. In other words, and pardon the colloquialism: It isn’t much, but it’s ours.