An (unexpected) enlightening conversation with Rooney
May 12th, 2010 at 10:23 am
Robert Schwartzman of Rooney. Photo by Kevin Kinder, NWA Media
Writing for a newspaper is rarely a dull endeavor. We interview different subjects each week as our story topics change. There is no shortage of interesting people with strange stories to tell. Entire stories simply fall through. We are trained to expect the unexpected.
Even then, we get surprised sometimes.
Like when I picked up my phone Tuesday afternoon and Robert Schwartzman, the lead singer of Rooney, was on the other end of the line.
He’d read my recent review of his band’s concert on April 26 at the Greek Theater and had a couple of things he wanted to tell me about it.
Musicians calling critics out of the blue can be a prickly affair, to say the least, and no journalist I know wants to field a call from someone like, say, Ryan Adams [caution: lots of super strongly-worded foul language in the link].
Instead, my chat with Schwartzman was a pleasant, informative one, although he wanted to call my attention to a couple things I had said.
I had questioned why there was no encore. Was it because the crowd was leaving? Was it because the band wasn’t enthused with the relatively low turnout or hampered by the cold?
None of the above, Schwartzman tells me. Rooney was contracted for a certain time limit, and his band had squeezed in all the songs they wanted to play in that chunk of time. No encore was planned, and the cold didn’t chill their enthusiasm, he says.
I also talked about the exodus of fans after the show’s final notes. There was a crowd leaving, and I know that because I was among them and followed plenty of folks out.
But, Schwartzman says, there were plenty who stayed around for autographs, and the band spent the time to sign everything handed their way.
I stick behind what I wrote. I think it was an accurate representation of the show, especially in my main point: “The band was solid … but the band also never reached critical mass, something that was going to be hard to accomplish considering that only 500 or so braved the cold and the UA’s finals week to see the free show.”
But naturally, those are one-sided interpretations. Sometimes, I miss things, and it appears there was more going on than I caught at first glance in this case.
It’s extraordinarily rare to get the chance to chat with musicians after a show, and they certainly see things on a different level than those in the stands do.
Schwartzman was worried he wouldn’t get to play because of rain showers that persisted all day. He said the Greek Theater may have been the largest stage (physically speaking) he had ever played on in his life, and he said it challenged his band because of the wide physical gap between the stage and the musicians.
He said he enjoyed his time in Fayetteville, and talked about all the times Rooney will play around here this summer (Tulsa, Columbia, Mo., Little Rock) with the hope of a nicer, warmer, sunnier night, which would be a little more appropriate for their sunny pop rock tunes.
Surprises sure make things interesting. And in this case, it served as a nice reminder that we don’t write in a vacuum.
People are always reading. Sometimes, even those you don’t suspect.