Photographing a Mac DeMarco Concert

The death of concert photographers everywhere – the first three songs of Mac DeMarco’s set last night were instrumental. Actually to be specific, the first 14 songs he played were instrumental.

I’ve been photographing concerts all around New York City all of July for a project in my photography class at the intensive studies program at Parsons School of Design. Needless to say I’ve spent a lot of time emailing PR contacts, sneaking my camera into underground venues, and flirting with band members to find back entrances. However, photographing Mac DeMarco was completely above board.

I started writing for a music magazine a couple years ago. Right after I went to a concert my sophomore year of college and wrote in my journal immediately upon returning to my dorm, “The concert was fun and all but I’d rather be photographing it. I can guarantee you that the next concert I go to I’ll be photographing.” And then, promptly, the next concert I went to, I was photographing. Since Mac DeMarco is a relatively well-known artist, I covered the show for the magazine and got a comp ticket and photo pass.

It had been a long day before I got in the building of Webster Hall though. My class was walking around Chelsea almost all day meeting creative directors, curators, and exploring galleries. July heat in NYC is no joke. When the time came for us to split off and go home, I decided to walk from Chelsea back to my dorm near Washington Square Park to get some nervous energy out of my system – plus I needed to talk to my mom and pick up a few things. The first stop was at CVS to get a new set of ear plugs and the second was at one of my favorite restaurants in the city, Sophie’s Cuban Cuisine. The best Cuban sandwiches ever.

All of my roommates were gone getting frozen yogurt when I returned so I took the opportunity to record a bit of a video I was trying to make about photographing the concert. The problem that always arises for me is that I get really into recording a video in the beginning, then get embarrassed to film things and it slowly falls off. The problem is that my passion is in editing videos and post production, not being in front of the camera. However, since the beginning of July, I’ve been trying my hand at combining writing with composition skills I’ve learned from photography through a more visual entity like filmmaking. Maybe I’m not the next Greta Gerwig, but I like documenting the times that I’ve had. I like to think that my life is interesting, so maybe other people do as well.

I get very nervous when going to a new place, which is where the nervous energy came from. Nervous in a way that has been classified by professionals as “anxiety” as my stomach churns and heart races. However it has yet to be debilitating for me, it just forces me to show up at Webster Hall an hour before the show starts because I’m afraid something will go wrong. I get more nervous about these things when I’m on assignment, because a team of people are all relying on my performance. Other than having to ask three different bouncers where to get media credentials and being looked up and down in disbelief by a very New York woman when I told her I was 21 and shooting for a magazine, I got in without trouble. Upon entry I thought that I might be the only photographer there that night, but minutes before the show was set to start more began to stream in and I realized that they were seasoned professionals and not anxious little college girls living in the Big City for the first time like me.

Everyone in the crowd was pushing against the barricades and chanting different song names as DeMarco walked out on stage and delivered the most painstaking news –

“To start, we’re going to play the entirety of my latest album, “Easy Hot Dogs”.”

I didn’t think anything of this announcement until the photographer next to me whispered, “It’s entirely instrumental.”

For the next hour I stood and watched DeMarco sit on a chair and quietly play his guitar while band members around him sat and played their various instruments. It gave me flashbacks to when Caden was in orchestra and I had to go watch his concerts and then congratulate him when he was done, even though he was always assigned to the last chair. Maybe that’s a bit too bitter, but I have a valid explanation. In concert photography, photographers are generally only allowed to photograph in the alley between the front row and stage during the first three songs of the show unless they’re hired by the band directly. This means that every single photo I took while in the photo pit looked exactly the same. DeMarco sitting on his chair with his guitar. Mouth closed. No movement. It looked like I had stayed for one song and left. I almost cried when the security guard patted me on the shoulder, telling me I had to leave the pit.

Despite my absolute disdain for DeMarco for pulling something like this, I still have immense respect for the individuality he shows in the music industry. Before attending the concert, I listened to Emma Chamberlain’s podcast interviewing DeMarco. It gave a lot of insight into the way he operates in a very different way than most successful musicians. He doesn’t have an Instagram, doesn’t have a huge team constantly telling him the ‘correct’ way of doing things, and instead of taking a tour bus on his last tour, he rode his motorcycle and stayed with friends instead of fancy hotels. Even though he doesn’t give into the bureaucracy that the music industry is often overrun with, he sold out three nights straight at Webster Hall.

The new album that he performed, “Easy Hot Dogs”, has 14 different instrumental tracks he produced while on a road trip from Los Angeles to New York City. Each song is named after the location they were recorded in, creating a musical diary of his road trip. Before each song, he announced where the song was written, as if we were all going on the road trip with him.

Even his stage was odd. The singer-songwriter performed on a highly decorated stage with a plastic, green, life-sized horse statue, numerous flower pots growing real plants, a fake automated rattlesnake that he danced with later in the show, and a collection of other trinkets. All of which came from his bandmate’s home in New Jersey, brought in by carload that morning. The maximalist set design helped DeMarco to create the exact atmosphere he wanted – as if he were just playing in his friend’s living room with his bandmates and a couple hundred of his closest friends.

While the couple hundred of his closest friends had expected a rowdy night at his concert, they quickly learned that they needed to simmer down, this was not a screaming and jumping event. Once finishing the album, DeMarco did play more upbeat songs and replaced sitting on the chair with his guitar with standing on the chair and dancing. However even when this was happening, the concert had an overall chill vibe to it. A boy I don’t know who goes to my college randomly DMed me asking for advice on things to do in NYC and it turned out he was coming all the way to NYC just to see DeMarco. Luckily for me, he wasn’t going to the concert on the same night as me. He told me that he and his friends were going to bring sandwiches and throw them on stage so DeMarco would play “She Wants the Sandwich”... I wonder if they got the hint to calm down and peacefully enjoy the show or if they tried to get more rowdy that night.

I watched the majority of the show from an upper balcony, as I couldn’t get any shots down on the floor over everyone’s heads. Photographers were only allowed on one side of the balcony though, and it already had a thick line of people watching the show. I put my camera up over my head in a humbling pose and tried to snap photos of the performer until a woman standing at the balcony moved out of the way and offered me the spot for a bit so I could take some pictures. I quickly snapped off as many pictures as I could of everything in the venue. By that time, the audience had taken out their flashlights and were waving them back and forth. DeMarco was dancing a bit more. Later in post-production I mirror flipped some of the images so they wouldn’t look so repetitive.

When I backed out to give the woman her spot back, she started talking to me instead. She was around late 20s or early 30s and was also a photographer who lived in the city. Mostly portraits and fine art, but I never got the chance to hear if she had a company or gallery I could visit. She was there with her friends and had never heard any Mac DeMarco music before, but one of her friends was friends with DeMarco so they all got tickets to the show and were going out afterwards. I should have made it my mission to get her photography connections and go backstage with her to get exclusive photos and maybe even go out on the town with DeMarco and his friends… but she was staring deep into my eyes and getting super close to me in a way that made it seem like she wanted to bed me. But maybe she was just drunk.

After the show I photographed the venue a bit while everyone was making their way out, but left pretty quickly after the lights turned on. On my short walk home, I was approached by two young boys who looked as though they were in high school, one of them was holding a vintage point and shoot camera. They asked me how I got the credentials to shoot at the concert and I gave them the information of the magazine I work for. I called my mom again on the way home to tell her about the concert, she laughed and said – 

“Well look on the bright side, at least it was quiet and calm enough that you didn’t need to wear the ear plugs!”

Yours truly,

Calihan