David Boone still can't wrap his mind around what happened last Saturday night. He knows what he did, knows what he saw and heard. Still, the experience that commenced when he and his band stepped onto the stage of the Wilma Theatre for a concert celebrating the release of his newest CD felt like something much more than just a performance."I know this probably sounds strange, but the best I can describe the other night is that it felt like a revival to me," said the 26-year old Boone this past Monday afternoon. "The religious connotation of 'revival' never lived up for me in the past, but this felt real.
"I don't even feel like it was a concert about me," added Boone. "It was a concert about all of us who were there."
Sometimes - in the best of times - culture is something that we co-create ourselves, in our own lives, here, now.
That probably sounds a bit grandiose, so let's start with the facts. For those who missed the buzz leading up to Saturday's concert, it was an event that Boone had pretty much single-handedly organized, pulling together numerous business sponsors, a dizzying schedule of media appearances, a good cause (Mountain Home Montana, a home for teenage mothers and their children) and a backing band made of up more than a dozen of Missoula's best musicians.
While the event would have been hard for anybody to pull off, it represented a special challenge to Boone. A couple of months ago, on the very day after he had finished recording the new CD, he got a phone call telling him that his grandmother was on her deathbed, suffering through the final, excruciating stages of lung cancer.
The drama that unfolded in the ensuing days, as Boone grappled with not only her impending death but with family drama that's almost too terrible to comprehend, proved too much for him. A couple of days after his grandmother passed away, Boone crashed.
"I couldn't get out of bed for about six weeks," said Boone.
This wasn't the first time he'd experienced such lows: Long ago diagnosed with bipolar disorder, Boone can vaguely recall several periods in his life, the blurry times, when he couldn't motivate himself to leave his bedroom.
Those periods seemed to have been behind him, until this past summer.
"It was really bad," said Boone of the weeks that followed his grandmother's death. "I was worried about how Steph (Boone's wife) would handle it, and ultimately it was her inspiration that led me to finally say: If I lay down again now and don't take a step forward, I never will. If I don't do the Wilma show and don't release the CD, it negates everything this entire project was about.
"I started taking steps in the dark," Boone continued. "Literally until Saturday night it was one step at a time, trudging, still feeling the residuals of that experience."
And so forward he trudged, through a hectic schedule of rehearsals and sponsor negotiations and media appearances.
Finally, Saturday came. It was supposed to be a lazy day leading up to the concert, but technical problems kept piling up during sound check. Finally, Mountain Home Montana director Gypsy Ray scurried into the auditorium of the Wilma to tell the band that it was time to clear the stage and let the audience in the doors. It was 6:15 p.m.
That's when something happened that Boone says he honestly didn't expect: The place filled up. By 8 p.m., more than a thousand people had filed into the auditorium, completely filling the first level as well as half of the balcony. Parents with young children sat alongside middle-aged couples and 20-something hipsters. It was a bigger crowd than many well-known national touring acts have drawn to the Wilma.
And then, the band - performing together after only three full rehearsals - started playing.
"I was just hoping we could keep it together," admitted Boone. "But every song that went by, I kept thinking, 'My God, that's exactly how I wanted to hear that song.' "
The audience responded with prolonged applause that grew after each song. A knot of dancers appeared at the foot of the stage, and a few kids got up on stage and started dancing with the band. More musicians joined the band on stage - some invited, some at the spur of the moment.
"At one point I was thinking, dang, the guitars are sounding great," said Boone, "and I looked up, and Tom Catmull was standing there playing, grinning at me. It was crazy."
Late in the set, the band left the stage and Boone was joined by drummer Travis Yost and three members of the local string band Broken Valley Road Show. With the accompanying pluckers gathered around a single microphone and Yost bouncing around in the background, Boone launched into the boot-stomping rocker, "Elements." During the chorus, Boone heard something he'd never heard before.
"I looked over, and those guys were singing this perfect harmony with me," said Boone. "We had never practiced that at all; they just did it. I didn't even know that they knew the words."
And so it went, song after song, building and building. By the time Boone and the band closed the set with the gorgeous love song "I Won't Leave You Alone," the emotional weight of the moment almost proved too much for him.
"That song is really the summation of what this was about for me," said Boone after the show. "When I got to the line where I sing, "there's a dream in my mind never challenged by time," I almost couldn't make it through; I felt like I was going to break down and cry right there.
"This concert was that dream," he continued. "It was something I had always imagined as possible, but hadn't ever experienced. I felt honestly like the audience was as much a performer in the event as any of the individuals on stage; we were definitely feeding off of them. It was electric."
Indeed, it's hard to say who feels more privileged in the wake of last Saturday's concert: We audience members, who were given a night to remember; or Boone himself, whose belief in the transcendent power of communal experience was redeemed with tangible proof, and whose terrible two months culminated in the experience of a lifetime.
"Because of what I went through this summer, I don't know if this is the end of something, or the beginning of something," said Boone. "Either way, I'm just amazed and privileged that I got to experience it."
So are we, David. Thanks.
Entertainer editor Joe Nickell can be reached at 523-5358 or at jnickell@missoulian.com.
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