Honestly, my first live show was pretty weak. You might remember the bands I saw, you might remember the single songs that made each famous, but you’d rather not and neither would I. The experience doesn’t aptly illustrate my feelings about what a live show is and should be.

Rather, I had to see a lot of concerts before finally tumbling into my house in Philadelphia one night after a show and finding in my own thoughts what music mediums mean to me. It was, strangely, a pile of unused equipment that set me off.

My turntables had been unhooked, laying in a pile next to crates of old records for longer than I cared to guess. Also, lying untweaked nearby, were the knobs on that old Stanton 3-channel. Yet, when they ask, I am indeed a DJ. Still flexing after all these years. The formats had changed, the machinery standard descended into a familiar setup shared by artists and consumers; a laptop, some speakers…that’s about it.

Yet my collection had grown, now existing as an intangible cloud of little yellow file pictures hovering menacingly over the bodies, the truly physical warm blackness that is now mass buried in those milk crates.

Despite the memories, I refuse guilt. Guilt arises when you feel you’ve neglected some duty. Guilt prevails when it is true. How often I forget that my commitment is not to the medium, the empty vessel, but to the sounds themselves. It’s what mattered when I was growing up in Thailand, where you couldn’t get anything other than a bootleg tape. It’s what mattered when we played records at parties and even now, as the sounds slowly but surely become free to possess. Stored on little cartridges or shiny circles and losing their market value, the sounds become a party favor, a mere flashing arrow pointing toward the culmination; the raw, uncut live show.

The mathematics are never more apparent or uncorrupted than when the act takes the stage. The opaque panels of presentation are taken down and the sounds fend for themselves, for better or for worse. Revealing is the nature of the live show, and promising are its prospects.

My name is Abdullah and I’m from Philly.

Welcome to 52 Shows, a new blog devoted to all aspects of live music. Expect concert reviews, live music MP3’s, venue discussion, and a little bit of general music chit-chat.

There are a couple different people that will be writing in this space. We’re spread out around the country, so each of us brings our own local flavor to the table. We run the gamut from music geek to smart ass, so I’ll let each person make their own introductions.

We’re all excited to get this thing off the ground, and really to get you all participating.