Should I Die For Orville Peck?

Would I die for Orville Peck? Seriously, would I die to hear Orville Peck yodel: “SEE-EE-EE-EE-EE-EE, see the boys as they walk on by.” Because I think I would. I think I would die for Orville Peck’s yodel on Dead of Night. Theoretically. Maybe even literally. It IS enough to make a young man cry. I say all of this with bravado right now, with him in my earphones, fan on, blinds down, my bedroom cool, his sexy warbling deep voice filling my ears with his weird operatic, Elvis-by-way-of-Mulholland-Drive cowboy drama. I would die for this man in my head. Would I die for him in real life, though? I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know. I was repeating this until the literal eve of his concert in Victoria, British Columbia, where the day he would be singing “SEE-EE-EE-EE-EE-EE” it would be 80 degrees in the shadeless black cement parking lot of the craft brewery where I would be standing, smashed together with a bunch of smashed kids. Would I pay $110 to maybe die of heat exhaustion as Orville Peck beautifully implored me to see? 

I would. 

Victoria is not a typically hot place. The average high temperature for this part of the country in July is just below 70 degrees. That day, like I said, it was pushing 80. Each day of the festival started at 3:00 p.m. and lasted seven hours. No way was I showing up that early. Orville Peck was the last act, he was on at 8:30. Noah Cyrus was up right before at 6:30. That’s when I showed. It was still 80 degrees then, but all the temperature had left to do was to go down with the sun. It felt safer. I could already hear Cyrus as I walked the country mile from the main road down to the venue. The sun was still piercing. It remained piercing as I walked through the fairground-like food area to the actual stage. Once you got there, if you were short like me, you had two choices: shade along the sides of the stage where you could see nothing, or bright sun in the middle where you could also see nothing. I stood by the misting station, which spritzed pleasantly in my general direction. I filled my water bottle twice in one hour.

I noticed Cyrus was wearing a skin-tight white latex dress—how hot was she? I mean, how fucking boiling hot did she feel? I know the lights on stage are often sweltering, I know the sun was sweltering, I know Jason Aldean not that long ago succumbed on stage to heat exhaustion. I also know Cyrus is 24 and could probably last twice as long in an iron furnace as I could. But she said they had been up since four or something (I looked it up, the day before she had been on the east coast, playing another outdoor festival. They had flown across the country that same morning. I could never be a musician). She forgot to wear sunscreen, she said. Someone give her sunscreen, I thought. For almost her entire one-hour set the sun felt like it was burning through my shirt into the bone of my right shoulder. When she played “July” everyone went nuts. A break. Shade.

I got a popsicle for health purposes. It was “orange float” flavor and it wasn’t that good. This is the second time in Victoria I have had bad ice cream. I think they don’t know how to do it here. They have never been this hot. They haven’t spent centuries learning how not to be this hot. They need decades more of this shit to come up with something as perfect as Agua Fresca.  

I wanted to actually see Orville Peck, so I was one of those people who stood for way too long in front of the stage when there was no one on it. But he showed up early, God bless. He was not wearing latex. His mask was different—you could see his smile. It probably kept him cooler. I hoped it did. The sun still wasn’t down. He wore jeans and a vest (his stylist, in case you were wondering, is Catherine Hahn) and he was full of muscles. This new stocky Orville Peck seemed like he could handle the heat like a stallion. He played across all of his albums—Pony, Bronco, even the extended play album (Show Pony), even the as-yet unreleased duet album (Stampede). His voice was strong and perfect. He mentioned the year he spent away looking after his mental health. He seemed grounded now. It felt good. It was good. At one point he brought out Cyrus again so they could perform their duet “How Far Will We Take It?” live for the first time together. She draped her arms around him. 

Then: “Hold on—stop! Can we get help over here?” Peck pointed into the crowd to the right of me. Quiet. Everyone looked around. I couldn’t see much from where I was. “Can we get a medic, please?” Cyrus said. Water was passed down by the crew. Peck: “Drink water, everybody, it’s really hot out.” Whatever was going on, they waited for the person to be removed from the crowd. I think the person was fine. I bet they had been there all day. 

I have never worried before about going to a concert over the weather. It seems strange to have to worry about this, like someone else should have worried about this before me, like there should be some kind of system in place, the same way there are safety standards with respect to crowd numbers and, I don’t know, stages not collapsing. “Our festival occurs rain or shine!” the site read. OK, but what is too much rain or too much shine? Who decides that? How does someone die at a Taylor Swift concert of heat exhaustion? More importantly, how does a Taylor Swift concert keep going in deadly, record-breaking heat? Why is Taylor Swift having to throw water bottles into the crowd to keep her fans from collapsing? Why does a crowd get to be injured by hail at a Louis Tomlinson concert that never even happened? Not to mention Eddie Vedder’s throat getting damaged by wildfire smoke.

According to Bloomberg, concert weather safety first started becoming a serious concern way back in 2011, when major winds at a Sugar Land concert at the Indiana State Fair caused the stage to collapse, killing seven and injuring 58 others. A non-profit called the Event Safety Alliance, which formed in the aftermath, put out guidelines three years later. In 2021, a decade after the Sugar Land event, these guidelines were standardized and accredited by the American National Standards Institute, though they remain voluntary. This is how you get a lengthy list in Billboard of 2023 concerts which were cut short, evacuated, and required emergency responses over excessive heat, excessive rain, excessive wind, even hail. Not to mention last-minute cancellation after last-minute cancellation. In 2022, Adam Met of AJR called for industry standards around climate change in a piece for Rolling Stone. He wrote about a concert that they were contracted to play in Little Rock, Ark., where they pulled the plug a third of the way through because it felt like 104 degrees on stage. As one crowd manager told Bloomberg, “Way too many safety precautions that I’ve seen are left up to a single individual at each venue that does their best and guess what’s going to be safest.” 

This all seems of a piece with the wider lack of regulations in the concert industry, in which corporate monoliths like Live Nation make bank while destroying smaller (indoor) venues, foisting all of the risk onto artists who can barely keep up with their demands, and audiences who can barely afford to see them. All of which is loaded on top of the whole live music … thing.

This thing is hard to explain and it will sound of a piece with fandom, but it’s not quite that. Concerts almost have this strange entitlement attached to them when they involve a musician you particularly like. Like you somehow deserve to see them because you’ve already proven yourself as a listener. And because of that, you will put up with more than usual to go—like your tolerance equates to your devotion (a kind of cultural self-flagellation). Concerts have always required a low-grade gamble with discomfort—how late will everything go, will you be able to see, will the crowd be good, will the band themselves be on. As you get older, the gamble becomes greater—will you be the oldest one there, how long will you have to stand, will there be toilets. With outdoor concerts, add on top of that the weather. I have been to festivals where it rained so much we were literally sinking into the soil. Climate change (and the overlords who refuse to seriously consider it) is in some ways calling for more and more sacrifice, to the point that even the most devoted seem on the brink of not tolerating it anymore.

I’m not sorry I went to see Orville Peck, the show was comparatively mild as climate discomfort goes these days, but it felt fitting that his last encore was “Bronco”—“Come on in hot, babe/Hurry up, babe/Can’t you see the gate from here?”—because even though everyone seemed happy to be there, I felt a collective sense of relief when it ended, as though a herd of wild horses that had been cooped up all afternoon in the midday sun had been finally released into the welcome comfort of the cool night air.