There are some concerts where you can tell what a band means to people before the band ever walks onstage.
King’s X at Putnam Place was one of those nights.
I had never seen them before. In fact, I really did not know much about them at all. But as I looked around the room, I started recognizing musicians I had photographed from local bands all over the Capital Region.
A lot of them.
Guitar players. Singers. Drummers. People I am used to seeing under stage lights were now standing in the crowd waiting for someone else to take the stage.
That told me something immediately.
This was a musicians’ band.
There was another clue.
There was never a line for the women’s room.
The men’s room? Different story.
Looking around, I would guess the audience was probably 90 to 95 percent male. And from the conversations I had, almost everyone seemed to have a long history with King’s X.
People started naming the places where they had seen them over the years.
Saratoga Winners.
Northern Lights.
The Chance.
Venues that once meant everything to the local rock scene and are no longer here.
One fan told me this was his 33rd time seeing King’s X.
Thirty-third.
I met one other person who, like me, was seeing them for the first time. He was there with a friend who had already seen them multiple times.
So apparently there were at least two King’s X virgins in the room.
Then the band came out and opened with “Groove Machine,” the song longtime fans already knew would be coming.
And from there, the crowd sang.
Not just a chorus here and there.
Nearly every song.
That was when the night started feeling like something more than a concert.
For a while, I had the strange sense that a lot of the people in that room were 19 again.
Maybe they were remembering standing in Saratoga Winners or Northern Lights years ago. Maybe they were remembering when those places still existed, when life was still wide open, when heads were filled with dreams, and perhaps some of those same people were imagining themselves on a stage someday.
There is something about music that can do that.
It does not just remind you of a song.
It reminds you of who you were when you first heard it.
And I think that was happening all over Putnam Place.
Maybe it was happening onstage too.
“Dug” Doug Pinnick had turned 76 the day before the show, but there was absolutely no reason to think about his age while watching him perform. His voice was strong, his presence was strong, and there seemed to be a perpetual smile on his face.
He looked like he was savoring every minute.
Not enduring it.
Not revisiting something that belonged to another time.
Savoring it.
And maybe, looking out at a room filled with people who had been there through so many chapters of the band’s history, he was reliving a little of it too.
Different venue.
Different year.
A lot of the same people.
Still singing.
Even the stage itself had a local connection. I later learned that the drum riser being used that night belonged to local band Kisstory.
It is a small detail, but somehow it fit perfectly.
Local musicians were in the crowd. A local band’s riser was under the drums. Fans were talking about long-gone local venues. And King’s X stood in the middle of all of it, connecting the past to the present without ever making the night feel stuck there.
For me, being new to King’s X may actually have made the whole thing easier to see.
I did not walk in carrying decades of memories of the band.
I got to watch everyone else carry theirs.
And honestly, that told me almost everything I needed to know.
You can read about a band’s history. You can look at album releases, tour dates, influences and all the other facts that make up a career.
But sometimes the better history is standing right in front of you.
It is the guy seeing them for the 33rd time.
It is the musician in the crowd who normally has people watching him.
It is someone remembering Saratoga Winners.
It is hundreds of voices knowing the words before the singer gets there.
It is a 76-year-old man onstage smiling like he still cannot quite believe he gets to do this.
The venues may disappear.
The years may stack up.
But some things stay with us.
For one night at Putnam Place, King’s X made all of those years feel very close again.
Photography by Stephanie J Bartik.
