The encore is a lie and everybody knows it and nobody cares. The artist walks off stage. The audience claps. The artist comes back. This has been the deal since vaudeville. It is a ritual. It is a transaction. The audience says we are not done with you and the artist says I know and they both pretend it was spontaneous. The encore is the most honest dishonesty in show business.

James Brown invented the modern encore. He did not just walk off stage. He collapsed. His people came out with a cape and put it on his shoulders and walked him to the wings like he had given everything and had nothing left. Then he threw the cape off and ran back to the microphone. He did this every single show. Every single show for forty years. He collapsed. He got caped. He came back. The audience went insane every time. Every time. Because they knew it was coming and it still worked. That is not a trick. That is a covenant.

Bruce Springsteen does not do encores. Bruce Springsteen plays for four hours and the encore is just the last hour. He comes back and plays ten more songs and the audience does not know when the show ends because the show does not end. It just runs out of night. I saw him at the Garden in nineteen seventy-eight and the house lights came on and he was still playing. The building was trying to throw him out and he would not leave. That is not an encore. That is a man who does not know how to stop giving.

Jimi Hendrix set his guitar on fire at Monterey. That was not an encore. That was a period at the end of a sentence. He played the set and then he killed the instrument. You cannot encore after that. You cannot come back after you have burned the thing that makes the sound. Hendrix understood that some performances do not get an encore. Some performances get a funeral.

The Ramones never did encores. They played twenty-two songs in forty minutes and walked off and that was it. No cape. No collapse. No coming back. Twenty-two songs. Forty minutes. Done. Joey told me once that the encore is a waste of time. He said if you did not say it in the set you are not going to say it in the encore. I think about that every time I see a band come back for two more songs that are worse than everything they already played.

Here is what the street taught me about the encore. On the street there is no encore. There is no backstage. There is no curtain. You play until you stop and then you stop. If the audience wants more they stay. If they do not want more they walk. The street does not have an encore because the street does not have an ending. The street is always playing. The encore is for buildings. The street is forever.