It’s the best case scenario for a rock concert. The moment when the dude on stage slams together the lids of his perfectly made up, or perfectly not made up, eyes and risks the welfare of his larynx in order to deliver a guttural and seemingly all-encompassing “ARE YOU READY TO ROCK?!” In that moment he knows that it is at that exact point in time when the heaving throng before him is totally ready to rock. It’s like when Tom Petty started to sing the first verse of his hit song, “Breakdown” but stopped after the first line. The swaying lighter-jockeys were singing it louder than him and took it from there. They swept easily through the verse and the chorus, even the two-part harmony. After the first chorus, the audience finally paused and Petty jokingly said, “you’re gonna’ put me out of a job.”

I personally witnessed this sort of phenomenon once at about the 30-yard line inside Memorial Stadium, which lies in the shadow of the Space Needle, circa 1997. Pearl Jam’s lead singer, Eddie Vedder, was singing the second verse of his band’s song, “Elderly Woman Behind the Counter in a Small Town”. We all sang “I just want to scream hello!” all at the same time. Then “My god, it’s been so long/ Never dreamed you’d return/ But now here you are/ And here I am.” We sang it to him and he sang it to us as if greeting an old friend we haven’t seen in a while and that’s how it felt.

It’s synergy, man. It’s that connection of stuff in a given situation that creates a thing bigger than the sum of its parts. No more us and them. Band and crowd become one. One and a half. A concert becomes a happening, like Woodstock. The audience magically becomes part of the show. I imagine that synergy was at least one of the forces at hand when the blond-haired girl with the blue eye shadow was swaying with her lighter held skyward in the movie “The Song Remains the Same” as she witnessed Led Zeppelin at the height of their creative prowess in the early 70s.

If you’re at a show and you’re wondering whether or not the power of synergy is in place, here are two good rules of thumb. No. 1, if a member of the band stage dives and the people in the audience carry him or her to the back of the venue and then complete a round trip by gently setting the performer back on the stage, chances are there’s some synergy there. Whereas, if that performer stage dives and the audience parts like the red sea only to have the performer belly flop onto concrete, chances are that synergy is lacking. No 2, if you have to ask whether or not synergy is at hand, then, even if it is, you are probably not part of it.