Where the Buffalo Roamed - RichardBenjamin - Spruce Bringsteen - Halloween 2009 @ Sadlack's!
In the spirit of Let Feedback Ring I went about booking a Halloween megashow.
Halloween's proximity to Troika made this a pretty frustrating undertaking. If you don't know, Troika is really serious about attendance and don't allow any of their bands to play for a few weeks before and after the fest. I don't blame them, it's just that this put easily a dozen bands I wanted on board on an unofficial "no invite" list. The locals I did invite couldn't do it.
Attendance at this thing won't be a problem. So I booked a Greenville-style show, WtBR + Richard + the Charming Youngsters + Spruce Bringsteen! It would be like 21 Eleven, it would be like Stockholm House.
Let no illusions stand. No matter what you picture a thing to be, no matter what you hope it to be, it will surprise you. The future is fluid, haven't you learned anything from science fiction?
The day of the show came and I was hoping we would have enough music to go around.
Let's see, two bands @ 40-45 minutes apiece... Richard solo and Spruce Bringsteen @ 15-20 minutes apiece and I got an email from Nolan Smock that the Charming Youngsters wouldn't be joining us and
deeply frustrated
drove to Raleigh immediately
feeling like booking these things was a joke I played on myself and other people were allowed to watch. Picturing these megashows that I so love, festivals, shit like that... shit I want to put together... and thinking it's a waste. In my mind, I always picture these big shows as gifts to whatever city they're in.
Big thinking, Corbie, bigger than the reality. You organize these shows as gifts to yourself and you create a fictional audience and pretend they're watching, but really you're the organ grinder's monkey when the organ grinder is out of the room. You pick up the music box and hop your little capuchin self onto the dresser to where you can see yourself in the mirror and then you turn the crank.
Such was my mindset as I drove to Raleigh. Bear with me here, we'll be utilizing a strictly chronological narrative. Ultimately, this was among the best shows I've ever played. At this point in the film, however, our protagonist's self-doubt has reached a critical point.
holy shit i hope he's okay
I get to Sadlack's at 6:00, as the original plan was to get the music started at 7:30. Feeling totally silly, like I busted ass for no reason, I stepped inside to get a sandwich and - let me be very clear when I say this -
EVERY USELESS GODFORSAKEN OUNCE OF DOUBT AND HYPERANALYTICAL SELF-DEPRECATION FELL AWAY AND RAN INTO THE STORM DRAINS TO JOIN ALL THE OTHER RUNOFF because, you know, when it really gets down to it
Sadlack's feels like home.
I mean, they're so nice to me there. Rose and Mike and Greg and Bill and Jeff (who I just met, but who I think is a great guy) and let's not forget the amazing Dancing Tony... so I put a beer in my hand and I had some really good conversation and
you know what
I realized how silly I'd been.
Of course it was going to go okay. There was no other way it could go.
Future Corbie encounters the year 2009.
Liz and Richard arrived not long after I did and we commenced sitting at the bar and drinking and pretty much having a freaking amazing time. I was drinking Foothills' People's Porter and eating a Hawaiian Reuben. I met a really nice guy by the name of Superman, a true son of Krypton, who'd come out dressed as
Grape Juice Scott.
A slow ebb and flow now, with a minor horde of costumed college freaks early in their evening bender. Andy was here and we were digging where we were, what we were doing. The first wave of revelers passed, on down the street they went (to another bar) and it was probably about 8:00, maybe a little before.
Yeah. I was in costume too. I was a time traveler... from two weeks in the future. What?
So it happened really fast. Suddenly they were everywhere and they were dressed up as all kinds of crazy shit. By 8:30 the place was crawling with wasted college kids and Richard picked up an acoustic guitar, pointed a SM58 clone at himself, and poured out his fucking heart
BECAUSE THAT IS EXACTLY WHAT HE DOES
I mean, he takes this insomniac muscle, a muscle that doesn't know rest until you hit the Big Sleep, and he breaks it open like a pecan with its parts sloppily falling in on themselves and littering the floor and some of them jam under your thumbnail with persistent amounts of pain. It isn't pretty. It's the fine art of an endangered swan flying into a turboprop and it's the unblinking eye of the observer - blank witness to the practical joke of our inescapable mortality, a reverse prophet on the attack. Morality a ruse, a technicolor curtain barely concealing human nature as it writhes and howls on the beach where it recently dropped its gills and learned the use of thumbs, vowels, crucifixes...
and he pours out his heart muscle and what happens is a beautiful contradiction
see
Richard writes regret music, mortal terror music. When he does it right you get motherfucking uncomfortable. It's end of the night music, it's the inner dialogue of a partier fifteen minutes before they pass out under a kitchen table on a muddy floor. Why won't the room stop spinning and what have I done to myself? What have I done to my precious egg, as Mark Vonnegut once called the treasure chest our brains live in, what have I done to all the time and effort that went into keeping me safe as a child? What have I done to the planet, striding its surface in a blind strut, every finger on my hand a middle finger? It's the spinning nightmare of a wasted night, it's a sky full of faded stars.
Richard writes and plays dark and trembling music and he delivers it, without fear or shame, with the awkward, cracking grandeur of - do I dare make the comparison? I think I will- the first Velvet Underground record.
Richard's show will stick in the mind of those in attendance like a photo album found, untouched, outside a house that burned to the ground and killed everyone inside.
This one guy, a ponytailed dude who looked like a roadie who had to quit when he threw out his back in 1987 (Whitesnake Summer Tour!), got pretty pissed and started talking shit when Richard broke out his ukelele for the last song (following keyboards, casio sax, and acoustic + Liz w/ harmonies and tambourine). Richard talked shit right back but his eyes registered the hurt. You can't open a vein in front of that many people and simultaneously maintain thick skin.
Sunshine/lollipops...
The show I booked focused on my favorite aspect of Halloween... the twisted, creepy side of things... the mentally unstable side of things... the sociopathic, demented side of the holiday. Richard gave us the dark side of the Catholic church and outlined the zero dignity death of a lifer with a penchant for needles and alcohol. Heavy shit, but the right shit to start on. By leading in with uneasy songs of naked regret and tragedy we had those who were paying attention suitably unsettled.
unsettled and also a little confused... I think we achieved the goal, kids.
I think back to the bald guy with the Layne Staley goatee who got my attention halfway through Richard's set to ask when the bands would start...
"Richard's the first act," I said. I feel like that answered the question.
"Right, but when will the bands start?"
"Well, this is Richard's set and then we have two more acts."
"Three acts! You have to be done by 11:00!" it was a little before 9:00
"We will," I said.
"What, are some of them going to play 15 minute sets?"
"One of them," I said. He laughed with derision.
"I know what I'm doing," I said and walked away from him. He sputtered false hurt behind me, semiapologetic, but I was back to listening to Richard's set with Grape Juice Scott.
I don't have time for people who subscribe to the myth that the production of music has to be a stressful thing, that you're only doing it right if you're worrying yourself halfway to stroke over the little details.
when the right bird flies...
We set up and started playing without wasting any time. We started off strong, with "Golgotha '98..." and Andy wore this ridiculous wizard mask. He assured me he could see just fine, but later admitted he was playing drums almost totally blind with the fucking thing on. We made significant amounts of noise and, for once, there were enough bodies to soak up the sound my three amps put out. It was loud as hell, but it was the right level.
Followed up with "North Dakota" and "1980," which people dug, but we really caught their attention with "Dirty Bomb Stratocaster."
See, the thing about this point in the night is that things were very very real. It made sense, the way to handle a crowd of this size, the way to ride the energy... but in retrospect it gathers a moss of unreality. It's that scene in
the Matrix where Neo fucking
gets it and starts fighting Agent Smith with one arm, without even looking. A healthy mix of waking life and dreamscape... a crowd is like any instrument and when they're moving with one mind it's just a question of figuring out what drives them and playing to that motivation.
I'm proud of how we handled ourselves.
I went a little wild. Andy played until his hands blistered and cracked. We met them in the middle and delivered 40 minutes of some of the most wide-open rock and roll we've ever played. If we can pull this kind of performance off again we'll be doing okay.
I remember there was a guy dressed up in a
300 outfit and I yelled "This is Spartaaaaa!" I called Grape Juice Scott the evil Superman because of his goatee. I was having a ton of fun.
Sadlack's has a lot of crazies and one of them came up to the stage area and joined us for some reason. I was playing guitar (I think it was during "Dirty Bomb Stratocaster") over by Andy's kit and this loonie came over and stood behind the mic, kind of near my pedals and raised his arms in the air like he was actually doing something. Then he kind of wandered around the stage area... he did this several times during the set.
Hell, it's rock and roll. I've seen far weirder.
The revelers dug the stoner thickness of "Wolf Wings" and "Peace Treaty." "Permafrost" we played pretty fast, but that's fine. It's a brand new song, it's going to take some sharpening. "Southport," though...
holy shit.
"Southport" was amazing. Never mind the point when the crazy guy stepped on my pedals and pulled my guitar cable out (ok, at this point he was getting annoying), I was still having a blast. We extended it a bit, loosened it a bit, and it felt great.
The people wanted more (this is rare and it's probably because they were so drunk, but maybe not) but I felt like we'd made our point. We'd rocked our hardest yet and I felt like the document was complete, anything further would be postscript. I felt fucking great.
As I turned off my amps I saw that the cable leading to my Fender amp was cut cleanly in two. The crazy guy, stomping around while we played, had stomped my fucking cable in half. It was the oddest thing I'd ever seen, though - it looked like it had been sliced with a razor. Cleanest cut I've ever seen - and if you know anything about guitar cables you know how hard they are to break!
Aliens did it. End of story.
and now, the weirdest cover band in history...
Within a few minutes we'd transformed again into Spruce Bringsteen and
hey bald dude, we actually played for 11 minutes!
I was a little self-conscious, but I shouldn't have been. We did well.
We started the set with the traditional Spruce Bringsteen setup - me on guitar and Richard drumming - but I quickly migrated to the double drumset and spent most of the set playing it. If you don't know, Spruce Bringsteen is a purely improvised rock band that never has practiced and never will. I put strings on the Spruce Bringsteen guitar (a bizarre custom job, newly fretless) in a random order and then tune them to made up relative tunings.
We get together for shows and play whatever comes to mind. We make our point in anything from 9 to 24 minutes, but rarely do our sets exceed the 15 minute mark.
Back to the double drumset - I brought out a floor tom, a snare and a hi-hat. I put the guitar in a stand and aimed a kick pedal at it. I played it like a regular set, with the guitar as my bassdrum. Then Richard and I played beats off each other. The guitar was going through a phaser, overdrive, and tremolo and it was being beaten half to pieces by the hammer of a kickdrum pedal. It sounded like the marching band at a football game in hell. It sounded like a piano being hit by passing cars on a crowded interstate. It sounded like deities bitch-slapping each other.
I know a guy named Alex from my Journalism class, and he made it out to the Spruce Bringsteen set. He said he dug it, he compared us to Captain Beefheart -
AWESOME - but his friends were weirded the fuck out and said "let's get out of here."
See
both Alex and his friends got what we were trying to do. No paradox.
So the music was over and we wanted to do a little freestyling, but I think we blew a fuse or something because we got no love from the mic. The crowd was at a critical volume, as it had been for a long time, and people wanted music... but we could have come with four hours of material prepared and still not had enough songs for these people.
It's fine. We did what we did and those in attendance seemed to enjoy themselves. Richard and Liz headed to Greenville, where they
also played the Spazz Haus Halloween show! We hung around long enough for Andy to get some food (he ordered the Hawaiian Reuben too and it made his night).
I went inside to thank Rose for putting us on, but midway through our conversation this deranged woman came into the kitchen and called her husband on the phone and a lot of yelling and cussing and threatening occurred. Thing is, he was
there with her. This woman was homicidally angry simply because she couldn't find him and was ready to go. Rose and Jeff and I somehow managed to hold a regular conversation despite the Jerry Springer action not far away...
Then I went outside and we got in our cars and got kind of lost but that was part of the magic of the evening.
Saturday night mob
It's easy to get lost in Raleigh.
Very easy. And the great bacchanal had reached juggernaut intensity. We got kind of turned around, headed down St. Mary's the wrong way for some fucking reason, and circled back to Hillsborough where we crawled by the enormous horde. The waves of drunkenness that had swept through Sadlack's, leaving spilled beer and thousands of dollars in their wake, had collected in a massive tide of inebriation that covered the sidewalks and spilled into the streets, a sea of dirty costumes and shouting. Cops every-fucking-where, but it lacked teeth. Greenville's where the brutality lies. Greenville's where they post snipers on the rooftops. These kids wouldn't know how to get dangerous if they had to. A couple of kids dressed up as the barrel monster and 8,000 fuckers dressed up as Max from Where the Wild Things Are and
shit... hit the brakes because some kid's presumed immortality caused him to walk in front of my truck but if I honk at him the entire crowd will descend on my vehicle but
what will they do? All they know is Cary and Taylor Swift and Jack Johnson and Jones Soda and Baptist mission trips and mom and dad take you to the Whole Foods on the weekend to buy organic munchies and all that other baseball & apple pie bullshit and they pretend, but they still think Sarah Palin is kinda sorta a-ok and this wilderness is just a game after all. We'll be grownups soon enough. We're just playing a role. In Greenville they would have turned the truck over or started rocking it or sent a parking meter crashing through the windshield. State kids would probably just surround it and stare dumbly until someone grabbed a megaphone and told them not to worry, it would be okay, their parents would be here soon... and maybe that's why I like Sadlack's so much, it's a cozy little den of lawlessness and you can crank your amps halfway to freedom, unleashing Grendel howls of feedback all up and down the cracked street
and don't get me wrong - this was a perfectly amoral debauch - it's just that these kids, no matter how wild they went, still had the deepest respect for The Rules and would have called them a safety net, had they even been consciously aware of their existence - an arbitrary set of guidelines that exist for no reason other than the furthering of their own existence... so perfectly self-referential that they fade instantly into the background. You don't know the walls are walls if you've never looked outside and part of me needs a certain degree of lawlessness, a certain chaotic and dangerous element, without which life lacks sugar.
So we made it to the beltline and that far out the crowds had dispersed and the only people on foot were the deranged and the recently separated (you could tell because a girl and a guy of the same approximate age would be walking on opposite sides of the road, yelling across it at each other) and onto the beltline and headed south and west... put on the BBC latenight radio because I was so tired... music would have put me out and I can't even remember what the BBC guys were talking about... wars and rumors of wars... the stories bled into each other and maybe my mind was going... they were in a basement somewhere? Some kind of archive?
into Chatham County, down 64, where the deer flirt dumbly with mangling disaster... hide in the woods where it's safe... & over Jordan Lake, not far now... at about this point I was close enough to home to where a little music wouldn't knock me out & I put in
Nebraska... couldn't wait to get out of the car and sleep for weeks...
New Jersey turnpike/riding on a wet night/beneath the refineries' glow/out where the great, black rivers flow and the catfish within Jordan Lake and the birds in their nests and the omnipresent deer and a little crackle in my head until I finally pull into my drive and Andy and I sit outside for a few minutes and have some late night conversation
and then sleep.
and then Andy locked himself out of my house at maybe 4:30am. Don't laugh, it's easy to do, and I found him out there at about 6:30, asleep in his car, and let him in the house. He was so freaked out by this dream he'd been having that he wouldn't tell me
but he told me later. When we were capital "a" Awake and having our coffee.
In his dream he'd gone to the neighbor's house after he'd been locked out, to try and get some help, and they'd been having a gigantic hick party and it was an unnerving and dangerous time, with cans of Busch Light flying through the air and it sounded like he was having a hard time escaping them.
Funny, because I had a dream that same night that I was in my yard and some guy had driven off the road in a fullsize Chevy Blazer or something and had cut through my yard to get to the house next door. Then I'd met the neighbors on that side, who I've not actually met yet, and I think in the dream they had some kind of junkyard or something going on.
Anyway. That's all.