the 27 club

I have a week to escape it.

Nobody invite me on any plane rides, give me large doses of hard drugs coupled with grain alcohol, or hit my head against a coffee table. Oh, and no one shoot me or poison me either. I'm not down with that.

28 on the 18th... day one... still alive. good to go.

I'm too obscure to go out like that anyway. I'll be the only octogenarian on the block with a tele and a pedalboard... seeing what a hearing aid sounds like when you get it feeding back and put it up to a P-90.

RLGH NC Y2K&9 AD... with a cop every 50-75 feet and a beer in my hand... with a guitar... with a pair of drumsticks... let it ring.

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 mandolin 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.

Soaked...

Battle Rockets - Blag'ard - Oct. 27th @ Fuse (Chapel Hill)

So here goes... another night in Chapel Hill and another Battle Rockets show. I showed up about 8:30, met Reno, and we caught a beer at Carolina Brewery. Got a Wilco record I've been meaning to pick up (A.M.) and the new Birds & Arrows (Starmaker). Two new records and a porter with my friend, then showed up at Fuse and got a burger

see

I dig a place that looks out for its bands.

'cuz they fed us and they beered us

and this caused me to say "hell yes."

Really nice people. I'd met Eddie a few times and had good conversation with the folks at the bar. Reno played a little on the piano, but not much. Blag'ard showed up and we talked with Joe and Adam for a while... the room reached critical mass and we started to play.

patience.

Fuse reminds me of Sylva's Guadalupe Cafe. There was a time, maybe four years ago, when Dave and I played there with my Asheville band, Migrations, and there was this core... this really solid core of local music lovers were out and were into it and it was one of the best shows. The people at Fuse were more laid back than the cats at Guadalupe that night... and Guadalupe never quite repeated that coolness at the other shows I played there...

expressed mathematically

(Guadalupe Cafe^2)=1/2(Fuse)

right

Guadalupe Cafe squared is still only half as cool as Fuse.

I'll bet these places never expected to be pitted against each other see
if I'm not careful I'm going to finish this writeup without ever actually saying anything, I want to go ahead and get it written before Halloween (tomorrow) which I know is going to be an exercise in madness and depravity (Sadlack's show with Where the Buffalo Roamed, the Charming Youngsters, Spruce Bringsteen, RichardBenjamin to coincide with the drunken, costumed Hillsborough Hike) and I'm such a fatass and I'm crass and I smell pretty gotta wind this in ok.

We played well. People were around, drinking their beer and relaxing. We were in the corner, blasting too loud for the PA to really keep up (a little Fender Passport getup). Fucked with the order a little, playing "Protohuman" second and closing on a particularly wide open version of "Patience." We've been stumbling at the last transition in "Conflict of Supermonsters" a little lately (Congress has voted that we rewrite the end) so we improvised an ending and we saw it and it was good. Reliable applause all night long. Hell yes for Fuse, hell yes for Tuesdays. Tuesday was invented right here in NC, you know...

Drag'lab

Drives me fucking crazy when people wander around in Zeppelin or Beatles shirts or construct themselves an identity based upon music (illusion) and all they can think of is Nirvana songs or the "poetry" of Jim Morrison... you know, people who buy Hendrix shirts at Target... but I don't just mean people to whom this is casual fashion, I mean people who construct themselves this persona... this "I'm into music! Music is important! Listen to my opinions on music!" persona and can't get past the most obvious godfucking examples in the book. Christ, it's like someone who swears up and down that they're a mathematical genius and you give them a piece of paper and a pencil and all they can do is multiply and divide. Then you give these people an opportunity to see real music, cutting edge shit, shit on the ground floor... you don't know who they are today but some of these bands will be landscape-changing huge and you're going to pretend you were into them while they were tiny but I've given you the opportunity, over and over again... cowardly, people get cowardly when it comes to stepping outside of their comfort zones and everything is factored down (simplistic, literal). Blues = Eric Clapton. Punk = the Ramones.... and then the stupid Best Ever labels. Who crowned Hendrix king?

I feel like a birdwatcher, trying to tell people about these fantastic birds but people are refusing to even look through my binoculars.
"Holy shit! Have you ever seen a peregrine falcon?"
"That's not like a robin is it? See, I've heard of robins. I don't want to look at a bird that's not a robin."
"Look... all you have to do is put these binoculars up to your eyes and look."
"Gee, no. See, I've had a really busy day at work and I don't really know anything about this pericles falcon."

Don't know what set that off. Gotta focus. Listening to Kyuss and somehow I doubt that'll help my focus. If anything, it's going to make it worse.

I saw a bald eagle flying over Jordan Lake a few days ago. It was really close and I watched it for maybe half a minute. True story - good things happen to good people. Enormous bird, totally huge.

BUT WHAT IS SO ROCK AND ROLL ABOUT PUTTING A BEATLES OR A LED ZEPPELIN OR A NIRVANA STICKER ON YOUR CAR? SHIT. SHITSHITSHITSHITSHITSHITSHITSHITSHITSHIT. STICKER MAY AS WELL SAY "MUSIC IS SWELL" OR "HERE'S SOMETHING WE CAN ALL AGREE ON." ANY LESS TEETH AND THESE FASHION STATEMENTS WON'T EVEN BE ABLE TO HANDLE APPLE SAUCE. That's like saying "I like the idea of politics, but I don't want to go out on a limb..." and slapping a JFK '60 sticker on yr Honda. Gimme a break. IT'S OKAY TO SUPPORT STUFF OTHER PEOPLE HAVEN'T HEARD OF. ANYTHING ELSE IS WASTED EFFORT. STOP IT.

I think I'm done. What did this have to do with Blag'ard?

Absolutely nothing except probably I want people to go to Pig Zen Space, Joe of Blag'ard's MP3 store, and buy local records. They're cheap. Cheap cheap cheap cheap ($3.50 a record). This thing is locally run for local bands - it's by musicians, for musicians. It's cheaper than the baffling giant that is iTunes. I want people to go hunting for music rather than accepting the mixed-media bullshit on pop radio.

Popular radio has always been a fucking scam. For every one great band to make a big splash (the Flaming Lips, Radiohead, Beck) there are dozens of crap acts and, short range, they're bigger stories. Sure, from a historical perspective we can all pretend that hordes of people were wandering around in the '60s grooving to Hendrix (I dig his music, I despise the deification and the "greatest guitarist ever" bullshit) when you and I know very well when we apply our friend logic that Herman's Hermits and the Lettermen were the Hot Shit at the time. It's easy to look at what time sifted out as "good" (even if it, ultimately, was kind of dreck - the Doors, Nirvana...) and pretend that's what everyone was banging their heads to. Remember, Aerosmith sold tons of records in the 90s. Put that in your pipe and smoke it next time you want to make-believe that Alice in Chains wrote the anthems of a generation.

They only wrote anthems for some of us. Glad I could be there.

What the hell am I talking about? Right, revisionist history. Good times.

Where was I... Blag'ard?

YES. PLEASE. TELL US ABOUT BLAG'ARD YOU IMBALANCED SHIT

I love Blag'ard. I love the way they write. I love their harmonies, their pop sensibilities. I love that their music is evolution in two directions. They speed towards a parallel future, following an imagined timeline in which the great Buddy Holly lived to be a disenchanted adult. The fantastic things that Buddy Holly can do (and the ferocity with which he did them as he got older and more embittered) caused, among other things, a world in which distortion was not viewed as essential to rock and roll. Joe Taylor plays a clean and snappy Stratocaster, his bite a shimmering marriage of sheer, spider-fingered technicality and a warm, crackling river of overdriven tubes.

Blag'ard owes as much of their chord structure to their vocal harmonies as the guitar work. Joe and Adam's harmonies build soaring, heroic moments in the choruses of trebly cavepunk anthems that make me want to go mountain biking inside a Vegas casino.
No kidding.
The mix, the late '50s guitar tone and Adam's relentless... what is it? What is his drumming? The bass drum tends towards a celebratory, rollerskating 70s punk kind of thing, while he skitters across the hi-hat and fires a pistol into his snare with every rapid hit. It's a joyride, it's a greaser spidered out, grasping the roof of a speeding hot rod and cackling with bliss... suicide and success indistinguishable from a distance.

...which I'm sure is what went through their heads when they wrote these songs look. I didn't mean for this writeup to get this badly out of control. I've been writing a lot of pieces for the school paper lately and I have word limits and they don't let me say things like "shit" or "fuck" or "rotten fuckzombies at the Brewery shows eating each other's split ends and drinking raptor spit" so maybe what happened is I suffered a terrible inverse reaction from having to write so many "straight" pieces. 400 words? What can I do in 400 words? I can do a lot. As you can tell, I need boundaries or I sound like a crazy person which
I
just
might
be
and
so
what?

What I wanted to say initially, when this was still an innocent show writeup and not a bizarre diatribe, was that the show ended and that we'd had a great time. I wanted to put in the details that I can picture in my mind so that it would stick and so that people would read this and know exactly how it felt, how it looked, how it sounded. Instead, any time I tried to write an actual detail (such as "it was raining like mad" or "Betsy got a CD from us") it came out like Ted Kacynski shouting at David Koresh. What the fuck?

I was going to tell you about how foggy it was when I drove back to Pittsboro. I was going to tell you how tired I was the next day, all day long, and how it was a very long day and how I would do it again without question, without regret. I was going to use one of my favorite closes and I was going to say that I was driving back into a dreamscape when I drove out into the fog, that I was driving back into the human subconscious and that I would emerge again when needed.

Of course, I didn't do that. Instead I picked on the Beatles, Zeppelin and Nirvana.

Good going, Corbie. Go to war with the easy targets. Loser.

Advanced run-on-sentence construction and technique.

Battle Rockets - H.O.W. - Lamb Handler - Transient - Oct 10 @ Volume 11

We get to Volume 11 at 6:00, which is pretty early (actually we show up at 6:30 but it seems ok) and we hang out, still the first to arrive, and generally unsure of what to do with ourselves so we load in and sit around for a while and they're setting up the stage (gigantic stage) and we decide to roll to Boylan Bridge, having never been there, to have a beer so we talk to the dudes and we leave our gear and we drink the beer - it's a cool location, but I've had better beer still it was the thing to do and our day wouldn't have had the same rhythm without it, plus - awesome view of the city and it's a mixed-up city but it's a good city - slammed the beer, sent it down pretty fast, and rolled back to Volume 11 to show back up a little before 7:30 (as promised)
not bad at all,
hung out, set up, soundchecked (super nice soundguy, really enjoyed talking to him), played Galaxian I miss that game, it makes me think of the first Spazzatorium - when I lived in Greenville I gave so many quarters to their arcade machine & Galaxian was my game of choice and eventually it was our time to play... we started at 9:30 I think... and played just shy of 40 minutes, maybe we played 35 minutes, but the set was a good one (despite a few fuckups) & I think we should rewrite the end of "Conflict of Supermonsters"
no way
you already rewrote it twice yeah way because it's our song and we can do what we want and
who
says
songs
are
ever
finished

anyway, question mark,
but the energy was awesome and the sound was huge, those three amps of mine compare nicely with physically larger (and far more expensive) Marshall stacks such as were lugged into that show and I absolutely fucking DIG their tone
so good energy & Tilson and Allen were there, they heard the new tune ("Patience") and I got really into it, ended up jumping offstage to floor level, rolling on the floor and probably getting metal venue show gunk on my clothes or in my hair but I don't actually care
that shit was fun and would I lie to you (almost used closed-end punctuation there, whew that would have been absolute buzzkill) so we loaded the Millenium Falcon and came back inside where
Lamb Handler were starting - they're definitely taking fashion cues from Eagles of Death Metal - and it was kinda southern rock maybe in a desert rock direction I think, the dude with the SG sounded like he played in an open tuning, it was binge drinking music, turning donuts on a dead end dirt road music, it was buy-whiskey-shots-for-the-band music
no one bought us whiskey shots
we got them for ourselves, so I'm not bitching
drummer played a 14" and a 16" on snare stands and the bassist had gear issues and the guitar/vocals dude looked like Drew, my old boss when I worked at Westville Pub, if he woke up one day cowboyed up on cocaine and blew his whole goddamn paycheck at a western wear store
wow,
that came across pretty negative,
he actually had really nice boots and a pretty snazzy western shirt (black with roses I think) but I could not get behind the handlebar mustache - even though I've sported one myself - this one I feared - and he looked like Drew's twin (really odd how alike they looked)
they finished and they unloaded, I walked out and talked to their drummer
who was a very nice guy
and he cited the Melvins as the inspiration for his nontraditional drumset he also said he liked us but would have liked us with more bottom end
anyway Transient made an honest-to-goodness grand entrance from the green room behind the stage we had the opportunity to go back there but it's just not me, man, and they played some rock and roll and
well
we left, feeling bad that we didn't get to hear H.O.W. play, but we rolled out, so
Transient and Lamb Handler were tight, practiced, and they knew how to command attention from a 4 1/2" tall stage, but their direction and our direction were so different - and I don't mean artistically, I mean our goals as bands - that we felt like exchange students
now
these two bands have exponentially better chances than we do of mainstream success and I wish them the best at it because they're obviously trying very hard and are very good within the hard rock genre
it's just that
I wanted to hear some stoner-ass shit, some sludged out, doomy metal and that's what H.O.W. was bringing, we knew it,
but
we were tired - really tired -
and we wussed out never let anyone tell you rock musicians are "cool" or "tough," or that we can "hang," it's a lie and sometimes I feel like a schizophrenic probably feels because I live in easily a dozen different worlds, all of them scattershot disconnected from each other, and sometimes my residency in all these spheres wears me out,
ya dig,
so
we left this part of town to drive to another part of town where we verbed some noun and listened to Sleep, Melvins, U.N.K.L.E., Lush, new Deftones and Tilson's solo recordings AND YOU HAVE TO FUCKING HEAR THEM OH MY GOD IOAUGOJHSIDGJHSIGU HSIUHSFGIH FIGH AISH%$*@#%^^#$(*U $T&()%& 74982)$*( and I crashed on the couch, awake early the next morning, sacred coffeecup in hand.

Sonic exchange students... "does it piss you off when he stands on your drum?"... Carrboro Love Fest, mk. 1.1... Permafrost... this is what happens when I read too much Lester Bangs...

all photos by Lou Horton

Where the Buffalo Roamed - Jordan - Goodbye, Titan - October 8 @ the Reservoir (Carrboro)

I'd been sitting on this story for over a month, the interview with Matt Cash to go in the Voice (the Wake Tech paper, my editorship soon enough) and today I just sat down and my article hit the paper in one try. Gluing quotes together, playing with imagery, establishing a loose narrative flow. It'll be out in November at some point. My stories for the October issue (three issues per semester + a summer rag) were just published and you should check them out (opens as a .pdf, Cletus. Check out pages 2 & 4).

***

Words are going to fail me (words, don't fail me now!) in the writeup of this show because this was quite possibly one of the best shows. Ever. No longer young enough to stand on identity (when I was 16 the whole world looked like flannel and long hair) I have to find actual accomplishments to celebrate. This show is an occasion for celebration.

I'd been talking to people about it since Wes emailed me and offered us the date. I'd listened to Jordan on their 'space and was immediately WOWED. Here's a band inspired by At the Drive-in who miraculously got it. How come the memory of that fine band is tainted by the bullshit screamo chickenshits who get all the record deals and the masturbatory Mars Volta... navel gazing to the point of detached retina? ANYWAY WHAT I MEANT TO BE SAYING is that Jordan (of Angiers, it's near Paris) immediately made me think of a less mathy version of At the Drive-in and it was delicious and there was no way I was going to turn down an opportunity to play with them.

I tend to overstate things. I know this. It's okay.

***

I have an idea that's been burning through my head for the past hour. I read this line in my Lester Bangs book... "I don't know which is more pathetic, the people of my generation who refuse to let their 1960s adolescence die a natural death, or the younger ones who will snatch up and gobble any shred, any scrap of a dream that someone declared over ten years ago," and something dawned on me in part that would dawn on me in total when he completed his thought a few 'graphs later with "Those who choose to falsify their memories - to pine for a neverland 1960s that never really happened that way in the first place - insult the retroactive Eden they enshrine."

I get it. I get why we can't outrun Woodstock. I get why the Beatles are a massive corporate interest that compete on the same scale as banks and nations. I get the "there's no good music these days" sentiment which is unadulterated bullshit. I feel so dumb that this didn't come to me sooner.

It's the baby boomers, stupid. The "me generation," that's what they were called and don't let them tell you any differently. Shit, this is my parents. This is a lot of my friends' parents. There are a sixty thousand zillion of them and they run the western world. A lot of them are amazing people but the amazing people never write the rules. The shitheads are the ones who get to be in charge and now they're running corporations and they're hating the world, hating life, enriching their memories with retroactive embellishments and making the rest of us pay dearly for their own self-contempt. It's been pounded into our heads, all our heads, as a civilization, that the achievements of the baby boomers as stoned teens are the gospel of all stoned teenager achievements... and by sheer number alone! You think this is funny, you think this is silly, then watch.... wait for the year 2052 when I and my crotchety peers are thundering down on the yokel oaf teens about how there's "no good new music, what is this bullshit you're blasting?" and berating them for their inability to have been born in time for Lollapalooza, which we'll all lie and say we attended. Even if we would have been nine at the time (I was 15, I think. Who cares?). 1994 we saw the 25th anniversary of Woodstock paraded around as a Big Fucking Deal and 2009 saw the 40th anniversary of Woodstock paraded around as a Big Fucking Deal and the cultural goldfish memory is purged, kids who don't remember the 25th anniversary (if you're 18 now it hit when you were 3) think this is the first time ever there's been a capitalist sandstorm in support of the supposed revolutionaries who actually became the machine if you look closer. Shit... I think I see my mom in there, a few rows back at a Hendrix show, complaining 'bout the noise.

So, the big surprise hits, when my parents became their parents ("I don't understand you damn kids and your rap(90s)/rock(60s)/jazz(40s)") and my generation will pull the same holier-than-thou moralism shit when our kids come home with safety pins jammed through their eyebrows with scary new genres in their heads. Teenagers now are the kids of people who cut their teeth on the Clash (if they were lucky) or Guns 'n' Roses (if they were glue sniffers). I imagine these parents moralizing about the Garbage on the Radio These Days and I laugh my all-knowing-wannabe ass off.

I can prove it all but I need to cut the rant now so I can write about the show. I want to get a community music blog going, it would probably go best up there. If you want to write for it please email me - corbie hill at g m a i l . com

THE SHOW WRITEUP ACTUALLY STARTS HERE

Thanks for bearing with me. Maybe you skipped down and saw those words and said "finally" and then read on. If you did the latter, I can sum up what you missed in a few words. "Corbie accuses his parents' generation of turning into their parents generation while listening to Sleep's Jerusalem and giggling at the lyrics."

My parents' generation did what their parents generation didn't do - it was the same application to a different arena. My parents' generation did to art and media what my grandparents' generation did to international politics. Not my parents or my grandparents themselves, fuck no, they were too private. They can't be held responsible for the actions of the public figures of their era but essential core attitudes maintain. stubborn. we have them too. For we are the children of Baby Boomers, we are the children of the Me Generation, and we got what they got for they were the antithesis of the Great Depression... "whatever I didn't get you're going to get because when I grew up we didn't have shoes and then I fought in this war over Germany/Japan/Italy so you can have anything you want in this sacred land of plenty" twice removed.

God, Corbie, shut up... get to the show.

***

The narrative starts the night before. Andy had been in town for several days (he'd come along for fliering with Rachel and me on Monday. We'd eaten pho at Lime and Basil and then promoted the living hell out of the show) working on a video project so he came by Wednesday night and we had this fire in the yard. It had been wet, so starting a reliable fire had involved more lighter fluid than I like to admit. There were moments of fear. I'd doused the logs in lighter fluid and lit them and there had been this great "ah-WHOOM" and time froze for a second before I could run for the hose and I had a thought that I somehow always expect is just around the corner

"It's finally happened.

Corbie Hill has fucked up."

but I hadn't. Not this time.

I got the hose and the fireball subsided and it actually took a few more (cautious) squirts of lighter fluid before the fire would catch. I did not burn my entire yard down, as I'd feared, but the night continued and Andy and I drank beer and caught up in the yard until an unreasonable hour because it was the first day of my fall break and I wanted to celebrate.

So we did and then the next day we wrote a new song and went on a killer hike along loosely maintained trails by the Haw River, scrambling and hopping over boulders. I dip my hand into the water and it's not even that cold.


This is all practically in my back yard.

Right. A good day was had, a very laid back day, and we eventually found ourselves at the Reservoir a little after 9:00 and the actual narrative can begin.

Thank god.

So we met Jordan and they're super cool guys. Witty and irreverent and good-natured, my kind of people. The Titan guys were already there and otherwise there were a couple of regulars so we settled on an order and that was that.

We went ahead and set up and people were drifting in at a good rate and about 10:15 I looked out and I saw a crowd ready for music. Andy must have seen it too because we agreed that it was time to start or we would lose critical energy. If you don't know, the energy given off by the audience creates itself. The music has little to nothing to do with it and you (as performer) must make the most of that energy when it exists. We both saw it crackling in the people at the Res so we started playing... I think it was 10:20 or so when we got to it.

At this point the musician/audience relationship becomes tricky. They have the energy and we, as performers, insert our creation into the mix. The tricky part is playing the music that matches the energy of the audience. As an original band, our music's going to be the same no matter what... there have been plenty of awkward shows when our audience was on a totally different frequency (which generally results in them vacating the room).

This night we were very lucky because what we played resonated perfectly with the audience. I can't remember the last time a crowd was that into a set I've played, honestly, and it thrilled my shit. I feel like Andy and I conducted ourselves nicely. We played tight and loose, we played loud and wild. I went jumping around, climbing on the drumset, I walked outside and played my guitar in the street while still plugged in inside. I played the face of Andy's kick with sticks and then kicked the hell out of it to end the set. "Does it piss you off when he stands on your drum?" someone asked Andy later. Andy laughs... it was his idea in the first place that I climb on the bass drum.

One thing that was a lot of fun was introducing "Permafrost," our new song, to an audience who was already really jazzed to see us play. I mean, there were these two girls dancing to "Dirty Bomb Stratocaster," for Osiris' sake.

I don't see that too often. In fact, I've never seen that.

Smoky room/righteous jams/Schlitz time

Jordan were playing quite soon. We shared some gear with them, so the set change took no time at all.

The oddest thing in the world happened at this show. The Res provides the bands with a cooler full of Schlitz and by the time Goodbye, Titan was starting their set (probably in a few paragraphs, I'm skipping ahead) there were only a few Schlitzes floating in the post-ice of the cooler. Someone was triple-fisting that shit...

Back to Jordan - their set was a spring-loaded pogo fest. The songs are there, they really know how to write, and the performance is tight and frenetic. They play off each other on and off the mic - miming to each other even when they aren't singing, each member in a one man play as well as part of the greater unit - and each of the three is an animated and joyful piece of the puzzle.

Joy, that's the word. These guys get supreme joy from the composition and performance of rock and roll and that joy translates to the audience. Lots of people were infected by it, smiling their asses off in the sweet strange timeless nethers that hit when the smoke is thick and the rafters look miles distant and darkness fell a long time ago but you don't want to think about closing time because that means no more music and you just can't fathom its absence - not now! Not while a band like this is playing! You know these guys understand how to run this show, you know they're going to play exactly as many songs as they should, so you won't scream for another but goddammit THEY NEED TO PLAY UNTIL MY BRAIN TURNS TO A DISSEMBLED LEGO SET so even if they have to stop their set - and I know they must at some point - I won't have to know it's even over. Send me to the mental institute from One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. I won't fight it. I've encountered a strange new species that communicates through rock and roll and its name is Jordan.

I've been listening to their record and I've put my finger on a few things. Sure, they're descended from At the Drive-in, I can hear that, but they avoid the pointed abstraction of AtDI. It's kind of like what would happen if Minus the Bear had good vocals... shit, these are all falling short. Try again.

Three members - keys (Baptiste), guitar (Adrienne), drums (Thibaut)... no set "lead vocalist," no lead anything. The songs infected us all with a preconscious joy, shouting incoherent expressions of approval when a song ended abruptly midphrase, delivering us to sudden artistic rapture. All members of Jordan contribute equally, both in instrumentation and on the vocals front. I can't really call it singing, it's far more dynamic than when the mind pictures "rock singing." Adrienne, Baptiste and Thibaut sing in a conversational style. They shout off each other like an anti-protest, marchers in a love fest, knocking over mailboxes and skateboarding the high tension cables of a suspension bridge in mindblanking glee. The energy is righteous, is hard-edged, it's angular and crisp four-on-the-floor dance-friendly rock and roll, positive living with a punk drive, three optimists at war with gloom & they're kicking its ass.

THE END IS NEAR. DID THE END MAKE AN APPOINTMENT? I DON'T KNOW, CHECK THE APPOINTMENT BOOK. IT'S UNDER "E" FOR "END, THE."

Goodbye, Titan ended the night by blasting it halfway to the Large Magellanic Cloud and viewing the redshift through a high powered radio telescope. Goodbye, Titan are the soundtrack for the fantastic Arthur C. Clarke book The Songs of Distant Earth... everything from the sunbright glare of the Magellan's quantum drive to the patient, nearly clinical, chapter-long dissection of the destruction of our solar system. Clarke really loves to destroy the planet Earth... there's another really good book he wrote in which he very gently dissolved our homeworld. I won't mention the title if you haven't read it, don't want to ruin anything. Suffice to say, it's a gorgeous destruction and any time I've seen Clarke destroy our planet - and there are more than just the two examples here - he's done it in such a way that it's as much a beginning as an end. His is a sympathetic apocalypse, as is Goodbye, Titan's.

I recommend digesting them together.

THE END IS NEAR

With this genie I'll turn myself 22 again when I'm 78 or so. I'll hang out with my grandkids and we'll wail on guitars and pound on drums and maybe by then my 1996 Squier Pro Tone Telecaster will be worth thousands of dollars instead of $500, which is still $200 more than I paid for it back in '97 or '98, whenever it was.

Which one's the permanent childhood? Dropping out or dropping in? Playing the game or sticking to your adolescent guns? There's something a little bit wrong with both and, like it or not, the kids of the Me Generation are about to produce a generation of their own (some of them have already started, but they started young) and we're going to be their doddering, out-of-touch parents... terminally unhip, embarrassing, etc. etc. etc. Maybe Red Collar said it right... "there was a time when the world was mine/if I'd just stayed on track..." it's all sentimental drivel from here on out... devil take the nostalgia (it's poison to us now).

So our parents generation ruined sex and drugs... fine. We've grown up in a world shaped by that ruination so it's nothing new and we wouldn't know what to do with free love and clean drugs if we had them. Rock and roll, however... they could not so easily corrupt rock and roll. The spirit lives and exists free of time and civilization. The desire to beat a snare head until it splits no different from the desire to push openstringed humbuckers in the face of a screaming and crackling 410 until the feedback and the harmonics are one and deific overtones flatten the landscape like unto a natural disaster no different from homo habilis at war with hyenas but chasing them and cackling and hunting alongside them and making the faces of animal death at large on the hot and tepid savannah know fear no different from huddled and terrified neandertals, facing certain frozen extinction, painting the hunt on cave walls to the dancing light of their fires and the painting is honest... tiny man and his flimsy spear, powered by the inimitable punk rock gall of fear turned to pride, driving that flimsy spear into the side of a gigantic bison, painted large painted real enough to crush the neandertal family with impunity, great sacred bison falling under tiny weapons to feed the family whose hope and fear, whose god and satan, all inhabit the same object of awe and terror - the towering cave bear whose roof shelters them whose claws torment them. On their floor, by their fire, the skull of the sacred cave bear sits.

These were the first rock songs.

So fuck yes I want to live and live and live, I want to see where this energy goes and how it reacts to the world which changes, which always changes, which always has changed, and what new ways people will find to express their terrified fascination with the great nightmare predator whose bodiless carnage feigns sleep with one eye open, hiding just under the blanket of sentience. Rock and roll is what happens when we reconcile ourselves to the devil inside and learn to love it and hate it at the same time... because we see what happens to the puritans, we see what happens to the deniers of human nature. Rock and roll is a life fully actualized, fully conscious of the paradox inherent and accepting of evil as a part of good and vice versa. We watch warily the wolves and cave bears and hyenas, but we are the lost predator that slinks alongside them and simultaneously despises them and slurs "me too... me too..."