Roam, Buffalo, Roam.

Link sausage

2010-12-01T01:22:00.000-05:00

If anyone's still watching, I've started a sci-fi serial over here.

It'll be updated pretty regularly. Like twice a week.

Read it. Or don't. I'll still sporadically update this page. Probably.

Southport music video!

2010-07-01T21:47:00.000-04:00

I made this last night using footage from our November 2008 tour with Finn Riggins. What do you think?

I really hope all my comments are from spammers.

Durham war party... we went out like a receding wave... bringing some of you with us... yet not many...

2010-05-01T11:12:00.252-04:00

Where the Buffalo Roamed - Fractal Farm - Fujiyama Roll - May 1 @ the Pinhook (Durham)

I knew, going into it, that this would be the last show for a while. Our little baby Sarah's due date, May 22nd, was rapidly approaching and I wanted to take parenting more seriously than anything to date. And I've gotten pretty serious about stuff like music, writing, eating right... but the responsibility of raising a child? I was ready for that. Ready to answer to a higher power: the future. Bringing a child into the world is nothing compared to bringing them to the future, prepared and self-confident... educated and willing to want to live right. So I was ready for an undeniable, inescapable, reason to live.

To be fair, this show was over a month ago - and our little girl, Sarah, was born on May 24th. Here's what she looks like

There won't be any more shows until fall - we're looking at mid to late September, maybe the week after Hopscotch - because she deserves my unwavering focus. And we knew that, going into the 5/1 gig. We would have pulled out all the stops, except we realized we never held back to begin with. And that might be why both my main guitars are giving me trouble, and it might be why there's a terrible buzzing in my Peavey amp (haven't used it at a show since the trouble started). But destruction is core to rock and roll, at least in the package we deliver.

I got in my new car - I've replaced the Millenium Falcon, which is a red Mazda pickup with a bad back, with a green Subaru forester - and drove myself to Durham. It's a long drive from Camp Werewolf, and there's plenty of time to think. We haven't had a ton of luck in Durham in the past, but this is a Saturday night. 307 Knox offered us this show. They had a hold on May 1st, but the show they were working on ended up on a different night, at a different venue. They sent out the word that they wanted the night filled - and fast - and we responded first. Can we pull our weight, though? Last time through, we played a pretty poorly attended little gig on a weeknight, and that doesn't even count my solo disaster when I tried to play a noise set. Fuck. Don't play a noise set at the Pinhook. And I was an optimist, I always am, but I don't think Durham's a good town for us - at least not on a practical level. The only times I've played successful shows there have been Battle Rockets sets... and they've never been there for us. We played an early Free Electric State show, about a year ago, and it was packed out. We also played MarVell, of all places, with Scientific Superstar and Beloved Binge. But they weren't there for us, and we were way too loud for the MarVell audience anyway. Still, both times we caught some errant audience love. It wasn't given as freely as in Raleigh or Greenville shows - or that kickass basement show in Asheville last January - but still. And the people at those two shows who dug us were genuine, but it's a tough town.

These were some of my thoughts driving to Durham. I knew we had a few fans in town - such as the stalwart Paul Gallant - but I was also nervous about my track record playing the Durm - and specifically playing the Pinhook. So I showed up and got a spectacular parking place in front of the MarVell, where enormous bouncers herded spectacularly dressed Durmites up the stairs and into the dim lights and slick dangerous thump of a DJ's spin. We would be playing last, which could work in our favor or against us. As far as we knew, nothing else was really going on in town that night and the Pinhook is a destination hangout for sure. Then again, in an earlier blog entry I pretty thoroughly trashed All Your Science for some reason. I felt like I had a pretty good critical point, but it can't have gone over well - and it can't be helping our cause that I'm such a rampant jackass. I mean, that band is Durham personified... the walking, talking battlecry of the modern vegan activist on a bicycle. And that's fine, I'm the outsider here.

(photo by Chelsea Rossini)

Fujiyama Roll is quite literally J-rock. I already knew Junko, their vocalist, from her work with the (now defunct) Scientific Superstar. She, and several other Durmites of Japanese extraction, formed Fujiyama Roll to play Japanese rock and roll. And that's what they did, and quite well. Their guitarist, Jimmy, plays this Strat with two P-90s... and he achieves tonal magic. It was pretty straightforward, yet well-delivered: maybe think a Japanese Weezer. Arena rock pathos: nerd rock ethos. Logos falls somewhere in between. I'm too busy building diametrically. Excuse me.

The crowd began to grow substantially during their set, peaking as Fractal Farm set up to play... and it became obvious that these guys could pull their weight. Even as a Wilmington band playing in Durham, they drew well. For one thing, the crowd came out almost exclusively for them. It was good to see Kellie Grubbs, she's a valuable contributor to the world of singer/songwritage. We talked about local music and other important things.

So they played big and raucous music, crowding the stage with synths and guitars and ruthlessly cranking their amps. The music was like the engines of a jet plane, both in volume and in purposeful cacophony. Somewhere in the heart of this turbulent thickness, beyond Corey Blackburn's twisting hammer-and-shred guitar work, Joshua Krautwurst delivered detached vocals - sensitive and simple, like Rob Crow. We stepped into the little room with the PBR-stocked fridge to apply our warpaint while Fractal Farm channeled Spiritualized - "the Individual," to be precise - building a merciless wall of noise. Overall, they were simultaneously precise and reckless, passionate and apathetic. Picture an enormous manta ray rising from a sea of white noise. Or maybe picture something that actually makes sense.

Then it was our turn and, I swear to some sacred taxi with Zeus, Buddha, and Zoroaster crammed in the backseat, I'm cursed. Granted, I didn't totally prevent my own fuckup. My green guitar (OLP MM1 w/ Seymour Duncans, natch) gave me trouble at our previous Nightlight show. I'd been playing it at home, and hadn't had any problems. It either has a loose wire or a bad pot on the volume knob - and I need to learn how to solder if I'm going to keep abusing my guitars. Anyway, I got no signal at all, so I borrowed Corey's Jaguar for most of our set, until the strap button popped out of the top horn (you gotta be kidding me...) so then I borrowed his doublecut hollowbody Tele - I think it's called the TC90 - for the last two songs.

My friend from the school paper, Chelsea, showed up with her friend Lydia and they took some fantastic pictures. And here are a few:

It was odd, straight odd, that Bad Things happened to any guitar I touched that evening, but we got through the set and we played well. We played to an empty house, but it doesn't quite matter. And it doesn't matter that, not ten minutes after we were done playing, the soundguy gave us a hard time about getting our gear off the stage. We had fun.

We headed back to Pittsboro, got soundly verbed, and grilled bratwurst at 3:00 in the morning. Niq played SNES and I remember blathering to Andy about some half-cocked, homegrown astrophysics concept as we watched the distant stars shine above the trees of Camp Werewolf.

We strike at midnight... if you still love rock and roll... keep those modern parables a-comin'... and we'll keep on not reading...

2010-04-13T21:11:00.255-04:00

*for a factual account of this show, click the pretty picture

Where the Buffalo Roamed - Finn Riggins - Kellie Ann Grubbs - April 13th @ the Nightlight (Chapel Hill)

When I was 16 years old I saw my first rock show. It was at Walnut Creek and, of all the major label hacks, I chose Pearl Jam. In fact, at this point in history the amphitheater was still called Hardee's Walnut Creek... and I was but a rube who had no idea what kind of moneytrail voodoo took place when it came to sponsorship of these places. So I paid my $25 and I saw the show. It was 1998, and I still lived in the absolute boondocks of Eastern North Carolina. Pamlico County, natch. And I at least knew a place called Cat's Cradle existed, but I couldn't even conceptualize local music (or even the independent scene). It didn't exist where I lived. At all. I mean, what, the nearest town was New Bern (worse than useless) and beyond that... I could have gotten some underground action in Greenville but I was dipshit clueless.

Tangent aside, I'd dropped $25 on the ticket and $100 at the merch hut. No shit. I got two shirts, a hat, some stickers, Pearl Jam socks, and two posters. Did I mention I was a total rube? But I was jazzed out of my mind. I already believed in rock and roll, even if I didn't know what it was yet. And don't judge me, either. Pearl Jam was my favorite band in the goddamn world. Every music lover has to start somewhere, and don't be a lying hipster and pretend the first band you loved was Spiritualized. This was a pilgrimage for me, so it was only natural to blow through $100 at the gift stand... dig?

I thought I was experiencing rock and roll. I shouted myself hoarse, jubilation, for I knew every lyric to every obscure little b-side. True story. And the hot, slightly older, girls just in front of me and my friend Mike kept looking back at us, annoyed. But I kept on bellowing along with Vedder, who was tiny in the extreme distance, a quarter of a mile across the lawn. True story. But really, as far as common experience goes, there was nothing personal at all about this show. This wasn't rock and roll, this was a readymade product... a shared experience on par with watching the summer blockbuster or pro ball on TV. A ruthlessly generalized product... and how many times had that show been played like that, to vague hordes, with minimal variation? How many times had that movie been made? And how many times can you see Kobe Bryant jump over a refrigerator before you start to yawn? Because there's no sweat. It's a carefully practiced attempt at the übermensch game, and therefore useless on a personal level.

Some say "time makes fools of us all." I call this one a copout. It's the great leveler. Through the lens of time, my asinine jack-foolery in Raleigh's eastern 'burbs, circa 1998, appears - accurately enough - as just one step of many. If that had been the extent of my physical interaction with rock and roll, then I'd probably be passed out by Walnut Creek's gates to this day. Hell, what is it even called any more? Verizon Jiffy Lube Schmirnoff Ice Lite Zero Bojangles Walnut Creek, brought to you by Michelob? But I kept moving. I kept walking.

The shows I cared about got smaller. The bands got weirder. And I got involved. It wasn't easy, but I got involved and I got louder. And louder. And when I look back on that show, 12 years ago this August, I hardly recognize it as rock and roll. Where's the fucking sweat? And I don't mean the sweat of some Led Zep shirt wearing hack with a $6 MGD sloshing around in a plastic cup. I mean the hard work of rock and roll that pulls its own weight. I mean bands that tune their own fucking guitars. I mean taking to the road in vehicles that barely run. And I mean getting as close as you want to the stage, where the culmination of hard work and dedication is the application of blood and sweat to the pickguard of a bashed-to-shit secondhand electric guitar in bad need of intonation work. And when you're the one on the stage, you're baptized by it.

It's important to outgrow your first love, in anything. Because you learn to love slowly, and you never do it right from the gate. I didn't know until after the fact that I had outgrown Pearl Jam, but it was a beautiful revelation. I had already been listening to much more engaging and technical music, as well as some really strange shit that might just turn my dogs against me. Locrian , from Chicago. Check them out. And it dawned on me one day that PJ never had been a good band to begin with. They were just my starting point and I had already moved on, I just didn't know it. I don't really miss them, either. I have plenty of good rock and roll (with actual coherent vocals) that does the trick better than they ever did... and without all the fucking histrionics.

And it's this sense of liberation that I wish on U2 fans. It's a baffler to me, that people can insist on digging U2... and defend it and maintain their indie cred without ever answering to the fact that their favorite band is a played out bastard creature with delusions of Christhood. But no, that's subjective. Let's keep it to what is objective.
LISTEN:
This kind of aggressive nostalgia (i.e.: the treatment of said band as infallible) is damaging to the development of new tastes. If you stay, at least in some way, locked in a certain time period or ethos, it will always damage your view of new bands. If you persist in continuing to worship your first musical love, you will (unwittingly) measure all new acts by their yardstick... as you did when you and your pimples first discovered them in a smelly bedroom when you were a teen.

SO THROW OFF YOUR SHACKLES.
GIVE UP THE BANDS OF YOUR TEEN YEARS.
THEY WILL ONLY LIE TO YOU. AND MAKE YOU THINK OF OTHER BANDS ON THEIR TERMS.

DRIVE TO THE NIGHTLIGHT/PARK/GRAB A BEER/UNLOAD GEAR/HELLO ANDY AND NIQ/HELLO FINN RIGGINS

Kelllie Ann Grubbs (click for an unsorted list of anagrams) started our fine show. She's common friends with our Wilmington buddies Ponchos from Peru and Fractal Farm (more on Fractal Farm in the next entry), and plays gently unhinged singer-songwriter stuff with a quiet, patient delivery. And she had the right kind of audience - a solid crowd of modern sensitives came out and gave her proper attention. About half of them stuck it out for Finn Riggins (here's their list of anagrams), which isn't bad for a bill with two rock bands and a solo act... where the crowd is there to see the solo act. The show started out seated, and maintained that dynamic throughout. We (anagrams for Where the Buffalo Roamed) had a select few who stayed to see us play, but our volume level pretty much emptied the place. The Carrboro Ninja stuck it out, snapping pictures from his perch - hanging upside-down from the ceiling by a diamond filament. I know acts like Caltrop play the Nightlight, and they are loud, but they also have a reliable Chapel Hill draw. Our draws are in Raleigh, Asheville, Greenville and possibly Wilmington. We definitely don't draw in Durham - more on that soon. But we played a pretty good show. I was having guitar issues, the OLP is pretty much falling apart, but we managed nicely. We played with a few different things, with Niq using his mic more often. Also, I changed "North Dakota" a little bit. Probably because I can't actually sing the part I wrote at the end, so I just play that melody on the guitar now. Not really a copout, because I've always been more of a guitarist than a vocalist. And I can always trust my left hand.

the second Let Feedback Ring went kind of like this.

2010-03-27T16:45:00.657-04:00

Have mercy on me please.

I've been working on this entry for almost two months.

I'm not even sure I like what I've written, but I feel this twisted responsibility to finish simply because I started.

I didn't even proofread most of this. It's too long. So I'm sorry if the section about your band or a band you love doesn't make any sense.

I'll be surprised if any of this makes any sense.

As for the basics:

My friend Bart Tomlin and I decided in December of 2009 or so to put on a festival in Raleigh, and to throw it the week after SXSW. This is the story of that festival. It's written from my perspective, though the first-person approach isn't always (or ever) the right one to use. God, it's what they start elementary schoolers on.

"I like dogs. I like cats. I want to live on the moon and be a firefighter."

I was the lazy one. Bart knows his shit.

Anyway. This is as finished as this entry is ever going to be. May whatever god you pray to forgive you for reading any part of this...

-c. hill

Camp Werewolf, NC

5/19/10

It's been close to a month since LFR. It doesn't feel like it. In fact, I'm having a hard time keeping ahold of any timeline right now. Life's been a mad flood of school, writing for the Indy, doing as much music as I can afford, and keeping up with the house. It's Spring, and Camp Werewolf is in full bloom. We have a monstrous and terrifying azalea in the yard that is at least 15 fee tall, if not taller, and that's just the start of it. Things are alive here, and we don't control them. We just keep them from eating us alive. The garden's coming together nicely and the pets are as they've always been - numerous and lazy.

It's April 16th, so that you know, and the windows are wide open. I'm in the old recliner that came with our house, listening to Kyuss and occasionally watching cars go back and forth on Highway 87. It's easy to remember Let Feedback Ring, though, and it's especially easy to remember how it started.

March 25th was the day the Pittsboro courthouse burned.

It didn't burn to the ground, if you don't live here and don't know, but it was pretty badly damaged. The thing was built in 1881 and an errant welder's torch set this off.

So I drove to Raleigh while the news copters circled and a massive column of black smoke dominated the sky. If ever I've seen an odd omen, this was it.

Fortunately, all the shows at Let Feedback Ring were to go well. The omen must have applied to something (or someone) else.

***

I've been gone from the bloggins world for a while because I'm not the writer I thought I was. No, it's okay. I'm not sad, just bear with me. Now that I'm writing for the Indy, I realize how much I have to learn. I'm jazzed as hell, because I actually am learning. So it's okay that I'm not the writer I thought I was. In fact, I prefer it this way. Humility's key, and if I can learn how to write for a paper I respect as much as the Indy? Well, that's something.

Clarity is key, is one thing I've learned. It's okay to appear to lose all control of your writing, just remember to make your point eventually. This one has always been hard for me.

Anyway, so I haven't come around recently because I wasn't entirely sure I knew what I was doing. Now I'm here, I'm writing this thing, and I need to get to the actual event before you lose interest and wander off to Failblog.

***

TAKE CARE

This was cool shit. Champaigne, Illinois' Take Care were the first band of the first night. They're on tour with Community College (I'll get to them soon), and each band compliments the other's style beautifully. Take Care plays long, engaging rock - and I'm going to call it instrumental rock despite the presence of vocals. I know it's a tad cliched to point this out, but the human voicebox is an instrument! A lot of cats say they use it as an instrument, but few bands simply do so. It's natural the way it happens with Take Care, they treat a multi-part vocal harmony (such as in "Our Home") the same as they treat the interaction between a bass and a guitar, say.

So, where do they come from? Where do they fit in? They sound, to me, like a band that could easily release a record through Temporary Residence, Ltd. No surprise they have friends in Hello Sir, which is effectively the gateway label to Temporary Residence. The songs develop in vague similarity to post rock quiet-loud-deafening-quietude, but they're similar in the same way as beagles and labs are similar. Sure, there's plenty of sparkle and delay in the guitars, but there's also a punch in the fuckin' gut element generally absent in post rock's slow builds. In fact, I'm listening to them right now and I feel like this is what a classic hardcore song would sound like if you played it at 1/20th of its original speed. Again, very cool shit.

COMMUNITY COLLEGE

These Chicagoans were set up and playing almost immediately, as they and Take Care shared most of their gear. Be glad I gave you a link to their music (above), because both bands have impossible to Google names. Very Temporary Residence, Ltd, again... (wasn't Rob Crow in a band called the Ladies?).

If Take Care were a classic hardcore band slowed way down, Community College were like Cinemechanica only sped way up. This was a power set if I've ever seen one, fucking madmen. They can't have played more than 25 minutes. I don't think any of their songs broke 2 minutes, and a lot of them were less than a minute long. Great song names ("I'm Lucky Cause my House is on Top of a Raccoon," "Two Pickets to Titsburg"), fantastic live show, and inhuman bursts of energy and precision defined this quadrangle. I've read about and heard of different kinds of music played for different species. People have written music for cats, dogs, chimpanzees, etc. The bottom line of it all is, music appeals to members of a certain species because of its relative tempo and pitch to familiar tempos and pitches to said species. For humans, the heartbeat is a familiar tempo. Chimp heartbeats are faster, so fast music is actually more calming to chimpanzees than slow music. You get it.

By this model, Community College writes music for dirtbikes. Fuck yes.

GOODBYE, TITAN

You know the drill. Goodbye, Titan is here. Several things are going to happen.
*first off, I'm going to put away the PA. We won't be needing microphones again
*it's going to get very loud
*you're going to start grinning from ear to ear
*you're going to feel like you rode out a hurricane on a floating refrigerator door when this is all over
But we have something new for you. See, this was the first Goodbye, Titan show with Matt Cash on bass.

Holy shit.

So, let's talk about this Matt Cash character. He's aggressively rhythmic. He plants himself somewhere in the bedrock and leans with the slow eruption. He's a creature of rhythm, he's a creature of tone. As such, he fits right in with Tilson and Allen's swarms of reverb, treble, and feedback and Cameron's modern punk metal drumming.

And these guys were loud. Holy shit, were they loud. They knocked the clock off the wall in the Sadlack's kitchen three times. Three times? At least.

I hung around afterwards to make sure the touring acts got paid, and headed to Tir na Nog at 10:30 or so for the second bill.

***
MARCH 25th/TIR NA NOG/10pm
***

FREE ELECTRIC STATE

I missed Red Leader, he had just finished when I got to the venue. A decent amount of people were milling around and Free Electric State was set up, ready to rock. By and by they did.

Their record's out now, it wasn't then, and we who dig their music have been wandering towards a categorization penned by David Raposa in his review: shoegrunge. The zoneout quality of some of the songs they've written in the past year is in the shoegaze vein, I picked up on that when I saw them at Slim's this past winter, but if it's shoegaze it's a brash version with blood on its knuckles and rum on its breath. If it's shoegaze, it's shoegaze wandering, dazed and somehow alive, away from the scene of a brutal plane crash. If it's shoegaze, it's shoegaze as Richard Hell would have written it. Something happened in the early 90s: punk rock energy migrated laterally away from the stuff that continued to call itself "punk" and into the unlikely intersection of John Cale and Hüsker Dü. Yeah, we called it all kinds of things.We called it "grunge," "alternative," "indie." The "i-word" means a different thing every decade, forfuxsake. But, anyway, once upon a time a guy names Charles Thompson came up with a clever stage name, met a girl named Kim Deal, and together they wrote a song called "Gouge Away," and the world was never the same.

So take "Gouge Away," and take Sonic Youth (even the underrated Thousand Leaves stuff) and the Screaming Trees and a little smidgeon of Mudhoney and even the Pumpkins (overrated as they are, they have their uses), and you have a bit of the foundation of this band. They were in their prime at this show, I shit you not, and it wasn't lost on the decent-sized crowd.

VEELEE

Finally, finally, finally, the two-headed creature that calls itself Veelee is working on a record. Matt and Ginger, natch. This was just plain cute - see, Matt's parents came to the show. This was the first time they'd seen Matt play since he was in high school or so.

I was getting pretty tired by this point, and Veelee's set was perfect for my mindset. I zoned totally into their fluid melodies - swaying with the sinuous twine of their practiced harmonies. Theirs is a perfect modern pop set - one that honors melodic forebears while taking full advantage of new technology they use to expand tonal variety without cluttering what is, by its nature, a simple backdrop. What Matt and Ginger do, instrumentally, is create a tableau, so their songs are structured more like beat-oriented music than rock and roll. You see? Totally true! Think about this next time you see them, and tell me if you hear it too.

***

So at this point I walked with Dan back to his apartment. I had a 10:00 class (Wake Tech, yo) the next morning, and it didn't make sense to drive back to Camp Werewolf (AKA Pittsboro). During our walk we stepped into a little cellar bar - just a little bar - and Raleigh is a city of bars. Every hole in the wall, every cellar, every corner, and we entered into a great, sprawling drunkenness that carried us across streets and from blabbed topic to mumbled compliment. A pair of old fashioned town drunks, resplendent in all this as if it's the same stream of misappropriated consciousness all over again that every drunk may revisit at leisure. An object at rest cannot be stopped, but careens until it hits an immovable barrier and collapses there (probably a couch) and sleeps (probably fitfully) until the sun comes up over the downtown skyline with a blaze of video game red that stabs the consciousness and it's never good when the first thought of the day is red sky at morning/sailors take warning.

***

But I managed to get back to sleep and was feeling mostly okay when I woke up for real. I got to my truck and drove it through layers of decaffeinated haze to Wake Tech, scrounged a buck from my change tray and bought a cup of coffee and I'll be motherfuckered if that wasn't the most amazing cup of coffee ever.

Yeah. It was that kind of morning.

***
MARCH 26th/SADLACK'S/7-10pm
***

SCIENTIFIC SUPERSTAR

This is such a cool little band, such a bizarre mismatch, and that is why they work. They take advantage, for one, of tones I don't hear much of in local music. Paul's drums live in a hybrid space, with electronica thump and digital sputter contributing as much to the rhythm as his cocktail kit. Well, I should explain. It's not your typical cocktail kit - it's the kind you'd buy in a Lowe's garden center run by Tito Puente, Mad Max, and Tom Waits' id (just his id). Thomas rides wild and rollicking basslines, feet planted and fuzz maxxed: like Matt Cash if he got a blood transfusion from a hummingbird or some kind of desert hare. And Junko, bringing the bilingual frontwoman angle to the band. These guys deserve some kind of absurd pyrotechnics display or at least a hundred foot tall screen showing 40 minutes of 1980s action figure commercials. You hear me? I want this band playing in front of forgotten cartoons that only survived for five episodes. I want these guys starring in the movie adaptation of "Count Duckula." You know what else? I want a Les Paul that shoots fucking killer bees.

PONCHOS FROM PERU

Will the smartest band in the room please stand up? Seriously, these guys can (and do) write instrumentals about complex and serious topics. Adam Smith's a very politically aware person - but his message is about how politics in America make outsiders of all of us (Adam - let me know if I missed the point). The songs live at the intersection of endearing and badass, and I can't keep myself from comparing them to Broken Social Scene. They don't even sound like them, not directly, but they have that same feel: that they're a band without boundaries, without borders, and they could just as easily shift and change over the years to include an entire host of players without becoming a different band. More of a group identity than a thing with membership, with "ins" and "outs" (Adam - am I just making this shit up? Don't let me misrepresent your fantastic band).

It's so fundamental, what they do. It's pure elements: un-effected guitar lines rely on killer technique to sound good, Will's an illogically talented drummer, and Matt's sense of time is good - quite good - enough to make his acoustic lines as much about percussion as tone.

JEWS AND CATHOLICS kicked ass, and I hear their set went beautifully, but I had to roll to Slim's so I didn't get to hear any of it.

***
MARCH 26th/SLIM'S/10pm
***

I'm not entirely sure why I'm listening to Black Sabbath right now. I should probably be ashamed of myself.

JASON KUTCHMA

Jason Kutchma plays as if his life depends on it, and when he takes the stage on his own (this was my first time seeing him solo), he is instantly a ragged prophet who sleeps on bedrock and knows the infinite pain of work that doesn't pay off, of ground that won't turn seeds to sprouts. It's the tradition of gravel and simple honesty we know from the obvious sources: Cash, early (and therefore good) Springsteen. There's a little bit of Pete Seeger in there too, but it's less preachy by far. Jason takes Seeger's awareness of the world as a unit, though, and applies it to the don't-fuck-with-my-livelihood conceits of the legends mentioned above.

So when he stomped his feet and played, he gave as much energy as when he plays with Red Collar. Something's different with an acoustic set, though. He commanded the entire room's attention with blasts of emotion and imagery. This was the final thoughts of a collapsing house, that - even as it sinks with a crumble of rafters - tries with all futility to tell of the many people who lived and slept there. There were struggles, there were good days, but ultimately there is a sense of abject loss that their souls will not be communicated - even if every fact of their lives is - that's central to Jason's solo show. There's a sweetness based in sadness, something never tempered - always sharpened - with time. Did I get too metaphysical? I hope not. I meant to say I liked his set a lot, it was a high point of Let Feedback Ring, and I was especially jazzed that he covered my favorite song from Nebraska.

FINN RIGGINS

Triumphant shit, to finally get to hear the Riggins after a year and a half without... a lot of what they did came from the new record (Vs. Wilderness), which is a fine document. It's like rock music as written by the lost boys - Neverland, not the Kiefer Sutherland vampires - and the album is perfectly named. Wilderness, yes, there's wilderness aplenty - and the Riggins are running in it like kids, playing war with real hatchets.

So their set was kickass,

+++

Holy shit, it's May.

It's been two months since Let Feedback Ring. And why can't I finish this? It's not that it's too long to manage - I've written long shit before. In fact, I haven't even gotten to some of the fun stuff yet. But do I even care about keeping a blog any more? No one reads this thing. I'll finish it, since I started it, but it may take me another two months.

Anyway. I can get through this.

Here goes...

+++

SOLAR POWERED SUN DESTROYER

SPSD followed the Riggins with their emotional prog. John, who sings their lead, seemed a tad frustrated but it made for a good stage presence. Their sound is super tight, and the way they hit transitions reminded me of Caspian... that enormous bla-DOW of a bomb drop when the full band locked in a sudden dynamic shift. The crowd had been ebbing and flowing all night, but it was growing steadily at this point.

GRAY YOUNG

And there was a crowd of decent size when Gray Young got started. Cats from WKNC, cats I know, cats I don't. Beer did flow and people crowded up front, digging the music. Gray Young rocked it, too. I'd hit the point of exhaustion and was just letting the music wash over me. Bart spoke to me and said "great, the skinheads are here." I looked past him and three or four guys (hey - it's been two months! Gimme a break!) and three girls stood. The girls were dressed like it was World War II and the guys wore suspenders and big boots and had their heads shaved. Bart feared they would make trouble. They looked harmless to me - too stuck in their own selfset roles to be any danger. I laughed. "Since when does Raleigh have skinheads?" I asked. "They'll be gone by summer," Bart said. "They won't be able to take the weather." I laughed. "No, they don't look like they'll thrive." We continued with an extended metaphor, in which we compared them to plants unsuited for the local climate. I ran into the big one a few minutes later in the bathroom, while I was waiting to piss. He walked in, rolling his shoulders back like a pugilist circa 1910, and I said. "How's it going?"
"Oh, man," he said in a loud rasp, forcing a huge cough. "I'm sick as a dog. I've been going from bar to bar, coughing on doorknobs."
"Hm." I said. "At least you're sharing." and I took my turn at the urinal.

About halfway through the set they found their courage (the power was in you all along!) and started yelling shit between songs. Throwing their beer in the air and yelling "ROCK AND FUCKING ROLL!" or whatever and people turned their heads and sneered. You're just fueling them, I thought, not turning my head. If you don't look at them, they'll go away. Fuckin' basic. But people kept giving them dirty looks, so they kept yelling and got more and more rambunctious, and the situation created itself.

Then Gray Young were done, and they had done well, and I was soon pacing. I pace when I'm nervous, I pace when I'm happy, I practically pace in my sleep. And I pace fast, I jet back and forth like an R2 on two conflicting missions. The music over, the skinheads were the loudest thing in the bar. I paused at the Finn Riggins merch table for a second to try and stop myself from pacing. "I want to ask them about their whole 'don't tread on me' thing," said Lisa. "Yeah, but then you'd have to talk to them," I said. She shrugged. She didn't mind. Their language was so peppered with obscenities at this point that their sentences made no sense, every other word was "fuck" or "fucking" or "fucker." And this is fine, so long as you can keep your verbs and nouns straight and unconfused. So when I was walking between them, talking to Bart on my phone, one of the Solar Powered guys was coming the other way, pushing an amp on casters, and the big skinhead started waving his arms and yelling at me, top volume, as I walked through. He meant to say "this guy's trying to get through," but what he said came across more as "get out of the fucking way. This fucking man is fucking trying to fucking get fucking through with his fucking shit." But there was no threat of violence, it was all bluff and all character acting. So I walked on without blinking. I knew danger when I saw it, and these guys were kittens with tiger masks tied on. Eventually they closed the bar and the skinheads shouted to each other about how they had to leave - because they had to have every conversation at full volume. They sounded like foot soldiers in some fictional people's revolution.No contractions, they called each other "brother" several times in each sentence. So they left to have their vague, readymade revolution somewhere else. Eventually I left too and rolled home to sleep... if I thought I had earned it, I knew nothing yet.

I don't remember any more what I did during the morning of the 27th, but I remember that it was a good day. I think I worked on the garden here at CampWerewolf, but I can no longer be sure. I'd had my fill of omens and madness, and there was none. Just one more day... just ten more bands. Just ten? You're telling me I have ten bands left to write about?

May as well get to it. The first one's easy - the first one's me.

***
MARCH 27th/SADLACK'S/4-10pm
***

WHERE THE BUFFALO ROAMED

I showed up at 4:00 - which was supposed to be our start time - and set up immediately. We got to playing and there was a surprisingly healthy crowd. They all stood back, we're loud as hell, but they appeared to dig. Andy and Niq's friend, who came out, thought I sang like the dude from Afghan Whigs. Shit yeah to that... so we played tight and we played well, no complaints on this show. Not in the slightest. So I have to move on... at this point I was keeping count... 15 bands down, 9 bands to go.

A dude on a skateboard rolled up. He didn't know music was happening, but he'd heard it from the street. I told him Oak City Six were playing later and he got excited. "Oak City Six are playing here?" He stayed for the whole show.

BLAG'ARD

Joe was in a mood. Sadlack's was, as always, packed with senseless drunkenness from early in the afternoon and he was heckling the inebriated. Joe's not a drinker, hasn't been since he was young(er) and wild(er), and he's largely against it. He and I had a conversation one evening, after they'd played a bust of a show at the Dive Bar. I'd rode with them and drank too many tall PBRs, so that after the show I was babbling in circles. I got an inside glimpse at his opinion of drunkenness that night. He sees it as one of the biggest wastes of our time, and he sees it as something people do instead of getting to know each other... as a creator of false friendships. Probably true, he's a smart guy. But he drives like a maniac, his white Ford minivan careens across all available lanes like a comet with rabies. "Is that what you guys do?" he was asking the Sadlack's crowd. "Just stay here and drink all day? I wouldn't spend $5 on you." I laughed, everyone needs their hackles raised a little bit and Joe plays especially well when his are up. They blasted through a righteous set as Dancing Tony did splits and somersaults until his shirt was soaked in sweat.

THE LAST TALLBOY

And now it was Bart's turn. He'd earned this a dozen times over, for working so hard on the festival. Harder than me, by far. He's the one with the connections, he's the one who's done his homework and has a little bit of an understanding of music economics.Me? My approach is a bit more juvenile, I tend to put shows together solely based on what I want to hear - not on what people already know or dig. Our festival ended up the middle ground between those two things - and it worked. Bill played his strange old Hagstrom, a 1960s guitar with a dozen switches and a fantastic sound.

SAINT SOLITUDE

I had seen Dup's latest project - the full band incarnation of Saint Solitude - once before, at some down and out lawyer bar in the basement this tex-mex chain out at Duke. That show had been weird. We'd had to pay to park because of some event that had nothing to do with us. Even the bands had to pay to park. But I had liked them there and I was ready to see what they were like at a more rock-friendly venue. They filled in the songs in a new way, replacing Dup's expert loop station dance with intellectual pop dynamics. But the songs weren't brighter. If anything, the opposite. C. Scott and Ed lend a hard edge to Dup's music that doesn't even exist on the record, and it's good for Dup to not have to take to the road alone. Hell, he's weird enough as it is. They did have the singular distinction of being the only band to hurt my ears. I was sitting directly in the line of fire from Dup's amp when it came time for a feedback squeal and I put my hands to the side of my head. And I stood and listened to both Goodbye, Titan and Caltrop without hearing protection. Good work, guys. You've earned your medal. Without being metal. Weird.

THE CHARMING YOUNGSTERS

It's always a treat to hear these guys. As in, I'm pretty sure it is. My mind was beginning to go at this point, but I knew I was having fun. The Charming Youngsters are growing in a natural way, it's so intuitive to hear the changes in the sound and the amount of fun these cats have while playing is straight infectious. They, as well as Blag'ard, were pulling double duty: they'd also played the Spazz Fest. For once I had more bands than Jeff Blinder...

Bart had to roll to the Berkeley Cafe, to set up that show, about the time tCY started.

OAK CITY SIX

"...impressed the shit out of me" is the rest of that sentence. Here we had something fresh. These guys are a punk band with groove and technicality. More MC5 and Stooges than Rancid and Ramones... fuck 'em. This had all kinds of funk and swing and this raving lunatic vocalist who reminded me of some kind of rebellious pharaoh, escaped from his own mummification and swooping down the steps of the pyramid to tell the People that the monkey-headed gods of the past were dead and it was time to pave the streets with gold. And it was nothing like that at all. The place got really crowded really fast and there was moshing and the dude who looks like Iggy Pop, but always wears a purple trench coat, appeared to be digging it. Then, 25 minutes later, it was all over and I hung out and talked to people for a little while, but I was in no state for conversation. My mind had long ago turned to butter, melted, and run down the back of my neck to cake on my shirt and attract bees.

***
MARCH 27th/BERKELEY CAFE/10pm
***

This was the biggest baffler... we put who we thought were our two biggest drawing acts on the same bill and no one came out. Seriously. Our triumphal closing show was dead.

TEMPERANCE LEAGUE

My synapses may as well have been firing in reverse by the time I tied up all our loose ends at Sadlack's and got to the Berk. Temperance League were nearly done with their set, but they sounded righteous. It was driving, gritty rock and roll and they were tight. The Berk's stage is a strange, multi-tiered thing, and the members of the band were standing on these platforms like bosses in a video game. It was a cool vibe, though, and added a third dimension to the show.

THE HUGUENOTS

These Carrboro cats impressed me a lot more this time around than their show with Saint Solitude at Armadillo Grill in Durham - the aforementioned lawyer bar. Bless the organizers of that strange little show - they wanted to bring good music to Duke. And they succeeded, but the corner of Duke they brought the music to wasn't having it. If the people who organize the shows at Armadillo Grill are reading this: please, keep doing what you're doing. Just get an in-road at a proper venue. You have amazing taste!
Anyway.
What worked so well for the Huguenots was, like Temperance League, their drive. They put a little gas behind the songs, so to speak, and things began to crackle. The music's sweet, bubbly pop rock with harmonies all day long. Yet, like early early early early Beatles, there was an edge - born of passion and self-confidence - that put a little heat in their set. And what is rock and roll if not the ultimate expression of self-confidence? These guys get it: "straightlaced dudes have as much fun as badasses" is the image. "Let's freakin' dance and have a good time while we do" is the message.

STATIC MINDS

A continuation of a theme, here... drive, grit, rock and roll. As their myspace says: "Don't tell us to turn down." Goddamn right, that's the central tenet of Let Feedback Ring. That there is no such thing as too loud. If my mind was damaged by a long day of rock and roll, beer, and sammiches, they smashed it flat. And they played a respectably wide open show for so empty a venue. I know Wilco played DPAC the same night, but that can't possibly have been the only reason our show was so dead. We'd had such great luck - 5 of our 6 bills had been beautifully attended. So we ran right into a total baffler when so few people walked into the Berk for our capstone show. But there was nothing we could do about it at this point.

I spent most of this show working the door, watching the streets of Raleigh and zoning in and out of the real world. I talked to Adam of Caltrop for a while, which was good. We lived really close to each other when I was in Carrboro and we hung out on occasion. One of my first nights in the Triangle, in fact, I spent getting perfectly torpedoed with him and Hannah, his girlfriend before they went wobbling off on their bikes. He's a really nice guy, so it was good to catch up. He was gracious about my mental state... but, hey... he plays in a rock band. I know he's been beyond the point of exhaustion before, to that strange twilight awareness I inhabited. Things could jump in and out of the room at any moment, like I had roving blind spots that covered tables, televisions, people.

Then Static Minds were done. Their guitar heroics made me happy, that they respected the basics of rock and roll. I'd told Bart I would watch the door, but that I absolutely had to see Caltrop play. So I went into the main room and somehow got in everyone's way while they were setting up. Bill McKelvey was there and he stood with me as we watched the final band of the final show of the final day and I was so exhausted I could barely speak.

CALTROP

Sweet Jesus, this was it. This was the finest set I had ever encountered. Big, loud, dirty bottom of the river rock powered by the souls of a thousand sacred hobos. For their 40 minutes, I didn't so much as wake back up as I shifted into a semi-lucid state. I didn't think at all, I let them control my synapses.

They played their new record in some form. I don't know the songs yet, but I love them. Murat kicked it off with a melodic tenor holler, an echo of Sam's "I know you wanna" that opens World Class (the last record). What else can I say? Lousy crowd aside, Caltrop was really good and if I don't post this fucking thing now I never will. I mean, it's June for Buddha's sake. I started this in April.

The one thing I did want to be sure to mention is the next day - the day after Let Feedback Ring - which was a fantastic day. I got enough sleep and had a great practice with Andy and Niq and didn't shower all day (for some reason this is an important distinction). We worked on a new song called "Newcomers to the West," and it's in a good direction.

Anyway, enough of this. Bart and I threw a festival and it went well.

We barely got out alive... but we barely got in alive... malcontent parade in the valley of the drones...

2010-03-06T21:17:00.273-05:00

Where the Buffalo Roamed - John Douglas Company - Another Day Falls - March 6th @ the Boiler Room (Asheville)

*disclaimer: the following post has very little to do with the show in question, or with anything all. In fact, I have no fucking idea why I even published it. Mostly, I put it out there because I put effort into it - even if it did turn into a jumbled fucking mess. You don't have to finish it just because it's on your plate.

Where do I start?

Asheville.

I have a love/hate relationship with you, Asheville.

I can't trust you, Asheville.

But a lot of my favorite people live there. There's some good scenery, but really - it's my people.

It's not even all the people, not remotely, but my people. And they know who they are.

I can no longer believe I lived in this bizarre little town for six years. It's progressive, sure, but so are lots of places - and those places aren't so hopelessly isolated.

Where do we start?

I guess we start ten years ago, when I moved to Asheville. Straight out of high school, a brilliantly oblivious freak of nurture. Straight to college for some reason. I blew it, sure. I had a blast, but I blew it. Failed out in three years (technically I dropped out, but it was one of those "you can't fire me! I quit!" kind of arrangements). It was the perfect town for me then, filled to the brim with illusion.

Then I was in the world. Working for a living, and that was my illusion. For once illusion and reality matched, but I was still telling myself stories in my off time. How I made my own rules, how I didn't need college... I would make it my own way. I had vague and fantastic ideas about being a famous musician, et cetera, but everyday life was very blue collar, hand to mouth, a beer and telecasters existence.

Really, my moult only happened at the very end of my time in Asheville. My self-actualization, when I learned to stop talking about music and just be music, hit barely a year before my move. Maybe less. Yes, it was less than a year before my move. Suddenly it all clicked, all the guitar with my friends and weird recording experiments with Andy and booze-choked nights letting Epiphones feed back in the little room in the decaying singlewide up on the hill in Candler, all the grubbing around the periphery of the rock world, reaching for something I didn't really understand, it all clicked.

But it was only born in Asheville. It didn't grow there. It grew in Greenville's hard ground. And then, when it was tough and confident, it was uprooted and put in a thriving garden. Now I'm a small player in an important scene, and I'm not moving up. I'm moving laterally, I'm moving on the fringes of success. Because I've already proven to myself, and anyone who's watching, that I'm not a conquering force. I spread myself so thin, it's a compulsion I don't completely understand.

So what does this have to do with my love/hate relationship with Asheville? I have no idea. I lost track of my thought.

***

At the end of a fine day in Asheville we landed deep in the Kingdom of the Animals. Darkness had fallen, and they were slowly waking. They would reach their bellowing greatness two hours after midnight, but those hours were far away.

John Douglas Company, self-proclaimed mountain grunge, were ready to play. I had a beer and my gear was inside. It wasn't a bad turnout for the Boiler Room and the ceiling was thump, thump, thumping with the beats from whatever booty club is directly upstairs. The Grove House, 11 Grove Street, is a modern house of institutionalized decadence - the economics of waste and oblivion, a place where, every night, the very bored and the very boring can go and write sprawling epics of intoxication about themselves. They get the kind of drunk high schoolers get, those legendary 17-year-old drunken nights that go on and on and on. They get in incoherent screaming battles. They stumble off dramatically and sit on the ground to mope. They make friends and go groping and falling around with each other, only to pseudo-reconstruct the whole blurred affair the next day. And it's all a formula. And it's all a sham. And it's all a series of elaborate steps designed to keep its adherents from knowing exactly how uncreative and bored they really are. Because if they abandoned the club scene, if they abandoned the elaborate ceremony of modern binge drinking, and if they stepped foot into the sun once without blinking back headache, they would be left with less than nothing, but a negative quantity in which expectations and ambition would neatly fit.

Thus saith the crotchety sociopath. And he brought a telecaster and three amps. And two friends (they're brothers, y'know!). But that's our set, and we're not to that yet. Hell, all the stuff I was talking about is end of the night stuff. Why the fuck am I giving away the end of my story so soon?

I was going to tell you about John Douglas Company. Maybe first I'll tell you a little more about my weekend.

***

Maybe I won't.

***

John Douglas Company (anagrams to "Ungodly Japan Smooch") bill themselves as mountain grunge. I heard this and immediately though "sweet shit, DrugMoney!"

Oh, sweet DrugMoney. Before they recorded their album, natch. That was some mean and crunchy glory. Mothhhhhherfuccccccckers who can't sing playing guitars in fyzzcracklefuzzd made-up tunings in their goddamn flip-flops. Evil little sexdrugsandPBR anthems like you wouldn't believe. Back when Vincent's Ear was just a place - and most people wouldn't go there - not the legend it is today. Or is it forgotten today? Oh, that infamous tourist town goldfish memory. Mtn Cty Jnk indeed.

John Douglas Company were not mountain grunge. It's been done, and done well, eight years ago. But I liked them. They drifted easily into their set, noodling in a jammy vein. We didn't know they were playing until three minutes into this thing. Their guitarist, a mohawked cat in camo pants named Skeeter, wandered around a theme on his hollowbody. The first song came off underrealized - they got their stride later - but it reminded me, if nothing else, of a weird little Kentucky band Rachel's uncle Michael introduced me to several years ago called Ralph Jones Band. I doubt they're around any more, I think they broke up at least four years back, but it was the same kind of stutterstep approach to rock composition. Even their rockingest songs rammed into these jazzy flareups, which were cool because they made you stop and consider what you heard.

***

I'm at the top of my game, and I'm at the bottom rung of every ladder I'm on. School, my internship under Grayson Currin, trying to do our record justice by properly promoting it. I'm at the top of my game because these are important things to me, and I'm doing them as right as I can. I'm at the bottom rung of these ladders because, well, I've put myself in a place where I can't fake it. I either succeed or fail. I've always bluffed my way to the top, but there's no foundation when you do that. I've seen the fruits of that over and over again. I've always made errors of overconfidence, my whole life. Now that I've all but stopped making them, I'm a lot quieter. Listen more, blather less. Still, I probably talk too much.

***

After John Douglas Company we had Charlotte's Another Day Falls (anagrams to "Rally on, Fatheads!") and it really wouldn't be fair for me to write about them. I mean, we're coming from completely different places and our goals couldn't be more different. They'd be right at home on mainstream rock radio. We'd burn down the transmitter tower and not be sorry.

So it was muscle rock. So it sounded like Incubus. So there were Fred Durst screams. So when I met the vocalist he told me his stage name was "Ruckus" and that he wouldn't tell me his real name. Like a big fuckin' rock star.

Good for them, because they might be big fuckin' rock stars one day. They stand a much greater chance than us and, honestly, someone's going to need to sell their jams to NASCAR and National Guard TV spots, and it won't be us. Good news, Another Day Falls... there is a place for you in this big world! It's called Charlotte! You already live there! Awesome!

***

Somewhere in this huge country that is a paradise - and never let anyone tell you any differently - there is an abandoned farmhouse surrounded by nothing on all sides. Maybe it's on the plains of Kansas, maybe the woods have encroached, maybe it's as close as the next town... but it's calling to us with its ungrounded plugs and shattered windows. It wants us to do a show in its living room. It wants us to play among all the accumulated bird nests of the past five decades. We're all very steadily returning to the earth, by the day. It would be so fulfilling to play somewhere to reflect that. In fact, it always is. Maybe that's why I miss the Spazz and Greenville's showhouses so badly. There was enough organic decay around to really fuel a rock performance. Not only did we play like our lives depended on it, but we played as if we'd learned the awful truth that nothing we could ever do would be enough to stop the eventuality of total fucking oblivion. And I'm not okay with that. There's too much to see, humanity has created a fantastic web of invention and knowledge and to go away, to hit the Big Sleep, and to never be able to access that infinite tapestry of experience again? Decades away or tomorrow, it still isn't ok.

***

It's taken me almost two weeks to write this. It's almost time for Let Feedback Ring (3/25-27) and I'm just now getting around to finishing this writeup. So much detail to this weekend, it was such a good one, but I can't fucking focus. It's a blur or friends and beer in the sun and noun at night and guitars and drums and effects pedals and Bandmom and Smashing Guitars and Chad and Graham and Adam and dogs and Fuzz pedals and Phase 90s and breakfast places. But the narrative is lost. I know what happened, my friends know what happened, but I can't tie it together.

***

So we played and it was a fun show. I sang my voice out pretty fast, natch, happens all the time. Where the Buffalo Roamed, by the way, has precious few good anagrams. The best one I could find was "Heehaw muffle rodeo brat." Heh. "Fateful Hebrew ham rodeo" is actually a really good one too.

***

I don't know why I can't focus and I don't know why I can't just shut up and tell the story like it happened.

***

We played loud and tight - quite together. Near the end, these two drunks got a vicious little pit going but it was more like a consensual fight. They threw each other into the ground and into pretty much anything that stood still. They behaved like people who felt so repressed by the crushing hipness of the town that they had to go totally fucking animal. Real animal. Foul smells and loosely calculated violence. It was a celebration. Then, at the very close - end of "Southport" - I put my guitar down and the feedback rose to an elemental force. Dup closed on my pedalboard and started turning knobs and turning on pedals, then he was joined and at least three people were playing with the pedals on my board as the feedback crackled and burned and howled. Then, after maybe two minutes of absolute and beautiful cacophony, I turned off the power strip. All the lights on my board went dead, the sound receded until needed again, and we were done.

***

After we played we packed up and the drunks were pouring out of the rest of the Grove House. They were moping and yelling and walking in front of cars and this one girl was sitting on the ground outside of the Boiler Room, being all sad angry drunk whatever it is you dang kids do these days. Brandon walked up to her and asked her if she was ok, but he did it in the most caring and heroic voice I've ever heard. What a good dude, I'm glad he came out to the show. He came out early and stayed for the whole thing. Dup came out and Dave came out and Seth came - he brought several friends and he gave me a wicked DOD fuzz pedal!

***

The next day, Niq and I got breakfast with Dup at the Early Girl. It was good, clean fun. Everything was free range or hormone free or whatever food is supposed to be for you to eat it without being crushed to death by enlightened guilt. And everything looked perfectly civilized, everything looked well-ordered. The wheels moved, the town processed tourists as they entered its gates and proceeded to nice restaurants and our place was the sidelines. So we wouldn't be remembered. No, not here. Elsewhere, sure, but not here. And the sun was bright and the day was unnaturally warm and the food - the food was the stuff of legend, but we were only guests. It was only borrowed space.

***

The night before, upon leaving the Boiler Room, Niq and I stopped at the grungy little gas station on the corner of Hilliard and Asheland.

"I'm not going in alone." I said something like that. It might have been, "All right, come on... I'm not going in there alone." Who cares? Niq walked in with me and we bought some beer that we were too tired to drink from a man who had seen too much violence in his lifetime. I handed him my money and took the PBR under one arm - it wasn't even fucking cold - and got back in the truck. Then we drove south, back into the night that spawned us.

On kicking my own ass at Spy Hunter... on the rain and the places it fell... on mystery sweets... on coming unstuck in time... on parables...

2010-02-24T19:28:00.334-05:00

Where the Buffalo Roamed - the Last Tallboy - the Charming Youngsters - February 24th @ Local 506

My baby will be here soon. She's due on May 22nd. We put her room together today (today is the 27th) and, as I sat exhausted in my living room after a day of moving furniture, I had an important revelation.

I've successfully made it to responsible adulthood without giving up rock and roll. In fact, I'm more into it now, get more out of it now, and am more comfortable with it than when I was a kid.

***

I was walking across the parking lot to the Indy's office in Durham today, with a notebook and a bottle of water in my left hand. Today is March 4th, 2010. I have an orange and I'm tossing it in the air and catching it again with my right hand. The orange responds to gravity the same as I respond to the need for sleep, and I'm running low. The orange moves against gravity as I move against sleep.

***

We're just goldfish if we don't record what we do, how we feel, what works and doesn't work for us in our great eyeblink of a civilization.

***

The show in question was over a week ago (I'm getting to it! Don't get your pantaloons in a twist!) and I've been running in 5th gear the whole time. Let Feedback Ring is at the end of the month and part of me fears the amount of time and effort that's going to go into making that beautiful monster fly.

***

So let's go back eight days to February, to the 24th, just a few days after the amazing Juggling Gypsy show. Andy and Niq had been in the Triangle for a while, eating pho and menacing travelers. I had been to school and home and, at the crux of my evening, had made my way to the 506.

I drove the familiar drive... out from Camp Werewolf and a brief interlude on 64, then 15 minutes or so on 15-501. I think I was listening to Spiritualized, but I can't ever be sure. I let too much time pass between this show and my writeup and all my facts and memories have gone ablur in the archaic television of my mind... stuck between channels with the jumping faces of newscasters and weathergirls and dealership ads. Save me. Upgrade my synapses. Install more memory. There's a TigerDirect store in Raleigh, there's one in the Durm. It's going to take half of their stock to get me up to speed again. Help.

***

Seriously. If your computer's going to have to handle more info what do you do? You upgrade it! So what if I put all this stuff on my plate, so what if I knew/know what I'm doing? UPGRADE MY BRAIN. SHIT.

***

I've been watching a lot of Battlestar Galactica lately. The new one, with Edward James Olmos. It's good shit. I want to turn off my brain and watch an episode right now. The DVD's in the player, but if I play it I'm not going to get any writing done.

***

Battlestar Galactica, as a television show, belongs in quotes. These are quotes: ""

***

The Charming Youngsters beat us to the 506, but I met them at the bar where we had beer and caught up a little. Andy and Niq and Jay and Amanda were setting up the merch (we sold a few CDs!) and playing video games. Glenn and Matt were working and Glenn had several boxes of sweets - cookies, brownies, etc. We cheerfully accepted the mystery chocolate and ate it while drinking beer.

***

No wonder my digestive tract hates me.

***

So the Charming Youngsters recorded a record up in Asheville recently, during one of many February snowstorms. Their set was mostly new, no "Bone Pickin'..." it's a great song, and I almost called out to hear it, but the set they chose to give us was gold. It was what we needed to hear. These fuckers are evolving - like a band's supposed to. They're still a ton of fun, but they've lost that goofy streak endemic to Nolan's solo days or the Nolan & Eric duo action.

***

Will the real Maxwell B. Houseworth please stand up?

***

I've stopped getting tired. Soon no more sleep. And no more curveballs. Everything will be under my control. I can feel myself evolving into a creature of constant consciousness. There will be different layers of awareness, sure, but they'll be less like rest and more like the spaces between the gears when the clutch hits the floorboards and the flywheels go whirr in the accel or deceleration. Change my parts out when I get old and clunky.

***

Not a bad number of people were out for a rainy Wednesday and they dug, dug, dug what was happening. We did't pack the room by any stretch of the imagination, but the people who were out appreciated what was happening.

Dig: the Charming Youngsters have evolved into a more fun version of Hammer no More the Fingers. I KNOW. HNMTF IS ALREADY A TON OF FUN! But the Charming Youngsters are more fun. They're still snappy, energetic pop... but the subject matter's gone more mature. They've perfected the use of three part doo wop-descended harmonized "ba ba ba baaaas" and "do do do dooooos" and other incarnations of la-la and other vowel melds... but they give them teeth, see. Instead of simply delivering the sound, they feel the sound. Their fanfuckingtastic closer, a tribute to the Spazzatorium (ne4a 4get), had this part, this fucking awesome part, where they introduced a little doo wop part (like above) but, once it was in the song, they pissed it off. They stepped on its toes or put a brick through its windshield or blasted its mailbox with a bat or something, because when it came time for it to express itself in the song it was mean, it was somewhere between an angry, wounded call and a warning. "Ba ba ba baaaaa" very suddenly had much more pushing it from throats, a very real feeling driving the little sounds that only meant what they meant because the band was a solid unit, and everyone there remembered the magic that was the Spazz and what, under the wrong supervision, would have been a simple and harmless doo wop harmony became a statement of unity, a declaration of memory, a gigantic "fuck you/don't tread on me" and when that part was over the song refused to end and suddenly evolved into a celebratory rockout that spoke volumes. It said "rock and roll can live anywhere. Destroy its home and it'll scoot out from underfoot even as you stomp." It said "Those of us who lived in Greenville during those days came out of our experiences profoundly changed and there is nothing the most twisted police force, or the most violent and demented small town in North Carolina, or the forces of mediocrity can take away from us." It said what rock and roll should always say - what any art should say. "I'm alive and I feel like this."

***

So it kind of felt like a reunion of sorts. Greenville kind of was a musical summer camp, there were all these fantastic artists and the venues were low-pressure. We played these crazy bills, bills no venue would put together in any other town because of the sheer eccentricism and illogical variety of the acts, and we played them all the time. It wasn't weird for me to play two shows a week. It wasn't weird for me to figure out my act the day of a show. I was just as likely to bring my acoustic archtop and play unamplified weepers as I was to dress up like a conquering extrasolar warlord, run a mic through my effects pedals, and preach bullshit from the balcony of the Spazz over improv noise. And Nolan lived in the same zone, a serious musician trying on every single hat on the rack because this scene encouraged it. I lost all fear of the stage, of experimentation, in that strange little town.

So it really was appropriate for Where the Buffalo Roamed - no longer my wandering solo identity but a full-on rock band - to share the stage with the Charming Youngsters, who'd evolved in almost direct parallel.

Amen.

***

I do wish the Last Tallboy would record.

It's almost part of the mystique that they don't have anything recorded. In these days of infinite information, when there's no longer exactly such a thing as not having a record, it is kind of cool to have a band out there you can only hear live. Let me explain: it reminds me of the 90s. If there was a record I really, really wanted it meant something different. I couldn't hop on the computer and listen to the songs on youtube or their myspace or reverbnation or whatever. If they came on the radio, I had to catch them there. If they didn't I had to... well, I had to buy the record... and how sweet it was, finally buying a record I needed. What an amazing payoff, getting to know the songs. I would listen to a new record three times, back to back. When I was in high school, I had to pick and choose the records I bought. You know the drill, limited financial resources coupled with the fact that I lived in isolated Pamlico County... shit, how often did I make it to a record store and how often was that record store total bullshit? I mean, New Bern had a branch of CD Alley for about a year and a half or two years and I was in there every chance I got. I would ride with my mom to work where she taught at Craven Community College and I would walk down to the record store and spend goddamn H O U R S there. I must have been 16. I was this motherfucking flannel-choked longhair in the mosquito swelter of Eastern NC, walking obscene distances to read the backs of CDs and rifle through the posters and ogle the rock band shirts. And then, when I'd put aside $12 or $15 (or $10 if I wanted a tape - since this was back when tapes were still mass-manufactured, long before the "tape label" renaissance that makes me fucking chuckle), the payoff when I actually got to buy a record was so intense - so sweet - and nothing feels like that any more because we're in the future, the information glut of the future, and we can instantly check out or download any artist we want. It's cheating, in a way. Some of the magic is gone to mundanity. And what I mean is that the Last Tallboy bring a little bit of that magic back.

They're not an anachronism, because they are very much of the modern day, but they're definitely coelocanths. Their music, stylistically, survived the 70s without dying of nihilistic frustration, and has evolved without forgetting its roots. Think sharks, alligators, ferns... think life of a form that worked in the past, so continues to work. These cats could have opened for - or had open for them - the MC5.

Maybe that is the evolution, though. There's none of the universal love popular among 70s protopunkers. These guys' starting ground is a fleeting moment, maybe in 1976, when protopunk was existing side-by-side with the sneering asshole movement that evolved into punk and DC hardcore and all the hooey that led to. Protopunk wasn't feeling the thrashing teenager thing, so it evolved into powerpop as we know it now... Big Star, natch. The Last Tallboy are into the technicality of protopunk (listen to that fucking guitar solo in "Search and Destroy" and - yes, you... look me in the eye when you say it - tell me - isn't that the hottest shit ever? Someone knew how to play, rest his soul...) and the songwriting of powerpop, but not its content.

Bill's scorching solos fit neatly into his progressions, never drawing undue attention but his playing is undeniably hot shit. So, yes, think protopunk. Much like early jazz (and I mean WAY early, dixieland early), solos are quick little deviations within a few bars. The soloist is good, but there's no ego. In fact, this same approach holds for the rest of the band. Joey, who's one of the slickest bass players in the Triangle, does what he does without excess or flair. Terry's drumming solidifies and defines what they're doing - his percussive lines are simultaneously catchy and urgent and the man doesn't miss a beat. Bart hollers, a philosopher at closing time, with surprising tonality. I mean, shit, the guy can sing and he maintains an emotional transparency the whole time that fucking works. These songs are inverse bar anthems, beer-fueled rock that rails against a dark bottom of a bottle.

***

The golden moment in their set was the song (I don't know its name) that ends with everyone on aux percussion. Kickass.

***

We closed the night and, though there weren't many people out, the size of the crowd hadn't really changed over the course of the night. We'd put together an 8 song set, something short and sweet and rollicking that respected the fact that we were playing a weeknight. When we got to the end of our set people were a little surprised... it was pretty short. Andy said "If just one person wants to hear another song, we'll play it." So we tacked on "North Dakota" at the end of our set and it was the right way to end our night - with my voice shot and class the next day getting closer and closer - and it was a righteous end to a righteous show that started like this...

***

We got started with three songs in a row - "Wolf Wings" begat "Dirty Bomb Stratocaster" begat "Missouri" - without a break, just feedback between, and it worked beautifully. In fact, we'll probably start today's show the same way.

Right. I almost forgot to tell you. Time passed again, it's March 6th and I'm in Asheville. We're playing the Boiler Room in, Jesus, 3 1/2 hours?

Anyway. I felt great about our show. We communicated nicely and the fact that we'd been preceded by two fantastic bands at the top of their game helped our live energy I'm sure. We played "Golgotha '98" pretty fast, but I kept up... and I didn't mind. We got to the end of our 8 songs on the set proper with "Permafrost," but directly before it was a really satisfying take on "Southport." I'd done a little reconnaissance before our show, I'd checked the height of the stage and I'd checked to see if the rail at the edge would hold my wait but none of that mattered when I was standing on Andy's bass drum. I jumped to the ground, guitar in hand and chords at work, ran to the edge of the stage and took a flying leap and when I was in the 2nd grade I encountered death - the death of a classmate. A young girl my age died in a freak accident on the way to a parade. She didn't make it out of the 80s. Riding in a wagon behind her parents' 4-wheeler or truck or something - this was 20 years ago - her wagon flipped and her tiny neck snapped and that was it. Lights out. I'd encountered death in pets, in old people, but to have someone my same age - this cute little girl that I actually had a fledgling elementary school crush on - suddenly put out, suddenly gone, a candle with a whisp of smoke briefly hanging around and then even that is gone. Totally messed up my whole world... I wanted to keep the article from the paper because I didn't have a picture of her and now she'd hit the Big Gone. I told my mom, whose response was less than sympathetic. Instead of helping me deal with this bizarre cluster of emotions invading my 8-year-old brain she told me I was being weird and forbade me from keeping the news clipping but all I wanted was to keep Crystal Sanders' picture - a living, breathing, smiling picture - I have two memories. I was in a classroom in the 2nd grade and she smiled at me - my little heart melted. A few months later she was dead on a rural road.

***

All parables are not created equal. Thanks for reading.

Power Rangers in the off season... I never thought I'd be smuggling myself... the beach the people walk upon... hookahs, hippies, road bikes... the first parable...

2010-02-20T23:00:00.383-05:00

Where the Buffalo Roamed - Ponchos From Peru - Mountain Lion - February 20th @ the Juggling Gypsy (Wilmington)

4:00 pm - we're headed East on 40, we're close to I-95, and Niq realizes he should have grabbed a sleeping bag.

Not for the night, no... we're not crashing on any couches tonight. The sleeping bag in question is one of those Army surplus mummy bags, those deep green jesuses that stay comfortable down to 20 below. He needed it for the ride.

This is how he was riding.

I'm told it was balls cold back there... what with the wind and all, but were we going to show up to the show without a bassist?

Ridiculous. That would just be uncivilized. The trio set is sounding way too good. Besides, the Millennium Falcon is the only vehicle any of us have that can fit all the gear. Shit, I left one of my amps behind for this date (the Peavey Pacer) and it was still pretty packed.

So Andy and Niq had showed up and we'd packed and rolled, freebasing at an alarming rate towards Wilmington. "Freebasing" means moving really fast on a freeway, right? Thought so.

It was an easy drive for me, no traffic to speak of and we were in Wilmington at 6:30. We rolled through town to Wrightsville, tried to catch the sunset at the beach but just missed it by fifteen minutes. Also, we couldn't get to the beach because of some pretty dramatic dredging efforts. Beach replenishment I think? Andy and Niq were ahead of me, I'd gone back for the camera. I was headed in the direction of the dunes when I saw them coming back.

They had been turned back.

"I was walking up to the gate, I could almost see the ocean," Andy lamented. Turns out we're going to have to drive a mile or so down the road to get to a beach access. So we drove until we came to a beach house with the gate left open and we parked near it to commandeer access.

We practically hi-fived the "no trespassing" sign on the way in. At the back of the parking lot a path cut off to the right, across the false electric glow of the Blockade Runner's poolside boardwalk. So we walked among non-native palms, hoodies in three colors like Power Rangers down on their luck, with hoods pulled tight around cold ears, under the steady smoldering glare of the hotel bartender. He did not leave his post, he stood by the plate glass. It's his world, we just trespass in it. Servers adrift hither and yon. Why the fuck am I still here? This place is absolutely dead. They didn't care. But the bartender is family with the owners. Or maybe he's just miserable. Maybe it comes out of his pay if people cut across the sickening brightness of their empty dunefront. I'll show those motherfuckers to walk here. Even though no one else's feet would grace the space. It's the principle of the thing. They didn't PAY for the privilege to walk across this sandy acre. Andy mentioned that private beaches work like this: that the property line extends 50 feet out into the sea.

***

We made it to the beach without incident and encountered the dredge pipe. It said this to us:

Within was the gristly rumble of untold tons of sand and, as we climbed over the thing, we felt it shudder. Shai Hulud. The old man of the desert. Insert further Frank Herbert references...

So we walked up the beach.
"So, do you think you could walk all the way to Florida?" Niq asked. Maybe he said South Carolina or Georgia.
"Probably not," I said. I mentioned inlets, rivers.
"Oh, I know you'd have to cross a bridge or two," he said. "I just was thinking that would be cool as shit, sleeping on the beach every night."
"Waking up every morning with sharks in your pants," I said.
That was the approximate level of our conversation. I was doing my best to make a joke out of everything.

So eventually we got hungry and turned around. Andy and I found a public beach access right next to the Blockade Runner (how did we miss that?) and we were soon traveling at sublight speeds back into the port city. I got my dad on the phone, and he sent us down Airlie Road. The directions were good and within a few minutes we had arrived at the Juggling Gypsy.

It's a hookah joint - a place that still, somehow, skirts the smoking ban. It hasn't been long since smoking bars existed, but I've already gotten used to their absence. I dug the place, but I smelled like 8,000 cigarettes after the show.

The venue fed and beered us and soon we were very comfortable.

***

The show started a little after 9:00 with Mountain Lion, a bleary-eyed pack of roommates who needed to go ahead and play so they could get to the Soapbox and see a more important show. Their eyes reflected more than just beer and weed, there was a jittering hunger in several of their number that set them pinballing around the room when they weren't onstage.

They played for 25 or 30 minutes. It was funky instrumental party rock, it reminded Andy and me of Spy Satellite circa 2007... when the band had a revolving set of members and played guerrilla gypsy gigs around the AVL. I was outside with my dad, right by the door, and I could see and hear them just fine. They weren't as loud as they had promised to be, and somehow the cloud of people who had arrived appearing to be the band condensed into a more manageable number when it came time to play.

Then they were done and they packed up and left - taking their audience with them and very nearly taking Andy's hi-hats. They were a hurricane of intoxication, unaware of any other band on the bill, apologizing to us even as they packed up and left before we played. When they were gone it was as if their show had finished and our show could begin.

***

Behind the Juggling Gypsy is a really cool courtyard with this wild, haunted carnival-style stage. It looks like it could handle the very imagination of Tom Waits and I wanted to play our set out there.

***

We took a few minutes to set up and got started with "Golgotha '98." Andy wanted to start off strong, and I agreed with him. Our set went well overall - there were a few stumbles, sure - but it was still a good set. People kept their seats (except for this one drunk girl who occasionally came Motley Crüe dancing towards the stage and was constantly accusing people of "not having a good time") but they appeared to enjoy themselves.

High points in the set were "Permafrost" and the instrumentals - "Southport" and "Dirty Bomb Stratocaster." "Permafrost" we played thick and mean, and I'm starting to really understand a lot of the emotion that song. It's dense - really dense - and it's not always easy to convey what I'm trying to say with it. Hell, I don't always know what I'm trying to say. Here are the lyrics - what do you think I'm trying to say?

once there was a frozen waste
once there was a startled heart
the bears survive by going underground
hawks, like meteors, hit the ground

she didn't say why, she just took the axe
and gave it to him in a lethal way
six months of night, six months of day
the best of us will go insane

she cut her hair, she dyed it blonde
she left him in a hidden pond
and when the trees and boulders froze
she burned all of her summer clothes

I'll be your cold weather friend
fall through the ice and take my hand
a four-wheeler follows the demarcation
the line of instinct and fear
farther and farther into the wilds
every animal leaves some kind of track

Right. See what I mean? I'm fascinated with writing about the darkest of us all, yet when it comes to properly expressing that stuff I get kind of intimidated sometimes... and now that I feel like I'm actually inhabiting that song when I sing it, so to speak, well... I don't know and I don't know where I'm going with this. I guess this kind of self-analysis belongs elsewhere.

Don't worry, I'm not losing my mind. I just write like I am.

"Southport" was epic, motherfucking epic. I did a very silly thing - I brought my Japanese flag and at the point in the song where it slows down and goes into the epic riff I put it on as a cape. I know, I've done this before, but it's a totally silly gesture.

Niq and I worked off each other nicely, musically and performance-wise. There came a point where we were playing back to back, leaning against each other, attacking the unholy shit out of our poor instruments and it felt like rock and roll. Then there, at the end, I let myself collapse backwards through the kit and I'll be damned if I didn't get stuck. Niq had to pull me out.

***

I stepped up to the bar to get a drink and a guy beside me was puffing away on a hookah. Evidently he'd blown smoke in my face (I hadn't noticed - it was really hazy in there) so he apologized to me and I shrugged. No worries. He offered to share his hookah with me and I told him I didn't smoke. He told me he didn't either, and explained that hookahs were not bad for you and it was kind of like smoking candy. So I took a puff and then I coughed quite a bit. Somehow I doubt that hookahs are good for you. It's just like the cloves that were all the rage back in 2000, when I first went to college. They were what enlightened people smoked instead of cigarettes until they realized the fucking things had more fiberglass in them than a racing boat.

***

Ponchos' drummer Will was setting up his kit in the courtyard and we thought this grill was part of his kit, but it was just nearby. Note to self: set up a drumkit with a grill where the floor tom should be. Will's kit is this crazy transparent Ludwig (!!!) and apparently he and his dad collect old Ludwig kits. I told him about my late '70s Ludwig and we talked drums for a minute.

I am not a drummer. I just started percussing this year. Will, however, is a drummer. Read on...

***

The first time I played with Ponchos was in 2008... November 9th, to be exact. They've had some lineup changes since then and the sound has changed as well, to reflect the different members and their different writing styles. They've gone more instrumental than they were a year and a half ago, but then they had a period of readjustment. Somewhere in these months they lost two members and gained a drummer. They came back lean, optimistic, and fearless. Will, the new drummer, plays with a frenetic, hyperlogical virtuosity that lends this disarming little band a surprising urgency.

Matt, Will, and Adam ooze talent, but they're not on this planet to rub it in your face. They're on this planet to write intellectual exercises in melody and to fuck, ever so gently, with rock convention. That sounded dirty, but I'm keeping it.

Much like the righteous Blag'ard, I can't describe Ponchos From Peru. I have no idea what the hell they are, other than to say they're essential. I like the glockenspiel, I like the distorted acoustic/electric, I like the unbelievable drumming. I like the precisely picked chords. I like this band.

these fucking buffoons...

Afterwards I met members of Fractal Farm, very nice guys, and we talked about Spiritualized until it was time to go.

***

From here it gets pretty hazy. We had to drive back to Pittsboro... not for lack of places to stay (the porty city was kind to us, there were several good people out there who would have helped us out) but because Trooper Andy had to work the next day we made the interstate move under our weary wheels. I don't understand how he does it, how he operates on so little sleep. I can put off sleep indefinitely, sure, but things get bad when it hits the 24 hour mark or when I have to operate on minimal sleep. If I know sleep is coming, I can push on... one more mile... dear god, one more mile means one less mile to go...

So I was fine to drive us the 3-odd hours back to Chatham, but I was happy to have Niq up there to keep me company. Poor Andy took to the back for the ride home and he was cold as hell. Somehow we made it... I fought exhaustion by talking with Niq and I babbled half-cocked ideas, the kind of shit that crosses your mind when you're in that semilucid halfzone. I decided he needed to hear some of my soundscape recordings - an entire album's worth, in fact. I must have been pretty tired to suggest that.

I got to bed about 4:00 and was awake at 10:00, but Andy and Niq were long gone. Sleep and rock music rarely ride in the same taxi.

parable, 1986

Public places like public beaches but what the fuck is a private beach? This concept confused my shit when I was maybe 5, but I can still remember the first time I encountered a private beach. I was walking down the beach road - maybe Holden Beach? No, Holden Beach is all public - whatever it was, we were walking down the beach road and we came to this gatehouse with tall white metal gates and beyond it a street lined with white houses tat I now realize were probably condos. It's one of my earliest memories, but most of my earliest memories involve the beach. We lived less than five miles from the ocean until I was 7 and we were there all the time.
Mom and I had to turn around and I straight up KNEW that we were almost to the end of the island and I wanted to walk all the way, but Mom explained to me that this was a private beach, starting here where we stood, and it struck me as an enormous injustice that I couldn't walk farther. I was baffled. How can one own the beach? I still think this way, where sea meets sand should never be held like that-but it was this day, probably in 1986 or 1987, that I felt the first sour pangs, the cold knives on a warm day.

The City at Night - Tubanjo's "Thanks for Listening" EP

2010-02-17T23:38:00.001-05:00

Tubanjo are a duo from Cincinnati (a six thousand-year-old elvish city on the banks of the river Lllìanllleellaolloslooo) and their first offering hit my mailbox earlier this week.

It took me several listens to get what I was hearing. This is very specialized music. It tends towards quick middle tempos, yet without a percussionist. It's upbeat, yet calming. It's busy, yet level. I'm not a jazz writer! What do I do?

But it's not jazz. Like it's not rock. Like it's not lounge music, not even remotely. It's most akin to folk rock.

Think a folk rock band with melodic jazz guitar flavor and magnificently EQ-ed bass that waxes bluesy one minute, funky swing the next. The first thing I thought when I heard Tubanjo, several months ago when they came to my attention, was of the powerful Happy Sad - Tim Buckley's 1969 genre molt. They called that folk jazz too - when they knew what to call it. This comparison I drew from the confident balance of bass and thick-toned clean jazz guitar. This is more refined than Happy Sad, it's less of a depressed hippie playground. Though the comparison won't get you far, it's good to have a starting point. So there you have it. Let's move on to an analysis of Tubanjo as a unit.

That's the way these things usually go, according to the rules I have just now made up. Arms inside the vehicle, you must be this tall to ride.

Don't write tired, kids.

***

In Tubanjo, there is no third member, but there is a third element.

Space. And the space is as important as its absence. It may not make sense to talk about a note played as the absence of space, but with so much space on a Tubanjo song the conscious decision to play a note is also a decision to displace the silence already there. I'm happy to say, with few exceptions (and I'll cover those), they respect the silence that surrounds their notes. Make sense? The question that should surround all music is "why this note, why here?" With Tubanjo, often only two or three notes are being played simultaneously. We have a guitar run paralleling a bass run. It's hard to ignore the basic question that should infuse all music. Why these notes in this order at this speed? What makes these notes preferable to the silence in which they rest? This is good stuff, an intellectual exercise I'm going to have to apply to busier music.

I'll try to find a few different ways to say this. It's an odd concept but it's what makes this EP work.

***

What we have here is a landscape record. It works fine if you put it on while you're in the kitchen, sure, or driving on an interstate, but my prescription is to drive around the biggest city you can find - at night - with this in your car. You'll thank me. This album is best experienced in the cold weather, with the windows closed, cruising slowly to some urban destination along damp streets in your warmest coat. The space in the music implies the bite of a frigid day, a pervasive atmospheric chill, yet the busy optimism of the guitar melodies establishes an essential warmth that never fades. It's a subtle warmth, nothing earthshaking, but more a "gee golly" that comes from flashed smiles or the knowledge of a worthwhile destination, say a little hole in the wall along an otherwise nondescript street that contains your favorite place to eat. Yes, the record is about motion. You could hear the whole thing without taking your eyes from the road and get a complete musical experience.

Though the band is two - Mike Reedy on the low strings and Kentucky Graham on the middle strings (a tenor guitar) - the absence of a drummer is not the absence of rhythm. I'm tapping my foot right now. Go, listen to "Trailway and Destination." If the time change at 2:19 doesn't make your foot go a-tappin' and your noggin go a-noddin', you may have something seriously wrong with you.

The absence of a drummer distinguishes this project, gives it a dignity it would lack otherwise. The music is written along a narrow scope, but that is what defines this as urban music. Reedy and Graham fly close, avoiding anything beyond minimal chording, with the songs stripped down to fit in the smallest space possible. At any moment the song expects to have to duck into an alcove to avoid the rain, and it wants to make sure it will fit.

There's not a drummer alive - unless they've played with Spiritualized - who could play with enough cool ease to match the landscape Reedy and Graham have built. Considering Tubanjo's predilection for mid- and up-tempo songs, the addition of percussion would alter the feel of their songs entirely. With a driving beat, even on congas or played with brushes, it would stop being a cityscape and we would have, well, we would have American Garage. And that's been done. To an extent, this project is Metheny's streetwise 2nd cousin. To another extent, that's not even remotely accurate.

***

There's a high point in "Walts" - which sees Reedy on piano. As indicated by the title, it comes dipping and swaying in with all swells of ONE two three TWO two three, but there's where the predictability stops. Graham's guitar line starts in a weird place, tonal but not completely scale, and the moment he establishes his melody his guitar line splinters in several directions. At first it sounds like slapback, but it's more of a scattershot. It's like he recorded three separate melody tracks - each just a little bit different - and decided to keep them all. Each melodic riff starts in the same place before scattering outwards like a school of fish exploding away from a sand tiger shark. Not all phrases achieve closure and, like any music worth hearing, it may be a little disorienting the first few listens. Listen again. And again. You'll get it, that's what it's supposed to do.

***

So I've said what works, so what about the stuff that doesn't work? Every record has stuff that doesn't work - unless, of course, it's one of those rare perfect albums.

Like Bel Biv Devoe's Poison, natch.

What didn't work for me was the inclusion of "Beyond the Sea" (lyrics: Jack Lawrence, orig. music by Charles Trenet). It's a fine recording of a 1940s classic, but doesn't fit the feel of the record. Tubanjo's EP is a record written for close horizons and small spaces. There's very strong landscape imagery, and this landscape is defined by the buildings of a modern city. The pastoral, carefree feel of "Beyond the Sea" belongs on a totally different record. It's a clever recording - yes, Graham, I caught the seagull calls... nice use of fret noise! - but it pulls you abruptly out of the world Reedy and Graham so effectively established in earlier tracks. It pulls you out of the car, away from the wet streets and bleared lights, and sets you in a much nicer place.

But this isn't about places that are nice on their own. This record is about places that are warm despite their surroundings. And that is why it works.

***

I've known Mike for a few years - he's a friend and he's family. If you think my knowing him has influenced this review, please: get a copy of the record, give it a good dozen listens, and let me know if I missed anything.

Reactions upon finally watching "Where the Buffalo Roam" or: I hope I'm not too late to review a 30-year-old movie.

2010-02-06T00:00:00.004-05:00

You'd think that, being in a band called Where the Buffalo Roamed, I would have seen this movie before. Not so, and there's not even a relation between the two names. I get this question all the time, "is the band named after the Hunter S. Thompson book?"

No such book. It's a movie. And I saw it. You should stop reading here if you haven't seen it yet and don't want it spoiled.

*

*

*

*

You were warned.

I'm left with mixed emotions. While Bill Murray played a fucking fantastic Huntie, the story was slapdash, the action slapstick, and it followed a vague arc so far from HST's rhythm that I didn't recognize it. The film tried to jump all over the place, tried to pogo around like Thompson's attention, but essentially it just kept close to the nest. A lot of things could have happened, I kept waiting for this little movie to jump out of the high branches and risk falling in an attempt to fly.

The real failing is that it played out like a wet dream. I know Thompson was involved in the making of this film, and I think he may have been playing one of his jokes on us. The whole movie's a smartass piece of "well, here's how it would have happened if I had it to do again..." Thank Zoroaster no such concessions were made in the late '90s Fear and Loathing with Johnny Depp.

The real Hunter S. Thompson got to talk to Nixon, all right, but he talked football... which was the one common ground they shared. There was no baffling fire extinguisher fight. There was a more genuine interaction, in which Thompson graciously realized that even a devil like Nixon, his greatest nemesis, needed to be human sometimes. So they talked football. And it was fun. No surrender here. They both lived to fight another day, but reading about it you wonder if this was two adversaries finally meeting on the fields of battle, and, upon sizing each other up, realizing they were too perfectly matched to waste their time in combat.

Most importantly, Where the Buffalo Roam doesn't have the teeth of a true gonzo work. I thought the film was coming into its own in the speech scene, the one in the college auditorium, when Murray's HST says that Lazlo (AKA Dr. Gonzo AKA Oscar Z. Acosta) is dead. He gets a faraway tone, less like he's blathering to entertain and more like he's narrating the world he sees whether or not anyone's there to hear him.

The weight of this scene almost immediately evaporates with the ultimate pulled punch, as Lazlo/Acosta comes heroically striding - very much alive - in a white suit and white grin into the film's silly climax. Where in Thompson's actual writing did his subjects ever receive their come-uppance at his own hand?

Listen:

The real Thompson would go to the graveyard with you, hold you by the hand, and look down into the yawning hole in the ground with you. In his own writings, he very honestly described his search for Acosta after the Brown Buffalo's disappearance, very plainly repeating what he'd heard - that Acosta had been shot and his body had been thrown in the sea during a drug deal gone bad. And that was it.

The film gets it all backwards, in everything from Thompson and Acosta's dynamic to the bastardization of Acosta's involvement with the Chicano movement... making him out instead to be the defender of a loose commune of hippies or something and then the founder of a loosely defined guerrilla republic or whatever that was.

There at the close of the film, with Lazlo/Acosta walking across the airport tarmac in a white suit, I realized this for what it was... I could almost hear Thompson, King Gonzo himself, chuckling as a very dark time turned to optimistic slapstick on the silver screen. All teeth were pulled in that moment and I realize something just now. This has the emotional depth of Cheech and fucking Chong! Lazlo is indestructible, oh that Lazlo, when will he learn? Silly, Lazlo.

The real Acosta wouldn't have made it within a half mile of an American president, or even candidate, without being dropped by a sniper. He was too dangerous, too unpredictable. He did more than wander around with a fucking Nixon mask on, he did more than just unnerve the people around him. And as a lawyer? Defending 18-year-old potheads too dumb to keep from getting caught? That's kid stuff.

All we get is a decent portrayal by Bill Murray (thoroughly wasted!) and a script written by and for people who think Thompson's life could be reduced to formulaic stoner comedy.

CD Release #3 (on the origin of species by means of natural selection)

2010-01-23T21:30:00.521-05:00

Where the Buffalo Roamed - JUST DIE! - Blag'ard - the Machiavillains - U.P.A.S.S. - January 23rd @ Double Dragon House (Asheville)

When I woke up the day after the Greenville show I felt GREAT. And I do mean great, I mean skipping down the street, high-fiving strangers great.

So I was out of bed by 10:15 or so - plenty of sleep - and Andy headed west around 11:00 or so. I hung around town, working on the house with Rachel and enjoying being in the same place for a few hours. Then, around 3:00, back into the current and west, listening to Sound Opinions (Jim and Greg talking with Frank Black) and calling friends. You know that thing that happens, when you're on the road and your destination isn't closing on you any faster, when you stay on the phone the whole way. Yeah, that thing.

AND ON THE WAY
HOLY SHIT
IN WINSTON-SALEM
I SAW THIS THING AGAIN

Picture above is from late '08, Andy snapped that shot riding with Finn Riggins from Asheville to Wilmington, but it was the same freaking thing! Same truck and all. I had no camera on me, it quickly passed me headed the other way on 40, but I definitely saw it and I took this as a good omen.

Only good could come of this show.

So it was a sunny and warm drive until I hit the mountains and I climbed the mountain through banks of thickening fog
haha
For some reason I want to put in a sentence that looks like it means something but really means gibberish like
I grappled, nigh mountebank of fog. Rough strewn carrevan ascendant braketack, like unto propagation amongst great veracity. Verily cartographed abreast of preakness majest!

Or some shit.

Point is, it was really foggy headed up the mountain and when I got to the top I was ready to be done driving. I rolled to Dave and Julie's house where they fixed me FANGODDAMNTASTIC food and we caught up and watched "the State."
What a silly show.
And after a few episodes I headed to the south side of town to get ready for the show.

Rolled across town and landed at Andy's old house - where the Niq and the Adam and the Chad and the Graham roam - I think at one point Chad and Adam were in the same room and I called them Chadam? Had a beer and kicked it, parked my truck and left it there. For the safety.

Shit. The show is starting.

Am I ready? Can I be ready?

It's a packed basement we've created - it's hungry for music.

Let's get it started.

***

A little before 10:00, but not by much, and Blag'ard got started. This was the last I would know of time until 3:30. 5 1/2 hours of noise and oblivion and midair collisions ensued and I rode the wave like I knew what I was doing... because I knew what I was doing. I felt like a skilled surfer, finally encountering the monster wave of legend, and realizing that the wave sized me up as I calmly set board to water.

This was the show. This was us growing up, this was us coming to a point where we felt like we could expect people to take us as seriously as we take ourselves. This was evolution. This was the one individual, of a species that has been changing for years, that scientists would call the moment of divergence. A feathered dinosaur becomes a bird and starts flying, stops gliding. Dig?

Read on.

***

Blag'ard had joined us for a second night and they got started first. The basement was healthily populated to begin with, and more people showed up during the set. Great love was given to Blag'ard - who played a fantastic set.

Double Dragon is a name I came up with for the house under the initial plan. Originally, this was going to be a show split between the Machiavillains' house and Andy's old house, where Niq and Chadam now reside. The two house plan kind of fell apart, but the Double Dragon House name stayed and I hope it remains the name of that house. It fits.

Anyway.

Again, Blag'ard focused on the material from the new record - which I've had long enough to appreciate now. It's a blistering pop record, ten quick tracks. The composition is tight, these guys waste nothing. They use as minimal an arsenal as I've ever seen for a band this wide-open. On hand are two mics, a Strat, two amps, a compression unit, a tuner, and a drumkit and that. is. it.

It's a more serious record than Bobcat. Central to this album is an estranged darkness, barely concealed by a laughing-to-keep-myself-from-crying smirk. Joe's voice crackles with loosely controlled emotion and some very real humanity comes out in the choruses of songs like "R.C.O." and "Babushka," when Adam's belted harmony rides alongside. Joe and Adam harmonize like two friends who don't even need to talk about what's fucked up in the world. Being friends is enough, there's no need to talk it out.

There's a disconnect in a thinking man trying to find his place in a world that changes quickly and without plan, and most of these songs are about that disconnect. Joe expresses cheerful self-deprecation, alternating between a maniacal cackle and a frustrated low rant in his vocal delivery. Listen to the pre-chorus of "R.C.O." to hear the kind of repression he manages to express. The guitar and drum lines are just restrained enough, they're building towards a satisfying go-kart derby of a chorus, but there's still a pent-up energy in this part of the song that never quite erupts... the close harmony of "R..... C.... O....." ties the guitar and drum track down, tightens it without fully hiding the tension beneath. What does "R.C.O." mean? Fuck if I know, but I know it's important.

Did that make any sense? Goddammit. I'm sitting here, listening to the record. I don't have the vocabulary to talk about it. I mean, it sounds so simple - a catchy, 33 minute rock record - but I always flop around like a fish on the shore when I try to write about Blag'ard.

Gotta love those harmonies.

When I was getting to know these guys, the first few times I saw them play, I got a different impression every time. I think all my earlier impressions were correct, but everything I've written about the Blaggies has fallen short. So maybe you tell me what this stuff is.

It's rock and roll. Shouldn't that be enough?

Amen. We'll go with that. Blag'ard was received well. People got CDs, people talked about them and they said very nice things.

***

Andy wore a turntable belt buckle that was powerful medicine and our enemies did cower. PBR and other cheapnesses were flowing. The people did drink, and some were verbing noun. It wasn't even that cold out. Two dudes were firedancing in the yard, which apparently involves a spool on fire and a length of line. The firedancer runs the spool back and forth in the space between their hands and, since it's night, you can't see the line - all you see is this fireball spinning in the air between open hands. They threw the spinning fire up, among the branches of a tree, and it landed in the grass. "Shit, let me try that again."

The second time he caught it. Nothing ended up on fire that wasn't supposed to be on fire.

***

The Machiavillians set up and, since this is their basement and their practice space, it didn't take them long. They've wired mic cables through the basement rafters, so that mics drop down from the ceiling at ideal locations. There's even a drummer mic hanging by the kit, which was perfect for Adam. This was a great PA for the purpose - there was even a monitor! I can't recall the last house show I've played that had monitors! This sentence also ends with an exclamation! I know what they say, that the overuse of exclamations dulls their impact, which is probably true! In fact, it's bad writing technique! In fact, it's probably a bad idea to use more than one per paragraph!

***

I got a proper copy of Dup's CD and he handed me a Lester Bangs book. Sweet.

***

Machiavillains - those guys must listen to a ton of Joe Strummer, but especially their bassist, Patrick. He was channeling middle Clash all night long, but not in a derivative way. Couple that with straightforward drumming and slightly disjointed guitar lines, and you have a good idea of what happens when Machiavillains play.

I was near the back, I'd walked in shortly after they got started and couldn't get very close. Dup was there and the Noise in Print hooligan gang of hooligans were with him. They definitely brought out their friends, the basement was solidly packed. Two bands in, and the night was already a righteous success.

***

Somewhere in here my gear, o my gear, made it into the basement and at some point it made it through the crowd and was set up. We moved the Machiavillains' kit out of the way, set up Ando's, and were soon ready to blast.

The stand was too short and the microphone smelled terrible so I didn't use it. I grabbed the drummer mic, hung it from the ceiling, and used it instead. Note: I want to use mics suspended from the ceiling from now on. It's good shit.

Niq joined us again on bass. He played with us the whole set and holy crap, he has his shit together. We stumbled a little at the Cave last time we did a show with him, coming together at the halfway point. For this show, we played tight as hell, and we did it as a trio!

North Dakota, Missouri, ~~1980~~, Wolf Wings, Dirty Bomb Stratocaster, Golgotha '98, Peace Treaty, Permafrost, Southport

We skipped "1980" because this was an evening perfect for the loud and the brash. There were some out-of-sight variations on the songs, including Andy's friend Tink joining us on motherfucking trombone during "Dirty Bomb Stratocaster!" That was freakin' cool.

Both during this show, and at the Greenville one, we played "Permafrost" nice and slow... groove-heavy as a mütherfüker. That, and "Wolf Wings," established a bong-rattling thickness that I hope is indicative of songs to come. We have a grunged-out number in the works, based on a progression I wrote in 10th or 11th grade (making it a true '90s song!), so stay tuned.

I can't remember the last time we played this tight
this locked-in
this seriously.

I howled. I ranted. I shouted and I stared down the crowded room, straight into the future, and I swear the walls did move and the people were so locked into the moment... into the very sensation of what we were doing. I felt it, man, we all did, and we held nothing back.

Then, at the end of the night, we closed on the best "Southport" ever. Ever ever ever. At the end I dove into Andy's kit and my tele made that terrifying thunderstorm sound it always does when I make it survive something of that nature. Then Niq was pummeling Andy's bassdrum with his bass. Then Andy was tearing his set apart, throwing drum elements to the ground. Then Niq and I were both hammering away at the head of the kickdrum with our instruments like axes. Then it was time. I turned off my amps (the cab on my Fender tower had nearly been knocked to the floor). Andy threw his kickdrum, face-up, to the floor and pounded a war cadence on it... then he was done and we were done and we finally knew the true nature of the wolf in the works.

***

I've been friends with Dave forever, including but not limited to our time together in Migrations. I can't believe this is the first time I've shared the stage with JUST DIE!, especially considering that the band's been at this for 4 years or so. I've had the shirts (I wore one of their shirts to our Greenville show, actually), the CDs, the stickers... I even got to sit in on a JD! practice in Dave's old house. I finally got to see the show and, holy shit, it was 25 minutes of war!

Intensity has many faces. Our intensity is the intensity of the living world. Wolves alope in the towering shadow of blinding glacial cliffs. A gazelle born with the speed and agility to elude predation before it has seen a single sunset. An eagle glides over a lake, not far over the water. The eagle knows the multitudinous fish beneath the water, but it patiently sails over a hundred - over a thousand - until the strike, and the strike is sudden. The chosen fish is in the talons, is in the air, is on its way to the nest of beaks agape and aimed to the sky in a prayer of instincts. Blag'ard's intensity is the intensity of a stock car on fire, its maniac driver still stomping the gas until the thing either explodes or grinds to a halt. JUST DIE! is the intensity of a severe thunderstorm racing through a modern city, an arsenal of donder and blitzen and hail and slashing rain to deafen and blind and destroy you - and then be gone. It leaves you refreshed, thrilled, fearless.

It's about the raw outpouring of emotion, bay-bee. It's about how good that feels, and every member of this tight quartet is celebrating some kind of release when they play. Dave churns the waters in the sky, slashing the innocent blue to a serious gray, and Josh's bass rolls the big cloud along in a groove-heavy gallop. Heavy crackle from Matt's SG, lethal riff lightning that dances within the cloud and sarcastically backhands the radio towers. All along, Steve - human size and very human - is running down the empty streets of the city in the pouring rain, laughing his ass off in unrestrained joy.

It was kind of like that and it was nothing like that. Lo, the people did mosh and there was one dude who knew all the words and celebrated along with the band - all unrestrained joy and fucking grins and shared microphones and this is what rock and roll is all about, you see? It's a shared experience, and JUST DIE! is a band that loves to share. What they have for the world is more than just hard core - is more than just drums + guitar + bass + ranting - it's release, and they brought enough for everyone.

I even got a song dedicated my way. Love beams.

***

So JUST DIE! were finished and I doubt they played more than 25 minutes. Bless that band... I stepped outside with a stupid, blissful grin on my face and tromped around in the dogshit in the yard. The party was operating on its own steam now, a steady diet of rock music, alcohol, and noun - the fuelstuffs of all-night revelry - and I stepped over to Chadam Manor to verb some noun myself
and I left the planet.
I got on a ship to Tralfamadore and was gone, daddy, gone.
My only regret is that I didn't get to hear U.P.A.S.S. play. Andy caught some of their set, so we weren't total jackasses, but I feel like kind of a jerk for vanishing like that.
Anyway, it's what happened, and we were over at Chadam Manor, sitting around giggling and telling jokes and Blag'adam launched into a cut scene from Charles Dickens - accents and all. Playing piano, playing guitar, babbling at each other, time dilation in full effect... wandering around the room once the people had gone, giving motivational speeches to the furniture and seeking my hoodie.
I like noun, I just don't use it too often, so when I do it reverts me to a giggling child with a water pistol. Shit yes.

***

About 3:30 I curled up on the couch with a comforter and peaced out. That was the first time in hours I'd known the time, and only because I'd bleared "What time is it?" to Chad and he'd smumbled an answer.

***

So we've finally come to the winddown of our narrative. I woke fully jazzed about 10:00 the next morning, and Niq and self quickly aced to Andy & Manita's house. Andy texted us back as we mounted the stairs to his door saying he was awake, so we didn't hesitate to knock as the pantsless bastard made his way to the door (how'd they get here this fast?) and this would have been a much more entertaining scene if we all had cockney accents but we don't.

Andy and Niq proceeded to cook a breakfast of illogical proportions. A dozen eggs, a pound of sausage, a pound or more of bacon, pancakes, toast... and what we got is a breakfast I like to call "The Scoutmaster's Wet Dream."

Don't read too much into that phrase. Just use the surface-level definition. Please.

And then they put a plate in my little chimp hands and I took some of everything and had a hard time finishing it, partially because I had enough food in front of me to feed a hobo camp for six weeks. Andy and Niq playfully made fun as they water buffalo stampeded their way through their bigass breakfasts, I'd eaten about half of mine and was pretty sure I'd had enough. I cracked wise because they sounded like football coaches, and the phrase "If your daddy knew you were eating like that he'd crawl out of his grave and kick you ass!" might have been said.

So I ate and then made my way to Dup's new house. His roomates are nice - even if they do enjoy badmouthing the South (boo!) - but I had a good time there.

***

Seriously, the Southeast gets such a bad rap, but it's all in such an disingenuine, cartoonish way. I'm especially baffled when people move here, then choose to talk shit. If you stop badmouthing the place for a minute, you'll realize that some of the best schools in the nation, a lot of the pharmaceuticals industry, some amazing scenery, and the goddamn space program that landed a man on the fucking moon and that has kept rovers that were supposed to last 3 months wandering around the Martian landscape for 6 years and counting are all based in the South. Blam.

Anyway. Can't abide regionalism. It doesn't have a place in educated discourse. Do people move to the West Coast or the North, just to badmouth the place and pretend it's a haven for two-dimensional yokels and inbreds? There are just as many illiterate people in other parts of the nation and racism is bad everywhere. You sound like a jerk if you go around, riffing on poor illiterates, because those are real people. It's a lot easier to imagine brokedown hollers full up'a toothless Joads (Joads? Oklahoma isn't the South! Oh, wait...) and McCoys and Hatfields levelin' they double-barrels at trespassers and thumpin' Bibles and screwing their cousins or whatever. We're getting a raw deal and it's a tad illogical.

***

The Noise in Print gang showed up, soaked to the balls with the rain that was a-fallin', and proceeded back out to flier. I had some coffee, some good conversation, and was back on the road in time to make it back to Pittsboro before the sun was completely gone from the sky.

It was a fine drive, and for the first time in I have no idea how long, I was satisfied to listen to music the whole way. No desire to pick up the phone and road-dial everyone I know. Nothing to say, I'd said it.

The rain was falling and I was all ears.

CD Release #2 (let the wookiee win)

2010-01-22T19:00:00.388-05:00

Where the Buffalo Roamed - Blag'ard - Jeremy Aggers - Jan 22nd @ the Tipsy Teapot (Greenville)

I think it was during my drive to school - or maybe my drive home - but I had my first important revelation of this weekend, one that would carry me into light.

Every show remaining in my weekend would be played like my it would be my last, I would play my heart out and leave nothing in my batteries. Anything that seemed right, I would do. I might even end up with my arm in a sling and a black eye by Sunday, who knew? It felt very right when I had this thought. I needed to give the elements another chance. I didn't actually want to control the music, I still wanted to behave like I was playing with tectonic forces that I really had no business touching, but the Reservoir show had left me scared.

What if I'm really not in control? Can the music destroy me? Would it?

Ultimately, I'm not even sure what it was about that show. I've played sloppily before, but it's never bothered me like this. I guess I was a little ashamed, thought that I'd made a fool of myself, even though I'm sure I was the only person who noticed.

Still, Jason Ward did yell "You released the fuck out of that CD!" when we finished playing last night. Thinking about all this stuff, feeling a bit better, but more importantly feeling that sacred carelessness that would make this one of the best show weekends... and it would be amazing because we would do it on our own terms and we would get away with it.

Up the next morning & to school & then home... took out enough trash to choke a rancor... need to get less lazy on that front... met Andy & Jay at Carolina Brewery... Jay wants to overthrow the government... all I wanted was a midday beer and a ridiculous burger... all slaw and chili and mustard... soon I was wearing the fucking thing but (miraculously) none of it got on my clothes... we worked out the movie we'd make... "The Fall of Jay..." a two hour, minute-by-minute, documentation of Jay's hilarious descent from respectable dude to meth head... laughed our asses off... we got collectively hit on by an attractive middle-aged woman in the next booth and got glares from her beau... awesome...

Eating a burger I had to wear to properly enjoy put me back in the mindset I needed to be in. Cracking wise and laughing at my own stupid jokes in a sleepy bar in my own little town at the crossroads put me back in my own head and evacuated the evil funk.

Goddammit, I have something here. We made a record and now we're releasing it - all that shit on our own. Feelings of indestructibility. Feelings that no matter what I did - no matter who noticed - that I had done something right. That morning I had resigned myself to the forces of nature that took me so by surprise at the Reservoir, and I had gone totally zen.

Big Evil a little before 5:00 when the phone rang. Jason Duff had quit Irata and they wouldn't be joining us. Momentary frustration, but it quickly passed through me and dissipated. Zen. When the going gets weird, I'll accept anything and move on. I could have opened my refrigerator to see it stocked with wriggling squid and I would have shrugged and gone about my day. Zen.

So our Greenville lineup had quickly gone from five to three (no more Gray Young, no more Irata). Things were changing so rapidly and so unpredictably and, you know what, it made shit exciting. Tried to set up a fourth band last minute, a local, but it didn't work and we chose to simply roll with it. Rolling to Greenville, jamming to Gnarls Barkley, thrilled to return to this strange town of hard drinking and hard insanity.

***

We arrived around 7:30 and headed to the place... used to go to the Tipsy Teapot on occasion when I lived in the GVL, but it was smaller then. Now they've rented out the space next door, which is the show space and bar now, and they've put together a righteous... well, you get the idea. They're doing it right.

Got there and ran into a guy who kind of acted like he worked there and a confusing conversation ensued. Turns out he's Jeremy Aggers' tour manager. Sorry to ruin the punchline, but it wouldn't have made for a better story if I'd gone into more detail.

I'd rather tell you about the crazy guy who cornered us while we were unloading the truck.

Andy and I were taking turns carrying gear into the back door when a guy with pretty sweet dreads and a fantastic coat the color of egg nog (not suede, but something similar and pimpish for sure) approached us and told us he was a musician too. He shook my hand, not quite breaking the bones but definitely moving them closer together, and proceeded to serenade us with Micheal Jackson songs. Half of the serenading was just him singing the guitar line or the beat, but that's fine.

During one of Andy's turns to load gear the topic changed - oh, before I forget - our new friend's name is Jah. "Spelled j - ah." Anyway, at this point Jah launched into Ric Flair mode - which is to say we got to hear about Ric Flair. He mainly talked about things Ric Flair said in interviews, though. From context, I think these were interviews given in Holiday Inn conference rooms or excerpts from 10:00am speeches in said rooms.

Sweet Kal-el, life's entertaining. I didn't have to do anything! I just sat there and let him yammer.

Near the end of our unpacking, though, I got a little annoyed. I'm not really jazzed by the babbling of crazy people fresh off the street and I could see him trying to follow us around half the fucking night. Definitely felt a little of this when he offered to help us carry shit in and tried to leave his bag in the bed of the truck. He helped us lug in some drum hardware - and he left his bag leaning on the tire of some random truck in the parking lot (?) when I told him I was closing my tailgate. Singing gibberish the whole way, he left the hardware with our other stuff before sauntering insanely back into the night.

***

Good food with good people... good times with the Blag'ardites... people were out in good number to see Jeremy Aggers so he got started a little after 9:00. The Teapot's resolute Delia offered to work the door for us, and she did nicely. She doesn't play - you either drop a few bucks in the jar or you don't come in - and I'm psyched we had her on our side. She took the show as seriously as we did.

***

I don't know the going exchange rate in the singer/songwriter world - it's not my bag, baby - but I do know that Jeremy Aggers can play the guitar like a motherfucker. I've always been envious of people who can play fingerstyle, but it went beyond that. It was a question of chord structure and order. His transitions were really cool, a lot of creative shapes sliding up to the 7th and the 10th frets before jetting back to his original progression. All this while singing and, you know folk music, there are a ton of words... so he was pretty busy up there. I would be curious to see what he does with a band behind him.

Upon talking to him he complained about the Atlanta scene being dominated by rock and rollers. He definitely draws a distinction between what he does and what I do. That was one of the strongest impressions I got from him, like he viewed music as compartmentalized - like the different genres were isolated spheres afloat in the ether. Weird.

Went to the back of the room and talked to his tour manager, Rob, for a little while and, you know what, when Rob lightens up he's a really entertaining guy. I didn't get much of a feel for what Jeremy was all about - nice enough guy but seemed really guarded - but Rob was a decent dude. Turns out he's from Kentucky. Awesome.

I love Kentucky. I told him so.

I guess the tour manager's job is to worry about things, to look out for what could be improved at a venue, etc., so their first instinct isn't to make friends with the other acts on the bill. He talked like he works really hard at this stuff, which is cool. It's rad that he has the passion for music and can look out for Jeremy - they were like wandering knights crossing a modern landscape, perpetually misunderstood yet destined for more (financial) success than I'll know.

I hope the best for them - which is about all I can do. This was a momentary intersection of two different worlds. Blag'ard and WtBR are of the independent rock community, in which success is defined by cooperation with other acts - a growing network rather than a single rising star - and making a living at this thing we call music isn't a realistic focus. Jeremy and Rob are looking for this to be their job. I get this feeling that Rob and I compared notes, realized that neither party's experience applied to the other's, and decided instead to just shoot the breeze about whatever came to mind.

Decent crowd at this point - a surprising amount of high school girls - and a woman at the back who was apparently bitching uncontrollably about anything to cross her mind. Awesome.

Most of them left when Jeremy was done and while Blag'ard was setting up... Drums! Amps! Stratocasters! Fear! ...and I'm pretty sure one of the ones to leave was the legendary whining woman of '010. Awesome.

So Blag'ard were quickly set up and were quickly playing. Awesome.

***

Most of Blag'ard's set came from their new record, Mach II, which I've had the pleasure of hearing. It's good. It's a transparent record, you can almost picture the blank canvas upon which the elements were placed, one at a time. Let's see... all this space to work with... so we'll put a guitar line here... we'll put some snare over here and we'll put some hat and kick near it... we'll put some vocals over here, kind of on their own so they come out clear and natural... it's a logical and unconfused records with more space in the recording process than Bobcat. If you've heard Blag'ard, hear me out - the space here is the same space you get in a band that's a clean Stratocaster, a drumkit, and two vocal lines. It's about Blag'ard being one of the least cluttered rock bands I know. Here it is. A song. No bullshit, just the song. And it's amazing.

Stopped at the back of the room to compliment Jeremy on his guitar playing (did I mention how good he is?). He looked a little surprised and a little frightened. I'm not sure what weirded him out so much about this show - it was a tremendous success. Maybe I just misread the poor guy, that's probably it.

anyway.

Blag'ard translated nicely and people were into it, but they failed to close the gap to the stage. Some of us got up front and reveled in this thing Joe and Adam do and we were rewarded. I never realized until this time around that Joe is a towering motherfucker, and watching him play guitar is like encountering a lean and dexterous bear. Adam - no matter his state - becomes a freeform mental patient when he gets behind the drumkit. I have no idea what he was saying between songs, maybe he didn't either, but he was as into what he was doing as is physically possible. This project possesses a single mind - and both Joe and Adam change a little when they enter into a state of Blag'ard.

They rocked it and then it was our turn and we rocked it.

Somewhere in here Jeremy and Rob departed.

***

Holy shit, do I feel validated.

We played the same set as at the Reservoir - Andy's idea - and I'm glad we did. We were tight, we were loud, and - according to Blag'adam - we had a good mix. At least 25 people moved up front, very close to us, and there were plenty of people back in the room as well. A very good crowd - so we played tight and passionate. I knew the cats out there - Liz and Davey and Joe and Mike "Jawline" King and Adam aka A-sharp and Heinrich and Jim Capps and the Blag'ard guys and some people I didn't know were up front, having a great time, and there's Nolan and he's singing along with "Missouri." Great feelings, love beams jammed through the atmosphere from a flourescent Japanese satellite. "Wolf Wings" and "Permafrost" I remember being really strong - but especially "Permafrost." It's rapidly becoming one of our best songs. We took those songs at a good pace... a deafening, menacing, leisurely, riff-driven thickness that makes me feel like I can split the Earth's crust just by stomping my feet.

So we closed this show with the same energy that closed the Reservoir show - only we were in perfect tune with it - so I ran across the floor and dove backwards into the drums and the set collapsed outwards like a booze-soaked flower collapsing in an alley. And the feedback rose. And Andy kicked over the pieces of his set that still stood.

And that was "Southport." The little song that could. One of our oldest, by the way. "Southport" and "Dirty Bomb Stratocaster" actually predate the band by a few years. I'm glad we're playing them.

And we sold some CDs and a shirt and it was a great night. Tried (unsuccessfully) to convince Liz to skip work and drive herself and Davey up to Asheville for our show the next day.

Now we enter a world of madness, so I'll have to go a little beat just to properly interpret stimulus.

Here goes.

So we packed to roll, tried to leave town, and failed several times because
goddammit
they're blocking off the downtown streets these days leaving them packed with
drunks
motherfuckers
freaks
girls in tubetops riding the backs of guys in polos
guys in perennial flip flops flopping flipping down the fucking street in self-righteous jaegerbomb wastedness

horndog attack posture like DMB howler monkeys on the warpath

down the street from Tipsy Teapot - tried to turn right and head out of town past my old house - orange cones and cop cars - no dice - had to wait at a green light while drunk bastards slogged across the street in heels and flip flops (shoes can have a gender?).
Considered running some of them over.
Reconsidered.
Didn't do it.
Goddamn circus.
The light was turning yellow when the parade of well-heeled uselessness was out of our way, so we drove up 4th Street to Summit and turned right, up to 5th Street, headed right when I should have gone left to 14th (duh) and I could have easily escaped but instead headed back into the waiting arms of partydown central
a gigantic magnet for the entirety of Eastern North Carolina
that attracts all the wretched scum and villainy
into a cavernous volcano that spews MGD and STD
and we had to skirt around its slopes as it erupted in the center of town
all human fluid and fuckshot braincells (cop cars planted at its boundaries like the natural disaster that it was) but we all know the kids define the cops like the seals define the sharks I mean
it's the most basic relationship in human society
the protector/protectee dynamic - when institutionalized - almost immediately reverts to a predator/prey dynamic
so we made another circle, up the same streets crawling with terminally wasted kids WAVE OF THE FUTURE COMING THROUGH and eventually down Dickinson and out of town
leaving the evening to collapse on itself
part and parcel to chaos
and I picture an enormous planetary nebula - all violence and expanding shockwave - yet within its post-nova forces some stars still shine and one of those stars is the Tipsy Teapot, a good venue that behaves like a good venue, a place that doesn't rely on girls in chaps dancing on the bar to stay in business. They've been in business a long time for a spot in Greenville - long may they remain.

***

Shit. That was more dangerous than I thought. Glad I let the reptile brain handle it.

Not much more to say on this show, which we considered an enormous success.

Let me see if anyone's still reading. Tits.

That'll wake them up.

Very long drive across a fading dreamscape again... passing through the night with the Ghost Dog soundtrack in the Millenium Falcon's speakers. Made it through the crushingly repetitive crawl of 264, headed home. Passed a kid, pulled by a cop, just inside of Chatham... and a quick glance to see that he was pleading with the cop... arms out, palms up... not a good night for the kid... a wide-eyed seal desolate in the obliterative path of a great white...

Got home. Split a Red Oval with Andy. Verbed a little noun, but I was too sleepy to get even remotely adjective.

In bed by 3:30 after a very long day and thrilled shitless.

One more town. One more show.

It's on.

CD Release #1 (Amazed to stumble where gods get lost)

2010-01-21T01:30:00.220-05:00

Where the Buffalo Roamed - Irata - "A Wolf in the Works" CD release! - January 21st, the Reservoir

Hello world. I'm selling myself short.

I'm scared of the spotlight, the harmless spotlight, and sometimes I sabotage myself. I woke up the morning after, feeling dejected, and scribbled this in my notebook...

One more weekend of destruction...
I guess that's the conflict I felt when I got home. I'd not just stepped up to the ledge, I'd gone over... quite literally.
This time, when I'd crawled on Andy's kickdrum I snagged my ankle on the tom mount & fell - hard - hit the concrete floor & kept playing.
I put my head in the speaker cab like some elemental pillow, like sleeping in a volcanic rim, and let the feedback take control.
I felt the sweet pain in my knee, in my ankle, in my hand, and I felt no fear.
I play music so I may know fear. Fear in the face of forces of nature. Fear in the face of unimaginable destruction. Fear in the face of wild potential.
When I got home I felt incomplete, though. I felt an inner conflict. We'd played loose and loud - very loose - and I'm beginning to think I can't sing.
I write to convey emotion, and sometimes these emotions are ragged and uncomfortable. That's why my last Pinhook show fell flat - the epic terror and bizarre landscapes of my solo work aren't the most inviting, are only soothing to sonic masochists such as myself.
So the emotion that drove our record release show was one of reckless abandon, a brazen absence of self-preservation, and I was not in control.
This music was in control, and as it gains control it changes until I barely even recognize it. These characters I've written into my songs are asserting themselves and it's not always safe to be near them.
If this all sounds a little dissociative it's because it is.
So I've decided to give control to the elements for this weekend, to see where it takes, and then I will step back and assess the future. Now that I know how to be a monster, what next?

Shows played in series, in my experience, tend towards a natural story arc. This is odd, the existence of a narrative flow in the real world, but I'm sure there's a perfectly rational explanation. That said, from this awkward springboard came some of the most amazing shows WtBR has played... so I ended up all right. The first night is part of the story, so here's what happened:

Late in the afternoon I got word that Gray Young couldn't make it - Chas was down with bronchitis. I had a feeling that trouble would travel in threes, as it tends to, so I allowed myself a moment's frustration before I circled the wagons.

When a thing can't be helped there's no sense in beating your head against it. You'll only damage yourself, as a thing that can't be helped can neither be damaged nor fixed.

So Andy showed up about 8:00 and ate with us. Rachel and I had just come from a shopping trip where I'd found a mysterious beer called Red Oval. Six cans for $2.99 at Trader Joe's... I kinda had to. Simple white can with a red oval that says "Red Oval" in it.

Red Oval classic lager, to be precise.

If you've ever been in a rock band or played a rock show or, hell, if you go to a ton of rock shows you'll know - it's a point of pride to drink a cheapass beer no one's ever seen. That's why it's so magical that the Reservoir stocks Schlitz for the bands. Sure, people have heard of it, but it's a sub-PBR show beer! Holy crap, if that's not attention to detail, I don't know what is.

So I was at Trader Joe's and I found an obscuro cheap beer that may even give Schlitz a run for its money! Hoooooolyshit.

Anyway... blah blah blah my imaginary readers probably don't want to read about boring shit like Rachel and Andy and me sitting around, catching up, and discussing the virtues of cheap, forgotten beer brands (link). Do you exist? Are you out there? If you're reading this, knock twice... or blink once... or slip a $20 my way... give me some kind of sign that I'm not just writing this shit for my own benefit
well
I guess that's what writing really is
maybe
but we showed up at the Reservoir a little before 10:00. The beauty of the place is how relaxed they are there. If you're playing a show, the only thing that really matters is that you're there by 10:00 or so. No bullshit about showing up mega early for a soundcheck or anything like that. It's rock and roll, not particle physics. We're not going to vaporize each other if things aren't calibrated exactly.

The guys at the Res get what's important about rock music. Amen.

So we showed up and Irata was set up and hanging out. Down to two bands - us and them - so we kicked it for quite a while, talked to friends, had a good time.

Irata played around 10:30.

So they played a phenomenal show. They'd brought these new toys, fog machines and lights and all kinds of wacky shit. The fog machine quickly filled the room with a thick, gray haze and - deity bless 'em - Irata made the Reservoir look like it used to.

I don't recognize the place when I can see the rafters. A smokeless Res is an odd place.

Given ensuing events, I wish I could say more about their show, but it was one thing - it was good - and I don't think I can break it down beyond that. I got that feeling I always get when Irata plays (played?), the feeling that I'm in the presence of a superior band and that I'm a very lucky person to get to share a bill with a band this massively talented. Andy leaned over to me at one point and said "I can't believe they're opening for us!"

He had a point. Their set was the story of the night. Then again, we were pretty loose. It's right that we played second.

Listen:

I stumbled like crazy, mumbled my lines. Most embarrassingly, I was clumsy with my pedals. It's usually so intuitive to me, so hitting my effects is as natural as hitting a C chord or recognizing the shape of a basic pentatonic scale.

Both Andy and I agreed later that we'd played clumsily, but I think it's because I wasn't totally in control. Music, to me, isn't something I create. It's not like a car, I can't steer it or control where it goes, it's more like the surface of the sea. I ride it, go where it goes. The songs I write aren't things I came up with, they're just minor currents in this vast, trackless sea. All I did was name them, identify them on a chart, and plot my course towards them when I plug in and let the distortion crackle between the great, mountainous waves and rumble in the deep trenches where blind creatures hunt and speak and see in vibration and heat differentials.

So the wind picked up and I'd been paying no attention, hadn't turned my gaze to the rapidly falling barometer, and I was caught up and thrown around in the storm I should have seen approaching. I spent more time immersed in the water, trying to recognize concepts like "up" and "breathing," than on the surface where I could recognize the individual properties of this thing I do. The end of the night found me chasing the songs I knew so well as they hung tattered in great North Atlantic scars like the sails of so many doomed craft, swamped and sinking with desperate sailors crying to gods of the moment or leaping over the sides in the desperate suicide hurtle straight into the arms of a cold and precious mother of storms... ancient intimidation from the skeleton haze as danger and fear and trouble found me, only a vessel for powerful forces that didn't choose me, I chose them, and I can usually handle them.

So, all that pseudomystical bullshit aside, I was off balance and off time. I'm sure the show sounded fine, but the defining moment - the mortal fear - came when I caught my foot and fell off the kickdrum, hit hard, and kept playing. I thought, for the first time, that music just may destroy me. Not because it means to - it can't mean to, it's a force of nature - but because I play with a fire that others avoid. Not because there's any advantage to playing like this, plenty of people play music without going batshit insane (hell, a lot of people manage to be pretty technical and precise in their playing), but because this kind of reckless abandon feels so fucking good. There's no difference between stimulus - pleasure and pain and joy and ferocity all amix. And it changes you, it rewires your mind. Picture me after the show, checking for blood. I landed guitar up - the ideal outcome. Picture me after the show, in the parking lot shouting Biblical ass-gibberish like "I name thee 'betrayer!'" True again, but dumb reason. Picture me driving home and getting home and sitting at my computer, wondering if I had been too much a creature and too little a human - if I was in actual danger from the way I behave when I play a show - and, for the first time, I wondered if guitars and drums and amps were the only things I would break if I wasn't careful.

The wolf in the works is me, so that you know.

The night was loud and amazing and confusing and the world would soon be shaken by great joy and sorrow and if it sounds confusing it's because it was confusing so that's the keyword, ok?

For this is someone else's paradise and I am taking up valuable space.

2010-01-13T22:28:00.006-05:00

Corbie is Afraid of the Bear - Lollipop Factory - Blood Red River - January 13th @ the Pinhook (Durm)

I don't have any confidence in my solo set yet and I really don't have much to say about this show. That said, I'm sure I'll end up on a dune buggy with no brakes of a ramble once I get started. Here's praying to Asimov, to Vonnegut, to Clarke... here's bribing Thompson, here's bribing Bangs that I don't. Something tells me I'm in the same corner as those last two, and as much as everyone and their cousin wants to be the next Hunter S. Thompson, the closer and closer I get to his muse the scarier it gets. Once that shit takes control, you have no idea what's happening, and though your everyday life is a series of facts stopped on the way home for gas and pumped gas while staring into the middle distance... let the dogs out when I got home... walked to the mailbox, which is a greater thrill than most things owing to its simplicity and the potential for surprise... came back inside and let the dogs in... got kind of mad when Ronin ate catshit out of the litterbox. What is up with dogs and catshit? these facts get muddled on the way to the page and I worry about my ability to get paid to write about the real world. I live in it, I buy groceries in it, I sleep in it and it's where my alarm clock and my snooze button are, but can I write about it? The temptation to borrow someone else's muse is so strong, is so popular, but that would be the easy way and Corbie can't do things the easy way, can he?

Maybe just once?

No?

Shit.

I was hoping I could cheat at it, just this once. That my vision of the future might come precisely true. That I may not have to realize after years of trying to force the miracle that salvation lies in the unknowable, in the forces of the absurd, and that the beauty that is my life is the beauty of a well-thrown curveball...

The little light that shines tells me not to talk about this show. It was a total bust, an absolute downer, a joke minus punchline.

Put simply, I started playing at shortly after 9:00. My solo set is me, my 11 pedals, my three amps, and whatever guitar has new strings on it at the time. I play these meditative guitar songs, theme and variation style. They are very, very loud and very, very introspective.

I started playing but I didn't look up. I get really nervous without a band (even if it's just me and another person) so I saw my amps and I saw the uneven hardwood of the floors. I started on "Manitutsu" and I played the riff a few times to get into the swing of it. There were maybe 15 people in the place, all of them in the bar and not by the stage, but I was ok with that. Then I kicked on my Micro POG and built the riff a little. Then I kicked on my orange Boss distortion and brought the song to a moderate intensity (only one distortion, usually when I play this song at home I build to three or all four distortions). I kept it there for a second, then brought it back down to totally clean and Soundcat Greg slid the note that said "Turn down. People are leaving." onto the floor directly in front of my pedals and it stopped me short.

This project is about as personal as I get. My lyrics with Where the Buffalo Roamed are honest and shameless, but so what. They're just words. Battle Rockets is a glimpse into my mindset, but it's pretty rational and it's based upon cooperation. It would be selfish for me to write stuff like my solo work for Battle Rockets, it would stop being a collaboration and it would be all Corbie Hill and who the fuck wants that?

Ultimately, the question is, who the fuck does want that? I don't know when it started, probably sometime in high school (start the clock somewhere in the late '90s), but when I play guitar on my own I go to this weird and dangerous place where I shut off my rational mind entirely and speak my emotions through feedback, distortion, and (when necessary) broken strings. It's an uncontrolled art.

I got an opportunity to play solo at Treetown, so I took it. I developed this freeform into something I could reproduce live and it kind of worked. I agreed to play with Lollipop Factory because not only do I dig them, but we've tried to play two shows together over the past year and both have fallen through for different reasons. I volunteered the new solo project because neither of my bands could make the date and because, well, I wanted to see if the solo show worked.

The solo show did work. I sounded fucking good. I lost my confidence after "Manitutsu" and played an abortive version of "Theme for a Tundra Ghost" next. I didn't finish it and there was no applause. I didn't even talk to anyone but Bekah and David, of Lollipop Factory, because I felt like I was kind of there beside everyone else, but not among them.

Bekah and David played a phenomenal show. I really enjoy the overblown death cabaret of their act, they are gothic bards wandering an endless trailer park... Tim Burton's overactive imagination splits from him as a teenager, goes off to Ohio to grow up, and then sets itself loose across the American landscape, all garish colors and tophats and serpentine harmonies. Come see the beauty of junk, come see yourself in a warped mirror and laugh your ass off. This is the sideshow that ran the circus. This is the lion tamer that ran away to join Queen. What does any of that mean? I have no idea.

Nothing against Blood Red River, but I didn't see them play. I felt powerfully down and had to go after Lollipop Factory played. Honestly, I don't feel missed, but this is fine. I'd be a real egotist if I thought the quality of a room depended on my presence.

On the way home I listened to Pythagoras, the first record I've made with my new solo direction, just to make sure I liked it and, you know what? I do like it. I'm proud of it. It's a fucking good track.

It's a short album consisting of a single 19-minute song. Does that sound cool to you? Yeah? Well, download it and tell me what you think.

I guess what really frustrates me here is how the legend of Durham meets with the reality of Durham. I thought it was the kind of place where I could plug in and go weird and go loud, I thought people would hear it and interact with it and accept it as music, even if they didn't necessarily dig. Instead, the venue turned against me in the time I was most vulnerable and I was still feeling pretty shaky until I went to bed.

Then I woke up late... late for me is 7:30, even if I play a show the night before. I felt a momentary shock of dammit before realizing that it didn't matter. That maybe I should play more solo shows, but that it was ok if I didn't, but that there was a time and a place for everything. I've had some great shows at the Pinhook, but the solo one wasn't it.

Kind of hard to keep coming up with clever shit to write in the title... the story's no problem, but the title?... fuck it...

2010-01-05T22:57:00.162-05:00

Battle Rockets - Jew(s) & Catholic(s) - the Sour Notes - January 5th @ the Reservoir

It's probably been a month or more since people just started accepting that Rachel and I are having a girl.

Funny thing is, the ultrasound was just today (Friday, the 8th)... but when she dropped me a line to let me know what we were having, well, it had come to a point where I would have been genuinely surprised if she'd said "it's going to be a boy."

She woke up one day thinking it was probably going to be a girl. Andy had a dream about our kid several weeks ago. When I asked him what gender our kid was in the dream he said "What, didn't you already tell me it was a girl?" It's almost like there's something intuitive, or at least on an instinctual level, some minor signal that tells the reptile brain. The higher functions rely on things that can be proven, things that can be magically zapped and scanned and photographed. I saw a grainy black and white picture of my kid, a kid who won't see the light of day until summer, but we all knew she was a girl weeks before.

It's ultrasound, yo.

Doubting Thomas that I am, I insisted on waiting for the proof and now, having done so, it was an unsurprising proof. A satisfactory proof, a thrilling proof, but I'm more led to believe that our senses pick up more than we give them credit for.

Call it old wives tales, call it premonition, call it whatever, but there are electrical impulses and there are subconscious cues that everyone is constantly giving everyone else and we're creatures of two minds: the reptile and the higher functions. They're talking to each other, but the higher functions never listen to the reptile mind. It jerks around with all its don't trust that guy and its this may seem ruined but it'll really turn out fine, so be patient but none of its assertions make any sense. Several peoples' reptile minds picked up on the gender of my unborn child - I'm sure mine did too - so why did I deny it?

I trust my instincts, but I don't mean that as the cliche. By the way, Internet, we're having a kid.

***

The drive to the venue was like any drive to a venue. Me, in my truck, listening to some songs. The Sour Notes would show up a little late, so we figured out an order and rolled with it.

Alanna from Jews & Catholics was sick, as was Reno. That considered, we rocked house.

imperfects

drive there/ touring act late/eddie as joe strummer and elvis costello but why?/music as intuitive process/

Those are the notes I wrote to myself a few days ago, last time I touched this writeup. I mean to say that when Eddie plays guitar, something about him makes me think about Elvis Costello, but something else makes me think of Joe Strummer. It's probably that wicked, three-humbuckered tele (Tele? Is that capitalized?) of his that makes me think of Joe Strummer, at least to an extent, but more likely it's the sense of immediacy he brings with him to the microphone... and that's what brings out the Elvis Costello thoughts as well. Why those two, though? Of all the guys to play a Fender and sing a rock song, why does Eddie remind me of those two specifically? I'll let you know if I ever figure it out.

I tried to imagine Jews and Catholics with a third member as they played, with a drummer instead of the drum machine, and when I did succeed in imagining it, you know, it kind of killed the magic. A lot of the beauty in this weird little band is the precision with which they deliver their parts. Drum machines don't change speed, don't respond to live cues, so the fact that their live show is as full of spontaneity and life as it is says a lot for Eddie and Alanna.

Alanna didn't look sick once she started playing. She treats her standup bass like a dance partner in some fiery bolero, alternating between groovily swinging with it and attacking the strings with hands like egret beaks rapidly probing a shallow marsh. The results are pocket-inducing basslines punctuated with the heavy, low rattle of a ruthlessly yanked A string.

Eddie's just a fantastic guitarist, and the lyrical content (as well as vocal melodies) are just deliciously dark. You get the impression you're watching some diabolical film about vampires who race hot rods... yet they establish all of this without going even the sightest bit rockabilly! AIUIDFHSHB! I KNOW! AUIHDFH KFGHSFG SUGH I! SGD!

Shit... so what did I mean by "music as intuitive process?" I think what I meant is that I may never know why Eddie makes me think of Elvis Costello. Usually I figure these connections out pretty quickly (or at least eventually) but I'm at a loss for this one and if I don't move on now I never might.

Was that a real sentence?

ANYWAY

We got started quite soon after Jews & Catholics and played what felt like 35 minutes but was probably closer to 40 or more... owing to our newest song, "Strange Halo," being about 9 minutes long. This would be the last Battle Rockets show for a while, with both Reno and myself in school now, so I'm glad we played like we did. It felt, and sounded, like Battle Rockets. We were tight, we knew our songs well enough to fuck with them just a little, and this was the first show I played with my new amp... now I play through my weird Fender stack, my Peavey, and (the new one!) a Fender Hot Rod Deville... an apocalyptic, soulful, force of nature, positively tectonic 60w 410 that might just have established contact with the nearest star system during our set. God, I love that amp.

So I had a beer with Wes, who's such a cool guy, as the Sour Notes played...

Spike the water with LSD and then make Kool-aid with it anyway

The Sour Notes were young, catchy, and well-dressed... all leather shoes and hollowbodies and enough synths to score a dozen NES games... Austindelia on the road. They'd just come from Atlanta and would see Baltimore the next day. Shit, that's a lot of driving, but it can be hard as hell to book Richmond or DC and, really, where is there to play between Atlanta and the Triangle? Behind them, on a screen, they projected a lightly modernized psychedelic light show. Laptops are more reliable than food coloring and overhead projectors (believe me, I've tried).

We're living in the golden age of performance art, people. This shit is so easy to do. Anyone can get their shit together and save up a few months - if they really give a shit and know what they're doing - and they can bring the images in their brain right the fuck out into public and spray them across any surface like with an enormous spraypaint can and suddenly we're all high on the fumes. This is drug music, that's the root, even if the purveyors aren't off their gourds from huffing dried guano and even if I haven't been drinking llama adrenaline to keep my buzz going... bleeding colors and hopelessly looped film reel behind/atop a band droning about love and fuzz with three keyboards and a single guitar with hair falling over the eyes and suddenly it's a movie about? Who fucking cares what the movie's about? I made my point somewhere in the above paragraph, not completely sure where, but here I am at its end and I realize that anything I write here would simply detract from the concept I've already outlined somewhere already somewhere already.

Talked gear with Eddie. Talked gear with Jared, of the Sour Notes. I love talking gear. If I could get paid to discuss the merits of different effects pedals and guitars, to discuss all the different ways of hot rodding a guitar, I would be one jazzed motherfucker.

Jack shit memory. Jack shit qualification to make all these judgments, consuming beer with Wes and spacing out a little. Jack shit for attention. Jack shit for analysis. Jack shit I can say about my own performance, even if I think I played a badass show. Jack shit knowledge of the band at hand beyond the fact that I nodded along when they played and that their songs were catchy. Jack shit future if I can't hurry up and get paid to write. Jack shit the next day when I woke up and headed to school and stumbled through motherfucking exhaustion and blurted boneheaded assertions that probably flew anyway but I wasn't happy with them. Jack shit for everything but the future, but for my daughter soon to be born, and to her I'll be?

2010 (the year we make contact)

2010-01-01T23:45:00.001-05:00

Obviously, we're not triumphing through space like we're supposed to (spent all that money on warfare and action movie special effects), so we'll just evolve artistically if we won't expand beyond the cradle.

Humanity can't stay in the cradle forever. Earth's a nice place, but we have a nice set of eggs to keep in one basket... and the basket's getting quite full. The space our species takes up also includes our use of resources, environmental harm included. Decline in air quality, noise pollution in the oceans, light pollution's effect on night birds, all of these things count as space we're taking up. We're not going to stop reproducing, the act is just way too much fun and birth control is prohibitively expensive (or blasphemous) to lots of people around the world... that said?

So we're in a futuristic-sounding year in a very... um... futuristic-sounding way. Ultimately, I don't think anyone expected 2010 to look like this. It looks amazing on paper, look at the numbers again... 2010... and remember that they apply to the current year.

We're going to have to get used to this. We're in the future, we've met the future and it is us. We can do pretty amazing shit, we're keeping in touch with people we'd otherwise lose with astounding ease (just to find we have nothing to say to them) and cel phones can do shit PCs were doing ten years ago. Yet, we've lost the Concord and have reverted to crashing shit into the moon (didn't we already establish that we could land people on its surface, like, 40 years ago?).

I would do without a lot of these things, I would happily go back to phones that simply sent and received phone calls if it meant space travel could go forward. I'm no fascist, and it would be fascism to suggest that the following things happen for any reason other than people in general's desire for them to, but I would gladly give up long strings of forgettable films (such as the $78 million spent to make Daredevil... fucking Daredevil!) and the ultimately pointless connectivity (Twitter anyone? I could do without Facebook, when it really boils down to it) to see the rest of the Solar System up close.

I don't ask for the stars, just the planets... and we already know how to do this stuff! We have the technology, the know-how, the calculations, and the ability to travel around the Solar System. These baby steps are driving me positively crazy.

The Ansari X Prize was a moment of excitement for me. The future of spaceflight is in the private sector. Fucking hell, we'd still be flying turboprops if the development of aircraft had been in the hands of the government. Think about it, the aviation explosion accompanying World War II was a privatized affair. The Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress... Lockheed-Martin's B-24 Liberator... but after Virgin's Space Ship 1 won the X Prize they lost their momentum! PICK IT UP GUYS. NASA's working on geological time here and, I don't know about anyone else, but I'm quite mortal. I want to slip the gentle bonds of Earth. I want to see the aurora from above, skipping across the ionosphere like playful ghosts. I want to look out into the void, where there's no interference forcing the stars to glitter. They'll shine and I'll shine back. Hi guys. We're coming. We're doing it very slowly, but we're coming.

Read Arthur C. Clarke. It's good for you.

New Years' Boredom (the curse in blessings' disguise)

2009-12-31T23:22:00.000-05:00

I'm not completely sure what the subtext means, but I know I'll find out in a moment. I typed in out in a blast of cleverness... you know, the kind that always leaves you going "I love it! What the fuck does it mean?"

I'm not sure when it happened, but New Years is my favorite holiday. In fact, it's the only one I actually have strong feelings about. Christmas? Boring. Halloween? A cliche. Thanksgiving? Christmas lite - all the food and awkward family time, none of the presents.

So here I am, bored on my favorite holiday, because I honestly don't know what to do with it.

The traditional route, getting ripped in a crowded room with a funky hat on, that doesn't do it for me. The New Year is one of the few things that consistently gives me a pseudo-religious experience. I know it's totally arbitrary, the end of a year and the start of another, but the concept of a brand new year calms me. It makes me feel like life is a series of infinite chances, of infinite shots at redemption, because I have always believed that I am, at heart, a fuckup.

So this is the fuckup's holiday. So be it, it's probably never been put that way. Let it be a celebration of all things tabula rasa. What did I do last year?

Honestly, I don't remember. I probably hung out at the house (it was Carrboro at that time, so it would have been the little duplex with no heat) and drank some beer and watched a movie or listened to some music or something. It was a good one - I would remember it otherwise - I always remember the bad ones.

That was the start of 2009. 2008 started much more memorably... in Greenville, with a failed show at Turducken. The overall show was a success, but I was supposed to play it with Awesome Heroes (before Kim quit and we reformed as Disco Banshee, which also died horribly). I can't remember why - it probably doesn't even matter why - but Kim couldn't do this show and we got word last minute. The set was a joke - part of it consciously so - but it was still a joke. The big deal, though, was that I had built this up in my mind as a big deal. I'd been saying to my friends how important it was to me to play a big New Years' show. Dave and Julie, my very good friends from Asheville, drove down to see it and to have it fall this flat was a big deal. Liz was pretty upset about it that night too but, in classic Liz fashion, bounced back almost immediately. Tough girl.

Beyond that, I can remember bits and pieces of my New Years, but I can no longer really discern them. All I know is that by the end of the year - like tonight, with 59 minutes left in 2009 as I write this line - I feel full. I feel like time's in these arbitrary units, and so be it, but I fit all I can in every unit and at the end of each year I'm full. That's it. Not one more experience, not one more ounce of data, or I may simply shut down/explode/etc.

God, the next day, the next morning, such sweet release. Twelve untouched months, the record is already set for the prior year. It's done... and I feel so young, but what will I feel tomorrow?

I know I will, I know I'll feel it like always... the endless potential of a year yet untouched.

I'm not completely sure what my point is, but I have 53 minutes left in my year and I don't think I'm going to use it - I haven't figured out how yet. This kind of mysticism, rebirth and all that shit, is too big for me and that's why I don't know what to do with New Years'... why I always end up frustrated and burning with unidentified energy by the end of the night at the end of the year. Maybe someday I'll figure out the proper way to transition from year to year... from arbitrary unit to arbitrary unit... but for now this is what I have. I can't cheapen it with festive-hatted, noisemakered buffoonery but I can't elevate it with senseless ceremony.

I don't know where I'm going with this, but I have 47 minutes left and I don't think I'm going to use them. I've done a lot with my year. It would be silly to try and force anything out of the last hour.

I'm in Pittsboro and the moon hangs where I left it. Maybe in the firepit the coals are still warm and I have a live recording to convert to MP3s.

Good night, good year, and good luck.

2009 predictions: let's see how we did.

2009-12-28T13:40:00.001-05:00

If you're curious, my midyear checksheet is over here.

Now, as for 2009...

Prediction: UNC's basketball team is going to kick some serious ass.

Result: I have to say, this one's pretty obvious.

Prediction: I'd like to release at least two records in the new year, one by Battle Rockets and one by Where the Buffalo Roamed. I think this is realistic.

Result: Neither came true. The WtBR record is finished, but is releasing in January of 2010. I don't consider this a loss, because I learned how to record and release a record in 2009.

Prediction: There are lots of cool music festivals in the triangle and I'd like to play a few. Specifically, I want to play Duo Fest in Durham.

Result: Played Duo-fest, had fun. I didn't play any others, but I got to work instead organizing my own festivals. I threw Let Feedback Ring #1, which was more of a megashow (7 bands @ Sadlack's on the 4th of July) but was a massive success. Now there's a LFR crew and we're working on the second Let Feedback Ring. This is going to happen in March of 2010 and is going to involve over 20 bands on at least 4 stages over the course of 3 days. I'm going to say this prediction came true and then some.

Prediction: It would be really cool to get on a Local 506 show with a post rock heavy hitter. I missed out on the Maserati show, I didn't know it was going on until recently. There will be another chance.

Result: This one's tragic as hell, now that we see what 2009 had in store for Maserati's poor drummer. I did play the 506, with Irata and Goodbye, Titan. Big sad, however, about Maserati. That ship has sailed and godspeed, Jerry Fuchs.

Prediction: The new Star Trek movie will make faithful Star Trek fans, such as myself, vomit with rage.

Result: I couldn't have been more wrong if I had tried. This movie was A M A Z I N G. The people who did vomit with rage, from what I can tell, don't enjoy things that are fun, enjoyable, etc.

Prediction: The Wolverine movie and Iron Man 2, however, will both rock.

Result: Iron Man 2 is out next year, and it looks good, but that removes any relevance whatsoever when it comes to an '09 prediction. The Wolverine movie was goddamn terrible... I gotta say, I blew this one.

Prediction: Where the Buffalo Roamed will be playing occasionally, generally we'll be doing long weekends. I'd like to do at least one week long stint on the road, maybe in the summer.

Result: Sort of accurate. There weren't any weeks on the road, but there were several long weekends. WtBR evolved nicely and, as things stand today, it's grown into a 3 1/2 piece. I said "sort of accurate" because we play pretty often. It's a much more serious band than it was at the start of the year or the end of last year. I can see us potentially doing two WtBR records in 2010 without having to actually work too hard.

Prediction: Battle Rockets will be playing a lot in the triangle and will do weekends on the road when we can.

Result: We did play a lot, like... a whole lot. Now we're hanging back, working on new stuff, kind of taking a rest from shows and I think we've earned it. No weekends on the road, but that's ok. I'll call this one accurate.

Prediction: I'll move into a house with heat (this is a big one!)

Result: The heat's on right now and I'm quite comfortable, thanks.

I'll probably make some top 10s and some predictions for 2010. Probably.

Cave dwellers... Toy Story 2 was ok... the biggest duo in town... don't think of it as the shortest day... think of it as the longest night...

2009-12-21T10:04:00.211-05:00

Where the Buffalo Roamed - Astronomers - Doombunny - Dec. 21st @ the Cave (Chapel Hill)

God it's early. Well, not quite, but it feels early. I'm listening to the recording of last night's show and, my cracked vocals aside, this is pretty good. Especially good for the new lineup.

In true WtBR fashion, we practiced once and then played a show. No exaggeration, that's the same way we did it for our first tour and it worked. We build the skeleton of the songs and then they grow and come to life over the course of our shows... and if you see us play you see the evolution. We are the world's first truly transparent rock band.

Dan Meier, who you may remember from our Tennessee Wolf Hunt, joined us on trumpet again. He lives in Colorado and can't be a permanent addition (if only!). Niq Meier (am I going to have to change my last name?) joined us on bass and it slowly dawned on me that, with him living in Asheville now, we have a full-time bassist now.

This was supposed to be a full weekend of shows, with two Asheville dates (Friday and Saturday), Sunday off, and then this date. Unfortunately, a massive snowbastard hit the Western half of NC and both Asheville shows got canceled. Lame lame lame. It would have been amazing to play three shows in a row with the Meiers. Crazy Germans...

Speaking of Meiers - Andy's mom and stepdad came to the show. How cool is that? They only live in, you know, Michigan!

Anyway. I do like the Cave. My favorite venues feel like natural phenomena, and Chapel Hill's Cavern Tavern feels like a place that was hollowed out of the rock by flowing water over millions of years. The subterranean waterway has long since moved on. In the 10,000 years since, various large predators have left signs of their passage on the Cave walls. Various tribes of Homo Nocturnalis have called the Cave their home to time immemorial. Using primitive sharpies, fashioned from seagull bones and hamster blood, they left tales of successful hunts. Stuff like "Jesus is gay, let the dead marry," and "Toy Story 2 was ok."

Ok, this is only cool to me because I'm an oddball, but someone's been wandering the bathrooms of West Franklin St. bars writing "Toy Story 2 was ok" on their walls. I've seen that simple tag in the bathrooms of the Reservoir, Fuse, and now the Cave.

My favorite Cave bathroom graffiti is definitely "Flying dracula that jacks off on you."

So what did we learn from this scattered intro?

Very little. Sentence fragment.

Solstice music.

I first saw Astronomers several months ago, when they played with the White Cascade. I can't remember who all was on the bill... I know the Lights, Flourescent played. Anyway, they were a three piece then and now they are four. One, two, three, four. This show was supposed to be show 3 of a 5-day stint for them, but the first two were canceled by the same inclement weather that shot the WtBR weekend to shit. I love snow... when it knows its place.

What these guys do is simultaneously bubbly and dramatically serious. Lots of rockout moves, lots of rolling on the ground. The rockout moves are cute, I liked it. Astronomers are a fun little band and their lightly choreographed stage antics increase that fun. The fact that they do what they do with a wry little smile - almost a wink to the audience - makes it for me. They don't take themselves too seriously, so it's easier for the audience to take them seriously.

Yet one of many inverse ratios inherent to the music world...

Right after they played Dan (Grinder) was trying to remember Niq's name. He guessed Nate, Nolan, then he made a mumbled guess that sounded to me like "Niar-Narny." I told him so and we laughed our asses off and figured out how it was spelled. We told Niq, and he seems to like his new name. Then we, collectively, drew the most ridiculous picture ever. I wish I had a scanner. Suffice to say, laughter did abound.

Niar-Narny's a pretty good bassist, so that you know.

Doombunny followed Astronomers and then it was our turn.

in the pack.

We started out with what, until now, was the traditional lineup - just Andy and me. We played "Wolf Wings" and then "Peace Treaty" as a duo, then invited up Niq for "North Dakota" and "Golgotha '98." Then the full lineup - three Meiers and a me - for "Dirty Bomb Stratocaster" and the set went from there into greatness.

For the record, my voice was pretty badly destroyed. I was dried out - I blame the weather - and I couldn't hold notes together to save my life. I recorded the whole set (a pretty decent sounding recording, too!) and I cringe every time I hear my hollered "You'll sleep when I'm dead" from "Wolf Wings." Anyway, I'm overreacting I'm sure. You hear your own fuckups much worse than other people do.

I had one of those moments, though, when you say something out loud and realize it is true as you say it. I LOVE THAT SHIT. I was talking to Nate, of Astronomers, and I paraphrase, but it was something like See, I'm not a singer. I don't enjoy singing. I write these songs and I don't trust anyone else to put the right emotion in them.

Bingo. Otherwise I wouldn't put myself through the pretense that I deserve a mic. It's a delivery system, not an end to itself. The lyrical content is the warhead.

My rhyming is a vitamin served without a capsule

The smooth criminal on beat breaks

Never put me in your box if your shit eats tapes

the city never sleeps

filled with villains and creeps

that's where I had to learn my hustle had to scuffle with freaks

Right, so following "Dirty Bomb Stratocaster" (remember, I was still telling about the set, then I skipped forward, now I'm skipping back because I wasn't done with the narrative) I sat down and Dan, Niq, and Andy Meier played a song called "Parkman (Ave)" which was SLICK and I shit you not. I've never heard Dan play trumpet like that, but he laid his head back and sank some serious breath into that fucking horn and it sounded amazing. He commanded the respect of the very walls like some nameless jazz messenger, sent in from the streets to declare his existence, and I want to think that a few heads turned involuntarily. Something is alive up there. Behold the clarion affirmation. "I'm alive." That's all it said, but that's all anything can say. The musical communication between the brothers spoke to something I can't do. There's something to be said for people you've known either all your life or all their life, and you can tell that bond, that intimate knowledge, when music is involved. Maybe it stands out like this because I had the opportunity to sit back and watch it happen, but "Parkman (Ave)" was the high point of the night for me.

Shit. "1980" was in there somewhere. Either before or after "Parkman (Ave)." "1980" sounded really good... and we played "Missouri" and "Permafrost," which both were spot-on. The three songs I just mentioned, all three included everyone, gave me an idea of what the future of this band looks like and the future is bright.

We closed on "Southport..." just Niq and Andy and me up there... and it was a wild and crushingly loud descent into monsoon rains via Soviet surplus helicopter gunship. I threw my guitar at the end. It's been a while since I've done that, but it was the right thing to do.

the beggars of paradise...

God, what a set. That felt really good. I almost don't want to tell about the next part of the night, it would be anticlimactic to talk about how we all loaded out and were hanging out behind the Cave, talking, when a little woman came up and was trying to beg money off of us... crafty little thing, used the foot-in-the-door phenomenon... pushy little thing, the classic Franklin Street panhandler does not comprehend the concept of "no..." somehow I was the slowest kid out of the parking lot and she was at the door of my truck trying to get me to give her my coat... no dice. I was not pleased.

I explained to her the futility of begging from musicians. Again, no dice.

We're paid in beer more often than not, and we still have to maintain these goddamn expensive toys of ours. It's like we're slaves to these things, these guitars and drums and basses, and if we play them right we break them faster, must replace them faster, and then there's this hole in the world we throw money into and loud, loud, music comes out.

It's well worth it, but don't ask us for money. You'd have better luck asking us for centaur rides.

*pictures to be added later. Check back around the New Year

Partying down in Noise Country... Jungian babblefish (babel fish?)... the old man and the C#...

2009-12-11T15:37:00.189-05:00

Corbie is Afraid of the Bear - the White Cascade - Goodbye, Titan - Dec. 11th @ Treetown (Raleigh)

It's getting cold soon.

Very cold, and there's a threat and a promise of heavy snows.

Heavy snows that snap branches. Images in my mind of ice storms that snapped Asheville into a strangely quiet still life, light refracting on iced-over branches like shards on the floor of a bombed-out cathedral. A strange, whispering sound, the wind through the pines in a strange way that I can only describe as an audible silence. So vivid, even four years after I left that town, and now every time there is a call for winter weather I picture the pure and cold land as it existed, as I walked in it and let the sharp and sacred air penetrate my very synapses, cleanse every hangover from my system, even the memory of the sensation. Echoes of Jim Carroll... I just want to be pure...

And the morning and the evening and the next day. Survival, and I'm immortal for now, but for how long? I've tested a lot of shaky bridges by running across them, clapping myself on the back in congratulations as mad water rushes by a hundred feet beneath. Dreams of unlikely landscapes, dreams of sinister weather. In my dreams I'm forever surrounded by tornadoes, dozens of them at a time, and I'm always driving when I see them. Sometimes they catch me and throw me through the air. Sometimes I just watch as they meander idiotically before suddenly turning and rushing my way. In my dreams I'm forever in these irrational mountain landscapes, following a high road that tends not to have a rail, coming across rivers swollen to rabid flood, rapids that could destroy houses. What does this all mean? What alien worlds am I visiting in my sleep... and why the constant danger? Just this week I had a dream that I was riding in a car with my uncle Tommy up this steep mountain road, straight up an illogically high mountain, and there was no guardrail and then a straight drop down a sheer cliff and across the valley the other mountains were stark and beautiful and none were even remotely as tall as ours. We would be riding bikes down this monster, and that terrified me (in the dream). I could picture myself going over the side, easily, and my teeth were chattering with the anxiety.

I'm always in motion, I'm always headed up some mountain but I'm never interested in the summit. Just the exploration of a new landscape.

But peril, peril is in the nature of everything I do. It's not a death wish at all, it's about getting the most out of life, but sometimes it makes me tired. It's the fine art of running on empty.

***

I got to Treetown, Nik and Jesse's fine showhouse, pretty close to 8:00. I sat down and talked to my friends and it was a good time until a girl I hadn't met before called me old. Naturally, she was butting into a conversation that had nothing to do with her and, naturally, she immediately congratulated herself on the cleverness of her statement.

"God, you're old!" was the clever statement.

28 is old? To who, first graders?

***

The White Cascade got started a little after 8:30. I've never heard them play with this kind of dynamics, Treetown was one of their best shows yet. The only thing missing were the vocals (no PA, vox run through a keyboard amp & indiscernable). Don't misunderstand me, I missed the vocals. I've seen the White Cascade enough to where I was hearing the vocal parts in my head and that helped.

Instrumentally, they were tight. This energy reminded me of their energy at Sadlack's, about a year ago, when we played together outside on a 20+/- fahrenheit day and the White Cascade, who had just changed their name from Mute (remember those days?) played a set matching the frozen weather to a degree.

In fact, that show came up in conversation a lot. Maybe because it's getting cold, maybe that's why, but the polar bear show was one for the record books.

I have this new pair of earplugs and they did the trick. I got to keep all the essential frequencies, but I also got to keep my hearing. Win/win!

The White Cascade's new stuff is really awesome. They're consistently coming into their own, evolving past their individual influences into a creature beyond. The drumming on the new stuff makes me think of the Cure for some reason, and I don't know what it is because it doesn't sound like Boris Williams' playing. There's definitely a lot of the '80s in the new stuff, the emotional post-punk stuff, and when you inject guitar work that is a collection of cascading drones and straight-up, motherfucking POWERFULLLLLLL BASSSSSSSSSLINES you end up with something that is not quite the sum of its influences, but rather the derivative of its own potential. I'm talking prime numbers, see, and the prime number that is the White Cascade somehow multiplies without gaining factors.

***

Set break... PBR... Matt, from my journalism class, arrived... we'd had our final a few hours earlier and he was sporting an enormous bottle of red wine and an oblivion wish... hell, we all get that sometimes... he looked like a man whose hangover would have a hangover the next day... so we both drank from the wine and the floor was still shaking with the persistence of resonance...

***

Goodbye, Titan played this one right on the heels of an oddity of a show down in Wilmington. It was a benefit, a show that happened for all the right reasons, but I understand that it was also a drunken bikerfest and that the other bands on the bill were playing AC/DC covers. Gross. So, we all had ourselves a seat and the natural forces took control and almost everyone felt it. In fact, I'm watching "Planet Earth" to try and regain some of the elemental energy.

Elemental - it's a big word for me. It's what a lot of my favorite bands sound and feel like, so here's what the latest Goodbye, Titan show was like.

A small crack forms in the surface of a glacier. The line grows slowly over the course of several hours. With a titanic shudder an iceberg thunders into the sea, throwing frigid water hundreds of feet into the air.

Wild dogs on the African savannah watch a frightened impala swimming awkwardly in a lake, where it jumped in a desperate gamble to escape predation. The dogs know it will come out, or drown.

The outer gases of an ancient star fall suddenly inwards and the extreme outer shell rockets outwards, the inner planets fold under the intense heat and pressure. The outer planets have their gaseous shells torn away and their dense cores are scoured without mercy.

A solitary polar bear sleeps beneath 15 feet of packed snow as 4 months of Arctic winter gives way to a slow dawn. The bear's head emerges and it blinks in the reflected sunlight.

***

The drunk girl who took me for an 800-year-old talked through their entire set (somehow talking over Goodbye, Titan at some points) had passed out, by the grace of some deity, by the end of their set. I set up, most of the people left, and I started playing.

***

This was my first solo show in quite a while, and my first in this direction. I brought all my amps (on top of that, I borrowed Allen's amp) and played these really spacey, minimalist songs. I build most of them around a single melodic line, a single riff, which I explore for 6 or 7 minutes. I brought a bunch of tools and used them to play guitar (coping saw, chisel, screwdrivers, etc). Here are a few things I learned...

*PATIENCE. I fucked up a bit on the first song (which I've since named "One Less Friend") because I wasn't patient enough with it. I messed up the rhythm loop because I forgot to count, I didn't take my time in establishing the build. It sounded good, but it could have been better.

*I need to do more than just make noise. For my second song I picked up the Spruce Bringsteen guitar and just started beating all hell out of it with power tools. It was kind of a mess, but at least it looked cool.

*It's ok to turn on a few distortions. When I play these songs at home I unleash serious waves of noise, which feels really good. I didn't do as much of that at the show.

I'm glad I did this. It was a learning experience and the music faithful sat and listened and appeared to enjoy themselves. I played for about 15 minutes and was going to quit after "Theme for a Tundra Ghost," but they made me not quit, so I played a solo version of "Protohuman." I rearranged the song a bit and took some liberties with the phrasing, expanded the melody some, and it felt really good. It was the high point of my short set, I think.

***

Beyond that there isn't much to say. I packed my gear and the party began dispersing, a few cats hung out but mainly people were headed out. I took a few PBRs for the road yeah, this should get me home and headed back to Pittsboro.

Do I even need to mention that I waited until I got home to drink them? What kind of a monster do you take me for?

the absence of caution... a tale of two DPACs... an absence of fear... looking for Batman, taking what we get... cats?

2009-12-10T00:57:00.321-05:00

Where the Buffalo Roamed - Birds and Arrows - Lionlimb - December 10 @ the Pinhook (Durham)

Writing as often as I do has had an unexpected side effect.

I'm starting to view everything - and I do mean everything - retrospectively even as it's happening. I write about every show I play (and some shows I don't play) and I play all the time. I guess it serves to reason that I would have a "how is this going to look written down/how am I going to write this down?" mindset, and I guess it serves to reason that this mindset would shift my internal narration forwards in time.

Compounding all this is my pesky insistence in writing accurate and honest representations of these nights, as I see them, and that gets tricky sometimes. Stay tuned, you'll see... sweet merciful crap, but I'm a lightweight.

*****

Andy came to town right about 4:00 and we plugged in and practiced in the sweat lodge. It's been cold (North Carolina cold, I know, there are colder places... so?) so we practiced with the doors shut (it seriously bugs my phoneline when you say it's cold and people have to one up you with some "OH, YEAH! Well, I'm from _______ and it actually gets cold there! You don't know cold!" I want to carry a suitcase full of trophies labeled "toughest motherfucker in the room" and hand them out any time someone engages in pointless one-upsmanship) and it warmed up pretty fast. We had a really unhinged practice, more of a catharsis session than anything, and it felt really good. It gets loud in there with the doors closed and the amps cranked. I wore my new pair of earplugs and they did nicely - more on that soon.

Recently I've been digging on a different style of guitar playing... bluesy tone and attack with way delayed phrasing and an emphasis on sustain. I'll work out a riff, establish it, and then intentionally drag the parts around until the notes are hitting way behind the beat, almost on the next beat. I'll play a riff for a bar, then hold the last note for four or six bars, just let it go until it starts to ring on its own. My two primary guitars have great pickups for this kind of thing.

I've been taking this liberal riff approach to its extremes. I've been working with s p a c e. I've been working with feedback, but in a different way. Feedback is part of space and space is part of the amp and the amp is the physical manifestation of the Sacred All. I've been working a lot with my gigadelay, a pedal I've barely scratched the surface of, but I've been looping recently. I don't want to rely too heavily on loops, but I do want to work out a coherent solo set. More on my solo work in the next writeup - you'll see.

So we played and it was good. Fucked with the makeup of "Southport" and "Permafrost" a little, added some crucial variations, and played a really grungy thing that'll probably become a song. It's based on a riff I wrote in '97 or '98 that I've been bouncing around for years.

Maybe now it'll see the light of day.

*****

I'm in my prime. It started at 23 and it hasn't ended yet because I haven't let it end, and every year has been the best yet because I am more and more the master of my environment with every passing year. I kind of wasted my teenage years, but that's what they're for, they're for a-wastin', and I kind of blew it in the first few years of my 20s but now I hang the keys on my wall to all these amazing machines I'm licensed to operate. Space shuttles, bullet trains, Batmobiles, ornithopters... 25 was amazing, 26 was weird and was kind of a waste but I learned a lot. That was the year of the Dead Bands, the last year in Greenville. I went through so many bands when I lived there, such a reckless time, absent of narrative, just a goliath wave of sensation... some good, some bad, some neutral... casual overstimulation... a carcinogenic pleasure wreck.

I'm going to have to write about the show before I forget to.

GET WITH THE PROGRAM, MAN

I know, right?

Birds and Arrows are one of my favorite local bands. They're just plain good, I can't really say anything beyond that, but I'm going to because you're expecting me to ramble.

By "you" I mean "me," because there's no guarantee anyone will read this fucking thing, but permit me the illusion.

This time around they brought their friend Thomas along on the pedal steel and he was a very nice guy and he wore an AMAZING cowboy shirt. It's unfair the kind of fashion that follows the B&A cats around... anyway, the Pinhook PA treated them well. Big acoustic guitars (I still think Andrea sounds her best on an acoustic) rolling into the room through the mains, monstrous midrange with rounded edges to keep the low strings from going khoom or the high strings from going shang thanks to the hand of soundcat Greg who was a very, very nice guy.

I'm listening to the new Flaming Lips. Again. You should be doing the same.

I didn't see mics on Pete's kit beyond the kick, but his snare just fucking CRACKED. It sounded like it was coming from everywhere at the same volume. That, and the toms... holy shit. Pete's a man with total control of his drumset, he's very conscious of tone. He hits the ride at this spot about 2/3 of the way up, a spot with a gorgeous bell tone, and I watched him hit this region every fucking time. Properly tuned toms sound deeper and richer, it brings out a warm, natural voice... like I said, Pete's a guy who knows his shit.

I also found out at this gig, while having a drink at the bar with Pete, Andrea, and Nick of Free Electric State, that Pete's painting on the front face of his kick is of Old Yeller battling a grizzly bear.

I never read the book, but apparently it happens. Old Yeller was not afraid of the bear.

This show's most memorable moment came during "Not Interested," easily. I was at the merch table, rooting through our suitcase o' swag for a sharpie that I never found, when they came to the part of the song where the guitar and all of the kit (except the kick) drops out and Andrea's singing "Don't look my way/because I know what you're thinking and/I'm not interested" over hand claps and I dropped what I was doing and turned to clap along and so did 4 or 5 other people. It made me feel really good that there were enough people there for that to work, that enough of us knew the album well enough to recognize the cue and clap on time.

There were enough of us clapping along to make it sound good, and that's something.

abstraction and its discontents

Lionlimb. Two guys from the home of my favorite radio show. Two guys on the road in a red Jeep Cherokee. With a miniature drumset of surprising tonality and a big Fender tube amp, with an infectious sound and a motherfucking heart.

These guys have a spirit of quiet heroism. They hung out, very polite and a little quiet, digging the music that was happening with these grins on their faces that said they got it, man!

It happened like this: their songs are exercises in abruptitude coupled with a vocal approach I had a hard time identifying at the show. I had to listen to their very good record before I understood this aspect, so let me get to that in a second.

Josh maximizes a tiny kit, a kick that can't be any bigger than 18" with a single floor tom and snare. Great tone from the little kit, but a lot of that is in Josh's celebratory drum style. He's obviously having a lot of fun and he's beating all hell out of this thing without sacrificing precision.

I love playing with other two pieces, I love seeing how they approach the canvas. Lionlimb's approach married commanding, undeniable drumming with deceptively clean guitar work. Stewart has a DS-1 and a Boss delay (I don't know which) and he maximizes them. I kept missing it, I never saw when he hit his pedals, but he had his delay set to stutter his guitar line and a clean, full, In Rainbows-esque Tele line would suddenly and unexpectedly go into a seizure like unto a deep, rapid tremolo.

Over this all - and I understand now, after listening to their eponymous, that the vocals should have been way loud - rides a disaffected voice. At first I thought it was a consciously bored vocal delivery, but the content is too unornamented and real for that. It's not apathy, either. There's plenty of pain here, frustration that could launch a thousand ships (just to have them languish in a harbor minus wind). No, this is a defense mechanism.

It took me two listens of the record to get this, but once I had the thought it made a ton of sense. The lyrical content is so raw and honest that it almost has to be delivered like this. This is the music of sensitive people who live in the real world. They want to say what they see, they want to say what they feel... so they do... but a yawning chasm of apathy opens in the path. They track it into the house. They find it in the change drawer. It helps them say what they so badly want to say without the sheer weight of the concepts sinking them into the hard soil where the cold lake winds blow.

Dig: these are lyrics about some sad shit. Sleeping through the day, waking up and staring at the ceiling, wondering if there's a reason to get out of bed. Songs about beautiful young couples huddled against bleak desolation ("our hands were warm but our bodies were cold"), songs about old eyes set in a youthful face. If you deliver this stuff like your heart's breaking it'll come off really sappy. This they avoid. Stewart's delivery is the delivery of someone whose heart's been broken for so long that it's just a functional part of his day. There's plenty of passion, but the batteries are drained, and any line could be the last rebelling gasp.

I can't stop listening to the record, by the way.

It's different from the live set. It's a delicate creature, beautifully recorded and mixed. There's a lot of piano on here, and it's welcome. The closing track ends with a piano line hypnotically repeating for six minutes - and once you realize that they're repeating it beyond its natural lifespan you almost don't want it to end.. The effect is similar to one of my favorite songs (Spiritualized's "Cop Shoot Cop"), it's repetitive and slow enough for you to analyze the artist's choice to make it repetitive and slow, their choice of chords and melody, as the song is still going. Then, even after that, it keeps going long enough for you to apply your analysis and test it.

Lionlimb are music for people who think and feel and I'll be happy to play with them again.

39 minute heart attack

We got up there and played. Good energy and I love the PA at the Pinhook. I can't say that enough. A lot of climbing, a lot of jumping around, a lot of fun in general. We recorded the show, but I can't really use it. I need to work out some kind of stereo crowd recording mechanism. I have enough mics and a good portable 8 track, I just don't have the right kind of stand.

A couple of the songs came out too fast, but we haven't played together since our fantastic Halloween show, so it's fine. We have a full weekend of shows coming up soon and that'll put us back on our feet.

The energy was great. A few people were out (it was kind of a sparse night) but they were a quality audience. Soundcat Greg was really nice and he treated our sound really well. "Permafrost" - our newest song - is growing nicely and it sounded really good. Our highest energy tunes are all benefitting from WtBR's evolutions in that direction - "Southport," "Dirty Bomb Stratocaster," the aforementioned "Permafrost..." I've been getting looser and looser in my guitar parts, finding what I can do within the songs. That's the beauty of getting to know these songs as band songs (rather than as solo tracks, which is what many of them started their lives as). You never know what they're going to be when they grow up.

Limbo ride.

Do I even want to tell you this next part?

I think I will. I trust you. Here goes.

I had more to drink than I should have, than I like to, and I had a nerve-wracking drive home. I'm usually so careful, I usually just have a few PBRs at the show (or Schlitzes, if it's a Reservoir show) and keep myself in a good state for driving home. Living in Pittsboro, the closest show is at least a 25 minute drive (Chapel Hill) and a Raleigh show can be 40 minutes away. Durham, even farther. Hell, I'm closer to Greensboro than Durham and it's not even technically part of the Triangle! Anyway, I'm conscientious about safe driving and I felt like such a bastard. I know there's always a choice, I know I should have been smart and asked to crash with someone, but at the time I didn't feel like I had any options. Can't really take a taxi home when you live two counties away...

I knew it was happening and I didn't finish one of my drinks, I gave it to Andy (who didn't have to drive), but I'd already goofed. I felt really fucking stupid, like I should be beyond basic mistakes like this... cursing myself until I made it home along the backroads to Highway 64 where it bisects Jordan Lake. The hawks and the eagles, so bold when the sun's out, asleep in their aeries, and I the only predator on the road.

Parade on an overcast day... of Durm and Durmites... the insanity defense...

2009-12-05T23:48:00.263-05:00

Battle Rockets - Scientific Superstar (CD release!) - Beloved Binge - December 5th @ MarVell Event Ctr (Durham)

I'm watching, I'm rolling with the moment and my mind is wandering but I'm totally zoned into the music, into the interplay, and then I always do this thing.

I realize that I'm going to have to write about the show later and I suddenly have this compulsion to "take it all in," and I kind of hold my breath for a few minutes and try to force total awareness

and it's all so silly

Really, it is
but it happens when I'm seeing a show. I kind of get these moments of "shit... am I paying enough attention?" but of course I am. If I'm comfortable enough to bop along with the tunes and let the landscape create itself, then I'm doing it right. I'm surprised at the detail I can recall when it comes time to write about a show, even if I never had a little frozen moment in which I forced myself to pay better attention.

It was the MarVell - the weird little upstairs venue by the Pinhook - and I was enjoying myself immensely. The family was there (they had been drinking) and I was there (I had been playing) and the Durm show crowd were out.

Everyone's in a band, everyone's involved. You can't turn your head without encountering someone who's in a band you've heard so much about, you've seen written up in the Indy, or that you know played a kickass show at Troika.

This was early evening in Durham. The beer was cheap, the DVD player was broken, and the vegans had taken over.

Be kind, rewind, to the point earlier when the sun hadn't quite set but thick cloud cover transmuted the light to a calm blue/gray and the Big Camera sank eventually over Durham as I took the exit. What the fuck? Parade? and the Christmas parade has just ended, or so it seemed, but this worked in my favor because parking was easy. The people would be back, of course, but for now the streets were ours and I pulled into a space as Beloved Binge arrived in their VW bus.

Upstairs with the gear. The gear on the stage. The guitar into the pedals. The pedals into the amps. The amps switched on. The music happened.

And we were loud.

REALLY LOUD.

I mean, I'm addicted. I'm addicted to the physical sensation of that kind of noise. I'm addicted to amps, lots of amps.

I just couldn't look out. I had a feeling that a lot of people there did not dig the level of sound we push. I don't know how to play quietly any more. I've seen the dark side of the electric guitar, the monstrous side, and I can no longer deny it. Can no longer say no to it. The wolf no longer scratches at the door, it curls at my feet at night. We sleep in the cold shadow of decency, a place devoid of restraint, where recklessness passes for civility and the forces of nature are our very currency.

So we played. Our communication was great and I think this was a really good set for us. Paul, of Scientific Superstar, joined us during "On the Fields of Battle" on his drums. I brought a tom and a snare, so during the middle of the song we had three drumlines going at once. Kickasssssssss. We've been improvving the end of "Conflict of Supermonsters" for several shows now and this was the best ending yet. We came together beautifully, we met in the middle with a part we hadn't played before and it sounded composed and purposeful.

We did overpower the PA, which was a little problematic, and we ended up losing our vocal lines and most of Reno's sampler parts. It happens sometimes.

I can't think of a weak song in the set and we received tons of compliments afterwards. Our decibel level was mentioned by a few people, which didn't surprise me, but they were all very understanding when I told them how important that level of noise is to me.

It was a good set and I was pleased. We played short and sweet and then we got out of the way. As it should be.

Afterwards I met the Secret Carrboro Ninja himself and he was as cool as I expected him to be. For my part, I was on cloud nine after such a good show, so I proceeded to BLAH BLAH BLAH him to death, but he didn't seem to mind. A sudden sound startled him and he scampered away up the wall and into an air duct, but I think I saw a camera flash from the vents later on.

Hey, look... a pony!

So Beloved Binge set up and were quickly playing. We were right on time. See, the MarVell needed us out of there by 9:00 so it could change back into a nightclub. So Beloved Binge were rocking by a little after 7:00 and this was fine. Lots of people were out, a respectable crowd of Durmites, so it didn't feel so early.

shoot you with my

Speaking of Beloved Binge, they're a talented little unit. On the road in a 40-year-old VW van, dressed in vintage colors you've never heard of, fine-tuned multi-instrumentalism and conversational vocals. They played a quick and effective little set. Everyone played short at this show, we pretty much had to, but their set was built on a humane variant of the hit-em-hard/hit-em-fast punk rock aesthetic. Rob plays his Tele through precious few pedals and they are maximized by discreet use of each. Rarely does he set more than one loop, preferring instead to split the rhythmic line with Eleni - who often piles unlikely instruments on top of her drumset and still manages to play them proficiency while drumming. I have to say, it makes my day when drummers multitask, and Eleni's one of the best at this. I mean, who else plays keyboards with drumsticks?

AWESOME.

I got flashbacks to Duo-fest '09 for sure, since all three acts on this bill played there (and that's where I met the others), but it was a fresh creature too. The evening had a tighter focus - three bands as opposed to a dozen plus three - and Beloved Binge surprised me with a Scientific Superstar cover.

It was a lot of fun, and then they were done. Such a good band.

gonna shoot ya/I'm gonna shoot ya with my b.b. gun

I think that one's called "Sam's Quick Stop." I could find out quickly enough, I have the CD, but I choose to trust my instincts right now. It's a far cry from swordfighting blindfolded, but I like to imagine myself into that kind of movie. Well, swordfighting movies. I'm less into blindfold movies.

Um.

So I drank some beer and the crowd was amazing and Scientific Superstar began to play.

This is my first time seeing them since they've gone trio. Junko joined them on vocals earlier in the year, but I don't know when. It's been a very full year. I met her the evening before, when she, Paul, Rob and myself went on the best radio station on the goddamn planet to promote the show.

It was a good interview, but that's another story entirely. I will tell you that I played "Protohuman" and "The Glaciers" recede solo (yes, on an acoustic) and I'm not entirely sure if it worked but I did it anyway.

Right, so SS was playing and I was nodding my head to it and a lot of dancing was happening and some of it was very awkward. Like, different parts of your body doing different popular dances of the '50s and early '60s awkward.

The dancing onstage however, was very slick. Scientific Superstar put on a very engaging stage show. I don't know what to call it, like everything they do their live element meets in the middle of so many different things that it's a new creature. It's like a gryphon or a centaur or a basilisk or whatever creature of legend you care to picture, something that somehow still works and is made better by the addition of potentially disparate elements.

More than anything, they give the impression that they're driving some kind of machine. I picture Paul in the control tower of this enormous mechanical beast on ten foot tires and he's hitting toms and snares and anything in reach with his drumsticks with that perpetual smile on his face. There's a crowd out on both sides of the street and this machine takes up the entire road, two full lanes and a turn lane in the middle, and Paul is forty feet up in the air steering it with percussion and gadgets. Directly below Paul, in the front, is Thomas and he's pedaling his heart out at the exact speed of the industrial funk angularity of his dangerous, dangerous basslines. Junko's out on this cherry picker arm with an enormous cannon on it and she's firing it into the crowd. WHUMP. Six tons of candy explode off the side of a building and rain down on a crowd of jubilant children. sheeeeee-KOOOF! She's launched a keg of PBR into the ballpark (what a shot!) and it's impaled itself on the flagpole. Fitl fitl fitlfflftlftlftl. Six hundred pigeons have escaped from the cannon and are making their way to the Pinhook for a round of drinks.

When I listen to Tom Waits I picture him headed down the road in a combination bicycle/pump organ with a maniacal grin on his face. The bellows go oooom ah oooom aahhh and the fifty year old wheels go weeee um skeeee um. He's one of many architects of Scientific Superstar's sound and, although the most obvious, he's only a part of the foundation.

Thomas rocked hard in a green Christmas tee, often leaning back to keep the heavy grooves emanating from his bass from toppling him forwards. Junko's performances are art, mixing elements of cabaret, lounge, and Japanese fan dancing that she laughingly insists in nontraditional. Paul rocks along behind the unlikely contraption that is his vertical drumset, himself as integral to the foundation of this odd little band as Mr. Bungle.

I think the Mike Patton references all come from Paul's vocals, now that I think of it. Not only do he and the great Patton have a very similar vocal quality, but a lot of Paul's vocals are recorded through a light overdrive, a lot like Patton.

A cold night in downtown Durm... not late... it sure feels late...

I've had two things in my head lately - Saturday Night Wrist by Deftones and Nothing's Shocking by Jane's Addiction. Great albums, both.

Family was there and with family I walked to the Federal. I'd been to James Joyce, but never to the Federal. Word was good.

I was a longer walk than I thought, but it was fine. We got there and made for a nice sized table. Smoke hung in the air and a wall of conversation and warmth hit me with the open door and immediately Neil Young was in my head. All once I thought I saw you/in a crowded, hazy bar and whatever. It felt kind of like the Westville Pub. Kind of.

I still get booking emails for that place from these weirdo booking agencies trying to book troupes of Chinese acrobats and one-hit wonders from twenty years ago.

So we had some food and the food was good. I didn't talk a lot, I had a Bell's Two-hearted and a chicken pesto panini and my uncle Peter ordered sweetbread, which I tried and liked. It was a good enough time, but going out to a bar with my mom and her boyfriend was odd. Not bad, just odd, and I'm not so sure I want to talk about it.

the last battle... rocket tallboys... Scooter McPurplecoat... a day without Daleks...

2009-11-14T17:44:00.153-05:00

Battle Rockets - the Last Tallboy - November 14th @ Sadlack's (Raleigh)

I'd been in a restaurant earlier that day and a woman was walking by with a little girl. I caught just enough of the conversation. The little girl was saying something that concluded with "...and I saw a bear."

"Were you afraid of the bear?"

Totally made my day. Amazing omen. I wanted to see where this conversation was going, but that option wasn't open to me.

Oh well. I heard enough.

I don't think this is going to be a very long writeup, and it just might be boring. See, I do my best writing when something goes wrong or when I have someone to make fun of. This show went over really well, without a hitch, pretty much a rock and roll lovefest. I might just mix in observations on the new Flaming Lips, because it's one of the most important rock records in a long time. Holy crap, they've really done it. There's all kinds of shit in here - the Lips are channeling Dungen, '70s prog, Dark Side of the Moon-era Floyd... they've even adopted the patient, noisy pacing of a Spiritualized record! More on that to come.

So I got out of work late and it frustrated me. I got really stressed, which I hate. I do a lot, but I don't think of myself as a very busy person. I partition my day very carefully so there's room for everything - homelife with Rachel, music (composition, performance, listening), writing, dogs, school, work, bookings, reading, cooking, eating, sleeping... and the occasional trip out of town. I keep a decent presence in Chapel Hill and Raleigh while living beyond the buffer on my 3 acres in Pittsboro - Camp Werewolf, as I call it. It rarely feels like a rush, though, because I've become the master of timing. So, any time my timing gets away from me (usually via circumstances beyond my control) it's kind of like a floodgate gets opened. This domino hits that domino hits the domino behind it and before you know it we've lost the Great Wall, it's been breached, and here come the hordes and shit gets out of hand (the center cannot hold, etc. the falcon cannot hear the falconer, etc.).

Anyway, that's the stress that hit and I knew it would hang around until I got to Sadlack's. My moods change very slowly and, in the unexpected extra hour of work, I'd built up a bit of anxiety that I knew would hang around for easily an hour and a half if not longer. SoIdrovehome, packedmyshit, drovetoRaleigh, unloadedmyshitorderedasandwich and as I was helping Reno unload his vehicle and as my friends were arriving I started calming down and returning to the planet. All was back on schedule, all was green.

Fun fact: I can be a little neurotic! Now I've written about it! No sense in keeping secrets! I wasn't going to anyway!

At some point in the narrative this fiercely determined lean guy with a wild, gray mohawk and falcon eyes pulled up on his scooter and drove it right onto the patio, between me and the picnic tables, to leave it by the door. He wore a purple trench coat - Jack Nicholson wore this same color in '89 - and heavy leather biker boots. Later on that same night I would recognize him as the guy who verbed noun - in public - out on the Sadlack's patio. Ballsy.

This guy has to be Iggy Pop's second cousin, but I can't figure out if he comes from the crazy side or the genius side.

So I ate my sandwich and I changed the strings on my guitar and by then it was 8:00 and it was time to play so we did.

You fell down.

photo by Paul Gallant

I played pretty sloppily, I have to admit, but we had a ton of fun. We started on "Flying Falling," but we hadn't even finished setting up the PA (d'oh) so we stopped mid-intro and plugged in the left main. OOPS. Played "Flying Falling" successfully the second time and it sounded really good.

Followed up with "Forced to Retreat" (in which I totally botched this one part, but made up for it in the end) and led into "the Glaciers Recede." Fucked up a bit on "Conflict of Supermonsters," during the first part, but I managed to at least keep things in the right key & the improvved end came out nicely (we've been doing that). Righteous version of "On the Fields of Battle," "Protohuman..." closed on "Patience." I messed with the ending a little bit and I need to work on that. It ends with a really frantically strummed part with a droning open D-A-D on the low three strings but I fucked around with it a little and lost the drone because I was focusing on the high strings. It sounded ok but I want to work on it more to where I can work in a melody without losing the frantic strumming.

It's doable.

We played and it felt good. People liked it. Isn't that the point?

rock and roll can never die.

photo by Paul Gallant

The Last Tallboy were soon up and running and I was immediately taken to a righteous place.

These guys have been playing select shows around Raleigh for the past 6+ months and I've heard they're really good, but they don't have anything recorded! It builds the mystery, but it also has me totally at a loss in describing their sound. I lamely repeated something about "it's like really good southern rock" before hearing them playing and holy shit
it's not that at all.

We're in 39th year of the 1970s and these guys are the water boiling within the wave crashing down upon your goddamn pitiful sandcastle and these guys are the thin water that runs backwards over the sand after the retreating wave, playfully carrying your goddamn plastic shovel back into the gigantic sea where you, a creature of lungs and opposable thumbs, won't be going. They're music about edges, divisions define them. It's the blur between sobriety and debauchery, between trust and recklessness, sharpened to a razor's width and explored.

They'll be riffing along, you recognize what they're doing because here's the guitar riff and it's in parallel with the bass riff, hey, I dig this! Kick in the MXR phaser on the Paul and here comes some reliable drumming, totally steady, totally rocking and then suddenly bart aims the mic and leans into the immortal rock and roll prayer that sounds to all the world like the howl of a thousand eagles dropping from a stormcloud to circle in enormous tornadoes of righteous bliss. Lo, I was rapt at attention their entire show. Usually it's easy for me to watch a band and piece a few things together and apply all these rock aficionado definitions or whatever but during the Last Tallboy's set I wasn't completely a creature of sentience. I was a dumb kid again, fascinated, totally ignorant of the workings of guitar, bass, drums and voice, but still in love with the things they could do together in 4 1/2 minutes.

The roots? Shit, this was rock and roll. I don't want to mention bands they were probably influenced by, because I would want to mention these bands as contemporaries. Ya dig? I could just as easily see these guys sharing a bill with Big Star as with Free Electric State.

At one point the crazy old man who took a shit on the bathroom floor during Let Feedback Ring #1 walked past Allen, Tilson, and myself and threw a hardback copy of Cold Mountain in the recycling bin. We had no idea what we had just witnessed, so we laughed ourselves stupid and that was the show we played.

the 27 club

2009-11-10T21:51:00.000-05:00

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.

2009-10-31T21:30:00.497-04:00

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.

Soaked...

2009-10-27T20:13:00.218-04:00

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.

2009-10-10T23:14:00.126-04:00

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...

2009-10-08T14:44:00.521-04:00

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..."

the weather machine... barhounds in paradise... "see you guys next year!"...

2009-09-26T08:18:00.248-04:00

Battle Rockets - Basalt - Taylor Bays - JMO - September 26 @ Maya Gallery (Greensboro)

The band was as useless as is possible, a jammy breed along the lines of Rusted Root and Black Crowes, and the compact little crowd was digging it more than is healthy. A woman in matching denim jeans and jacket, a speedfreak James Dean transported to 1983, danced her ass off. A few recent converts of hippiedom flopped around near the stage. They were too clean to have been hippies for long and this music was too sterile to attract any of the true, grunged-out, sons and daughters of patchouli.

Hovered over a beer at NY Pizza, across the street from Maya, we momentarily entertained the idea of just heading back to Pittsboro and playing in my shed... but then we realized that this cultural nightmare had nothing at all to do with the show we'd come to play. There were too many children in the bar, and that really weirded our shit right out. People had come out to see this forgettable band and they'd gotten ripped with each other and their kids were wandering in and out of the bar. "Ey!" shouted this llama of a woman, uncommon antagonism in her voice. A ten year old stops in his tracks and turns to face her where she sits, maybe 7 feet away from him in the smoky, noisy bar, "Gum ere!" she continues, her face slurring and sliding too. "You's get so big!"

Sometimes to be early is to be lame. Here's what happened:

shitshitshitshithurryhurryhurryhurry

I'd been at work and was headed home, listening to Sound Opinions, and hoping to leave by 4:30. I got home about 4:15, which didn't leave much time to pack the Millenium Falcon... so I packed and ate in a crazy fucking hurry and we were out the door by maybe 4:40.

If I'd done my homework a little better I would have known that the show was slated to start at 8:00, not 6:00, and we not only would have had a more laid back time of things and we may have been able to miss that horrible, horrible street band.

Approaching Greensboro by hovercraft
the weather: steady rain
the soundtrack: U2, "Pop"

We made excellent time. It's really not far from Pittsboro to Greensboro and we showed up at maybe 5:40, but probably earlier. I wasn't really paying a lot of attention to the time and the interminable grayness of the atmosphere made it feel a lot later than it really was. We made it to Tate Street... we had heard scattered talk of a Tate Street Fest going on the day of the show... and the section of the road Maya's on was closed off with barricades. We circled a few blocks and made it to the other barricade, where I told a nice guy that we were playing Maya and needed to park. He let us pass (these aren't the droids you're looking for) and we parked the Falcon a block from Maya.

Now our narrative intersects its own intro, because this is the point in which we encounter that innocuous jam band and realize that we're here, in Greensboro... at a drizzly, underattended street festival we care nothing about, with two hours to kill. We ducked into Maya upon our arrival and they were happy to see us but told us how early we were, so we went across the street into the little pizza bar and ordered drinks.

Magic Hat #9 is much better on tap.

We wandered around a little, kind of terrified, and ended up back in the bar for another round. People were losing their balance and their volume controls were stuck on 10 and the jam band played on, jangly herald of a stillborn hangover. A lot of these people were totally normal, they were anyone you'd see... only they'd been transformed and mutilated over the course of a celebratory bender that might just destroy us all. Open hostility in a few spots. Reno and I were admiring this series of awesome photos by a local artist, they're these staged shots emulating a turn-of-the-century boxing match, complete with amazing sideburns and handlebar mustaches. This girl stops and talks to us for a minute and she's telling us what building the photoshoot took place in.

I'm saying I really like them but that I don't know Greensboro well enough to know the building she means. I say we're from the triangle and don't come to Gboro too often, to which she takes offense. I mention our show, I don't even say she should come see us, I just say "Yeah, we're here to play Maya in a few hours," and she launches into "Well, you need to come here more often! It's your sister city!" and she's really pissed, something we said really killed her buzz, so she spits out "enjoy your show" and disappears into the drunken swarm.

What the fuck are they serving these people? Did we forget the complimentary adrenaline shot when we ordered our drinks?

Dig Maya. Dig the books. Dig the art, untrained. Dig the records, classics and forgotten plastic together. Dig the people. Dig Maya. Gotta go across the street and get out of this bar before the entire place descends upon us like a gigantic toddler having a violent tantrum.

***

There weren't many people out, not for a street festival, and soon the rains came. Dutiful techs in ponchos took apart the stage, the circus most people identify with live music goes home until next year. "See you next year," is what the band said. They didn't even bother to promote their next show. Maybe they knew an inconsistent audience when they saw one? Maybe they play once a year? Who knows?

Who cares?

***

When we walked in the door to Maya we saw that Taylor Bays was already playing and I cursed a little. I hate missing the other acts on a bill, even for a few songs. I think he'd just been playing for maybe ten minutes, but we made sure to catch the rest.

He definitely had the most people out and his friends were really good to him. He played an electric and sang through an amp. His songs were highly emotional, as was his guitar delivery. His friends came up and played along on a snare drum under a blanket and he had a ton of fun, the aux percussion contributed nicely to his set. He said hi to his mom, who'd come out to see the show, and finished by covering a sweet, sweet song from the 20s (?). He didn't know the decade, the composer, but he'd heard it on a cartoon once and wasn't able to excise it from his head afterwards.

If only more artists had that kind of honesty, re: influence.

It was a very sweet and optimistic song and then he was done.

Nice suit.

JMO, J. Marshall Owens, was wearing a very nice suit. In fact, I saw him in the bar during the fest thing and the way he was dressed spoke and it said "Yo, I'm playing a show today."

I wish I could say more, but he played a really short set and vanished immediately afterwards. We talked to him briefly and he seemed nice enough, but he really wasn't completely there. Weird.

Somewhere in there Adrian and Katie gave me two slices of pizza that saved my life.

the broken toilet of human transcendence

The rain pounded the town into submission. People retreated inside and put the windows of their eyes up to the windows of their buildings and watched as everything in sight received a liberal soaking. We had parked the Millenium Falcon directly outside of Maya after the street festival, an ideal spot, and we still got soaked to the bone loading our gear in.

So we set up and we played and the set went pretty well. Not a whole lot of people out but the ones who were out were serious! We sold some shirts and Maya bought almost all our CDs to sell on their shelves! Gotta love a venue that'll do that for you.

I didn't bring my full set of amps, I didn't want to be my usual deafening self in a spot like Maya. We were loud, but regular loud, and the people who were there seemed to dig it. "Glaciers" was pretty righteous and I fucked up some in "Conflict of Supermonsters." We played short and sweet and then it was Nicky's turn.

The Weird shall inherit the kingdom (and they deserve it)

Nicky (aka Basalt) played solo. That's the size of the unit right now and she is talking about forming a band, which would be cool as hell. The songs work nicely solo, the waves of chorus riding almost parallel to her guitar sound in a weird mix of tonal drone and detached atmosphere. Smoky, patient vocals that build upon, rather than follow, her tricky jazz phrasings.

The content is weird, and she stopped every few songs to remind us of how strange her lyrics can be. It wasn't apology, though, not from Nicky... more of a public service announcement. The oddity of it all is what builds the mystique, though, and you end up with this audience-as-anthropologist dynamic as the listener tries to inhabit Nicky's unique mindset as communicated through her storytelling. She finished her set with a "normal" song, as she put it, but it's the strange songs that make her who she is.

Then it was over. I tried on almost all of the Basalt shirts before settling on one and I'm wearing it right now.

Approaching Pittsboro by rhino sled
the weather: wet roads, dry clouds
the soundtrack: Spiritualized, "Ladies and Gentlemen we are Floating in Space"

I'd found an Asimov book I'd been hunting for to complete my Robot Series collection (the Robots of Dawn) and was driving home in a good mood, though I was tired. The rains were pretty much done by the time we got to 421 and we rocketed along the damp roads with our eyes peeled for deer by the road... creatures of simple minds, living only to procreate and kill themselves on the rushing grills of Chevrolets.

I was home by 11:00 and in bed by 12:30. Nice.

cross the pit... through the narrows... smell the hot dogs/smell the grill... too many hot dogs... door's on the right....

2009-09-25T22:26:00.316-04:00

Where the Buffalo Roamed - Blag'ard - RichardBenjamin - September 25 @ Incognito Dojo (Winston-Salem)

I love house shows, especially properly orchestrated house shows, so when Aaron Brookshire (the younger brother of Josh Brookshire, who I know from my Greenville days) invited us to play the first show at his new showspace I very quickly said "we'll do it!"

It was a recipe for success... an apartment not unlike King's Arms in Greenville (GVL people - you know the deal). Aaron's place is surrounded on all sides by empty apartments and is in a shady enough neighborhood when something would have to get really hairy before cops were called. Basically, if you know your neighbors and they know you there will be no trouble. Aaron's a smart kid and he did his homework. The foundations were as solid as they come.

Approaching Winston-Salem by weather balloon.
the weather: intermittent drizzle
the soundtrack: Zorch, "demo"

It only took an hour and fifteen minutes to get there and the driving was easy. I had "repaired" the Falcon, replacing a broken window with particle board, epoxy and super glue... the glue held, the rain kept off my shit. The spot was easy to find and I was soon hanging out in a parking lot with Liz, Richard and Davey... testament to the cohesive power of connections forged in the dingy fires of Greenville.

Andy got a little lost, but we were all in the right place by go time and WtBR started the night... started the space, even. We were the first to plug in at what promises to be a fortress of music and debauchery, I only hope this kind of momentum continues.

The first thing I noticed, even before we played, is that it felt like Greenville. See, there was this core of people there who really dug music and who were really jazzed to have it in such an honest way. We were happy to cram into a little bedroom and have as many of them join us as would fit. Others would be listening from beyond thick walls and that is fine. We did what we came to do - we played loud, we went a little bit into the wilderness. The only light in the room was a nightlight and it cast shadows across the wall older than language, jumping shadows, giant shadows... the great spirits whose name are Void who long haunted our ancestors, hunted by giants, cats and bears and even at night, retreated to the safety of their cave... the sacred fire throwing shapes against the wall to jump and leer... primitive man has no choice but to delight in the devil... that devil inside before the devil even has a name... here's a destructive force we don't have to quantify... we're fucking crazy with exhaustion from dodging panthers and hyenas all day... let's pretend for a second that we're the predators... let's throw our giant shadows across the cave walls...
BOO, MOTHERFUCKER, I'M TWELVE FEET TALL but then we learned language, philosophy, good, evil... the devil became a quantity just like anything and we're taught to fear it... taught it stinks like rotten eggs... so whenever we meet our instincts halfway between society and psychosis we yell "get behind me Satan" and all that hashaddled bullshit... when we should be celebrating the dark core that helped us survive the wild and burning savannah and enabled continued existence square in the center of the food chain.

Nonessential civilization fell away a little and our middle animals came out like lycanthrope expressions of feedback & snare hits & growling & yelping. "Peace Treaty" and "Wolf Wings" came out fantastic. "Southport" and "Dirty Bomb Stratocaster" were the wild ones. "Golgotha '98" we played faster than I could keep up with, but that's okay. Shit, it's a house party.

I made an amazing discovery. When I'm standing on a bass drum I can put one foot on each ring and rock it back and forth. This sounds really cool when I rock the inner head towards the hammer of the kick pedal, it rings out loud as hell. Gotta try that one out at the next Reservoir show!

Jesus loves bikers too!

Blag'ard played with the tightness and refinement I have come to expect from them. Joe's guitar technique is matched by his compression unit, which accentuates the snap and harmonics, creating a Strat sound of surprising depth and clarity. Every two piece has their own expression and Blag'ard's is still one of my favorites. Adam has an eminently digable drum style, he can drive a song without pushing it. Josh, in attendance, swung his long black hair around and generally rocked the fuck out. Andy and I bounced around a little too. Hell, it's rock and roll. It's okay to move around sometimes.

The crowd was young and the crowd was into rock and roll. Faith, man... I have faith. These kids live the way I live and Aaron is their prophet. I mean they look around the world, you see, and they don't see what they want in the world, so they make it happen. They make it exist. Aaron doesn't moan that bands he digs don't come to town often enough, he invites them to play his apartment. Aaron doesn't settle for what he's handed in the musical world, even in the independent canon (and, face it, Pitchfork can be as barren a landscape as Billboard), he does his homework and he finds the good shit, size be damned.

HAPPY EIGHTEENTH BIRTHDAY! FO REALZZ!

Aaron gave his lady friend a great birthday present in this show. Niiiicely done.

I'm sure there was a narrative to this evening, but I can't find it. I keep wandering off... I want to write some unifying piece, I want to write the Great American Music Story, something so cohesive and caustic that it will speak to Those in the and that will be of zero interest to people blissfully drowning in a sea of Bonos and Will.i.ams and Rascal Flattses... the sacred tirade of the dispossessed radiant. See? I'm doing it again. I waited a week to finish this writeup and this is what's happening.

Shut up shut up shut up.

I'm kind of frustrated. I shouldn't be, but I am, so if I give it a name and write briefly about it I can get back to the writeup at hand....

HERE GOES

I should be thrilled. I am thrilled... I'll be taking over in the Spring as the editor of the Wake Tech paper. I've wanted to give this a shot for a while and it's come faster than I thought. I've been riding high on that since it became official, but this achievement is currently (illogically) overshadowed by gadflies. WTF, mate?

I responded to a call from sonicfrontiers.net maybe 2 weeks ago... they said they needed music writers... so I emailed them. I was honest, I told them what I do, and didn't hear back. This is fine, I send out a lot of feelers in (music/writing/life) and the great majority of them are dead ends. So what?

They surprised me today by writing back. Yeah, they turned me down, but they did so with a passive little form letter... talking about "pursuing other staff writers" and all... the classic "it's not you, it's me..."

Form letters are barnacles on the hull of any publication. A publication that oversensitive to people's feelings is missing the point of criticism... and here I am writing this in a perfectly google-able blog? Whatever. It's totally irrational, but having an honest email answered with a feelings-cushioning form letter is a bit insulting and it's taking up space behind my eyelids and it has no business there.

I proofread that paragraph and forgot my point. That's probably why they turned me down. Anyway, the point (aha! found it!) is that I prefer to get turned down in a way that causes growth... here's how they should have written me...

Mr. Hill
We've looked over the writings you sent us and we're pretty confused. What are these about? We're a music website and, from what we can tell, your blog isn't actually about anything. I'm sure you like music, but in the entry we tried to read you talked about your truck for at least 600 words, told aimless stories about your friends, and declared war on the Wookiee homeworld before we lost interest.
Why don't you give this thing some practice? We recommend listening to Paleface on repeat for the next week and then writing your first reactions in human blood... preferably your own.

Or something to that effect. I really need to focus.

the echo chamber approached midnight (and midnight approaches the echo chamber)

You can open your eyes now. We're back to the narrative but we aren't out of the haunted house.

So Aaron plugged in this old Teisco (was it a Teisco? Something like that) and his friend went fuckwild on the drums and this happened for about 25 minutes. It was a jangly, psychedelic, deadly thing and it scampered off across the highway to mate when they were finished with it. I think there was a Brian Jonestown Massacre song in there somewhere (Liz pointed that one out) but it was a badass ride down the face of a collapsing glacier.

Somewhere in there I ate too many hot dogs. I ate them cold, they'd been off the grill for a while and I didn't know if there were any buns so I just ate three hot dogs for no goddamn reason at all and it started to hurt.

It was good to be around Davey again because he is an absolute maniac. He's this odd, impossible mix of harmless and apocalyptic, an omnisexual avenging angel. I remember, long ago in Greenville, 7,000 drinks ago, when he chased a car out of the 4th Street Tavern parking lot after this battle of the bands that Million Dollar Sunset played. He started shit with some guy and no one knows the reason, but before we knew it he was hitting the side of the guy's car and the guy was scared and Davey was chasing the dude's car out of the parking lot and shouting his own bizarre brand of threats as the taillights receded into the cop-heavy night.

1 2 3 4 i declare thumb war

So Davey and Richard and Liz set up in the bathroom and they began their act. Outside the bathroom, looking in, it was like a still life. Liz and Davey sat beside each other, Liz with tambourines and Davey with his sampler. Richard with his acoustic, sitting in the floor.

They got started.

Some John Frusciante happened first, that song I love to hear (and I prefer Richard's version to the original) and then another song in the same vein. Things went from there to an evolved place, percussive acoustic lines over Davey's spacey beats with Liz (tambourine + voices) and even some deadpan vocals at parts, with Davey and Liz both coming in behind Richard with unexpected tonality.

Somewhere during their set I went into the bathroom with them and stood in the muddy shower, listening. Aaron came in with his mandolin at one point and started playing "along." He was pretty drunk and it was pretty entertaining.

Richard brought the casio saxophone and led into a fantastic and ferocious rap jam, like a minstrel with a fife transforming into latter day endtimes poet. Themes of death, themes of decay... "we will all face this..."

Absolutely fucking raw. Absolutely fucking essential.

songs that shall never die.

Songs never die, it's people who just forget to keep playing them. Liz and I made sure that didn't happen to us. I borrowed Richard's guitar and we played a few old Awesome Heroes songs... most notably, "1 in 6" and "Ambassador to the World" and about half of "Ivory." I can't remember how to play "Blues on Monday" and Liz didn't have the lyrics in her head any more for the others. Joe (Blag'ard) hung out and listened and appeared to enjoy himself.

Not much to say past this point. We hung around, we talked. A crew showed up and locked themselves in the bathroom. We all stood in the pit and had our pictures taken. Aaron threw up and we agreed not to walk in his vomit.

Approaching Pittsboro by bullet train
the weather: ex-rain
the soundtrack: Beastie Boys, "Paul's Boutique" & Liars, "Drum's not Dead."

This was one of the best drives of my life. I was so at peace, so jazzed to be behind the wheel. I'd been drinking water all night and my head was so clear I barely recognized it.

More nights like this, please.

***

10/5/09... post post post postscript...

How did I leave this out? At one point during the night Aaron somehow put his elbow through the glass of his door, destroying one pane utterly and causing massive amounts of blood to happen. He wrapped it himself and soldiered on. I think it was Richard asked him if he needed stitches and he changed the subject.
Tough kid.

0 and 3... round robin vs. hawk vomit... It's Always Sunny in Carrboro...

2009-09-17T13:57:00.027-04:00

Where the Buffalo Roamed – the White Cascade – Lollipop Factory* - September 17th @ the Reservoir (Carrboro)

Goddammit, look at me… it’s been a week and I still haven’t touched this writeup. I’ve been going to school (and kicking ass at it) and I’ve been going to bed early (kicking ass at that too). Watching Netflix, talking about this concept record I want to do but generally not touching it. Ask me about it sometime, it’s going to be called the Alaskan. Heavy shit… crime, tundra ghosts, helicopter accidents.

This isn’t about the Alaskan. This has nothing to do with the Alaskan and I have no idea why I brought that up, beyond simple self-promotion. This is about the show we played on September 17th.

I think I was tired that day, but that’s not even part of the narrative. The narrative begins a little after 7:00. Andy rolls up and Rachel and I are sitting outside with the little dog and the frogs are sitting in the pond; regal, sleek, and lazy. I hate semicolons. We kicked around for an hour or so, loaded up the Falcon, and rolled to Carrboro.

Upon arrival, Wes tells us that Lollipop Factory is down for the count. David is suffering badly… some freaked-out elvish flu… I know as well as anyone how hard it is to play guitar and sing when you’re down with the itis. It would take all the druids in the greater Orange County area chopping off goat balls and painting themselves with poke berries ‘round the clock just to get him better and that would not be an instant fix… these kind of holistic cures take time.

Now I remember, I wasn’t tired, I was getting over a head cold! Right, that’s what it was. This was my first day better but my voice was still a bit out. I knew I couldn’t possibly be losing my mind, not this young, and not again!

So Andy and I talked a minute with Wes, we planted the seeds of a round robin… we told him about our experience at Springwater with Pushy Lips. He was receptive! I heard some guys a few seats down talking about Pushy Lips and Irata and some other bands I know, so I tried to strike up a conversation but one of them looked at me like I’d just sprouted antlers. So be it. They stuck around for maybe half of the show, so that’s a plus.

The show would start after the season premiere of “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” (PROJECTION SCREEN!) which would be on at 10:00. We were so very down with this and our feet were anxious so Andy and I walked down Franklin and ducked into the Cave for a little pre-show powwow with Adam of A Rooster for the Masses.

Adam’s a really nice guy. We met on the internet, in a seedy chatroom, and it took him six weeks to wheedle my phone number out of me. Six weeks! Unreal!

By that I mean, he and I have been talking back and forth on Facebook for a while and it was nice to get to meet him in person.

Not much to say, pretty much hovered there and talked while some guy played innocuous acoustic ditties and occasionally gargled behind his harmonica. The Cave had plenty of people in it already, as it should have.

Rooster have done the work and deserve the accolades.

Andy and I walked back down Franklin to the Reservoir and we drank some Schlitz.

Whatever you are, if you're up there, you gotta help me.
My own inner dialogue has been running in this fucked-up mix of Bill Hicks, Hunter S. Thompson, and movie-era Captain Kirk. I want to be clever, it's so important to me, but I have to consciously stop myself from directly plagiarizing these poor people who never actually meant to inspire me.
Captain Kirk isn't even “people.” Goddammit...

We and the White Cascade agreed to do this round robin thing (I absolutely must come up with a better fucking name than “round robin…” “round grizzly bear?” “dragon party?” “Hawk vomit” is still a popular option) so we took our time setting up, taking plenty of breaks to watch the season premiere of “It's Always Sunny...” God, funny. Very, very funny. We got started a little after 10:30 and WtBR led the charge.

There were a few people in there, maybe 15 or so, and they sat at the bar and they paid attention and they appeared to enjoy themselves. We played “Golgotha '98” faster than ever before and it was a fantastic and ferocious thing. “Wolf Wings,” “Peace Treaty...” our heavy and dark shit always sounds great in this kind of room. The instrumentals, “Dirty Bomb Stratocaster” and “Southport,” were a bit unhinged and a lot of fun. We seriously need to write some more songs in the rockout vein. It's as fun now as it was when Chuck Berry was turning America's teens to the amoral dance fiends who ended up being our parents...

Weird.

I've never seen the White Cascade play this wide open. There was mothergoddamnpigfucking drive behind things that were happening, the noise of it all hurt so good. We went back and forth three times, I want to say, but my memory can’t be trusted. Hawk vomit warps time (I’ll bet no one’s ever put those words together before). I’ve become so used to identifying a set by the established length of 45 minutes that I lose all concept of time’s passage when sets blur together. We played three songs for their every two.

It came together the most beautifully during the White Cascade’s last turn, right after we'd played “Southport.” They were up there in a flash and they didn't so much as launch into “Sunblind” as they pushed it off a fucking building and rode it down. It was the final maniac ride of an overheating hot rod and they knew if they let their feet off the gas, just for a second, the engine would explode and it would never know road again.

Matt Cash had this slurring precision, this confident intensity to his bassline and he pushed the walls a little farther apart with his P-bass. Robbins made some pretty classic rock faces, haven't seen those from him before... I know he specializes in swirling eddies of cymbal wash but I don't think I've seen him feel it to this degree. It was pretty amazing. Guess, for his part, keeps a cool expression. He's a dedicated pedalhead and I suppose that's the face of concentration. For some reason I can never identify or remember his individual pedals, but I suppose it's because of his approach. Most guitarists (myself included) treat their pedals as weapons in an arsenal... he treats his like ingredients in a recipe. What you get in the end is unidentifiable by individual definitions but is obviously the sum of its parts.

They ended with a question mark, with this J. Spaceman noise build they've been doing for maybe six months. It functions nicely within a set, yet it doesn’t do well as a set closer. Considering the galactic energies erupting from “Sunblind,” especially this time around, I would vote that they lead into “Sunblind” from their noise build. A good example of this kind of build is from Spiritualized's Live From Albert Hall... the first two tracks... only, instead of the noise building into the supreme chillout of “Shine a Light” we build into the juggernaut that is “Sunblind.” For fuck’s sake, that song’s like watching a Concord take off. It’s like waterskiing behind a PT Boat… through a minefield… in the Mekong Delta... at night… on acid… Take the noise build, build it until the audience is just about to lose bowel control, then launch mercilessly into “Sunblind” and end the show there. Wham, bam… encore would be impossible and impermissible… anything in addition would only detract from the sympathetic fury that is rock and roll.

All parties involved went home from this show feeling like they’d done something important… because we had. This was the most fantastic time in history, except for all the other good shows.

Life’s pretty rad. Love fest, flower power, etc. Went home… went to bed… woke up… took a test… ACED IT.

*3rd time’s a charm.

Both times WtBR has been booked to play with Lollipop Factory there’s been some bizarre factor beyond our control that’s prevented the show from taking place. We’re going to give this another shot in January and I won’t walk under any mirrors or break any ladders in the meantime.

Where the Buffalo Roamed and Pushy Lips corner and capture the Tennessee Wolf and it is us: a tale of crisis and redemption in three acts.

2009-09-05T10:09:00.325-04:00

Act Three: Nashville

Christ, nobody's going to read these.

These are way too long and I know this entry is going to be really long too. There's a lot to cover and if anyone has been able to read the entries up to this point they're probably sick of the negativity. I've written ranting, rambling, unhinged nonsense and I'm only serving to make people think I'm crazy or just pissed off.

I'm praying to something I believe in, whatever that is, to grant me the strength to write this anyway. Batman, if you're up there, I'm banking on you to pull me through this. I'll settle for salvation a la Captain Kirk or Godzilla as well. Maybe it takes the form of Captain Kirk riding Godzilla to victory in a saddle he fashioned himself, smashing up the lecture hall at UNCA for some reason. It could happen!

Captain Kirk (verb) - to simultaneously get in a fight with and have sex with another person. Jeff did not finish college because of all his Captain Kirking and was forced to take a job delivering pizzas.

focus, motherfucker.

Right. The trip to Nashville, the show.

I think it's important, so I'm going to write it. The quick synopsis is: our Nashville show at Springwater was unbelievable, was amazing, and did wonders for this uncommonly jaded musician. I felt welcomed, I felt like I'd come home after being lost in the woods of sleep deprivation... chased by Baba Iaga... sick of beer, sick of shows... our September 5th set at Springwater alleviated a lot of these fears and waking hallucinations.

I recommend taking in the full narrative... read acts one and two before coming back to this entry.

...did you read them yet?

Morning, September 5th, 9:30 or 10:00. I can't sleep in any more. I'd gone to bed at 3:00 or so in the morning and was up. I put a little coffee in my system, shoveled a little snow off the driveway in my head, and walked to the nearby Ingles to buy breakfast for everyone. I got eggs and sausage and cheddar cheese and some coffee and also some Lapsang Souchong for myself... I love that stuff. We ate and then we went downtown where I went on some quality meanders. The marquee at the Buncombe County Administrative Office reads "Text messages may threaten your identity!"

Guh?

Next time I'm scared of something real I'll just have to think back to this crucial information... this rabid bear with herpes can't possibly be as dangerous as a text message. I have nothing to fear.

Went by Smashing Guitars to get a cable and some strings, great time as always. I exhibited fantastic self control and did not buy a chorus pedal.

Stepped into Static Age and said hi to Joel. Saw a badass HST shirt for way too much money... We were fliering for Drone Valley III and it went well. Went in the beer store downtown, really cool spot, and finished up by sitting on the patio at Rosetta's with Andy, Dan, Adam, Chad & Graham... Chad and I laughed our asses off at a 19 year old with vinyl pants and vertical Robert Smith hair as he got into his LeBaron.

Chad's good people.

Back to south Asheville from downtown to load up the Falcon and drive to Nashville. It's a long drive, a very long drive, and I felt every mile.

Every curvy mountain mile... three guys in the cab of one truck. I wasn't very entertaining, I was sulking. I've done so much driving recently and I'm about as chipper as an earthworm on a sidewalk when I get behind the wheel. I sank back into the burnout I've been feeling, wondering what the use or point of all these shows really was. Every rolling mile, every mile to Knoxville and the endless stretch beyond, cussing out every mile marker... goddammit! Is Nashville getting farther away? How is that possible? Got to a rest area somewhere in the middle of Tennessee, called Rachel... are you there, god? It's me, Corbie. I don't have any use for religion but I have endless use for miracles. Maybe we can cut a deal.

Timezones changed, celphones kicked in and out of the familiar mode, and we made it to Nashville pretty early (a little after 7:00) and found Springwater very easily.

I'm going to go ahead and mention that this place was amazing to us. Fucking amazing. Jumpstarted my hope engine for sure.

We arrived and streets were crowded, the place is really close to Vanderbilt's football stadium (we could hear the announcers and an occasional tugboat horn that probably had something to do with the game) and people were parked every-fucking-place. I wanted to drop the gear by (and we could have if I had actually looked around a little better - more on that soon) but it didn't appear that we could, so we went a mile up the road to Andy and Dan's cousin Emily's place. She lives 11 stories up in a really nice apartment building but the Falcon is not completely secure, so I waited with our gear while Andy and Dan went up. Too much time with this stupid big brain of mine, too much time overthinking... what the fuck are you doing, Corbie? Live in the moment, remember? They came down and we rolled to a mexican restaurant where Corbie, king of the paranoid bastard people, could keep an eye on the truckfull of music gear. Ate, talked a little, but generally just spaced out and stared into the middle distance.

It's been too long.

The last time I stopped in Nashville was 2005, in a drunken pilgrimage to see Modest Mouse play some auditorium at Vandy. The opener was some then-unknown named Gavin DeGraw who, as fate would have it, was denied the obscurity he so badly deserves. Andy was along in 2005 and he was along in 2009. As cool as 2005 was, and as many parallels there were (the primary parallel is that I was an exhausted and whining pussy both times), 2009 kicked its ass. In 2005 we saw a show... in 2009 we played the motherfucker.

We finished eating and rolled to Springwater. I discovered that Kristen (yes, Pushy Lips Kristen) is the owner-operator of a badass little taco stand in the back of the place. We could have left our gear at Springwater after all. Not only that, but we should have given our business to Kristen! We would have if we'd known.

By the way, if you're ever in Nashville eat at Taco Party. Seriously, do it. I'll come to your house and spraypaint the pages of your favorite book if you don't.

So we talked and pretty much had a good time, catching up with our friends in Pushy Lips on their home turf... and what sweet turf it is.

MUSIC! FINALLY! ISN'T THIS SUPPOSED TO BE A MUSIC BLOG?

Not so much, more "slice-of-life" than anything.

First up were Frosty (I can't find a website, please let me know if you know the link) and they were for real. It was thrashy and energetic but it was coherent and with a purpose. People were really into them (myself included). Frosty was followed by A Secret Policeman's Ball, a young band showing great promise. They mentioned during their set that this was their second show or so. I want to see the evolution of this band... they're going to be unstoppable in 3 or 4 years. They didn't play for long at all, I would have enjoyed a few more songs from them. Their vocalist and keyboardist, Nikki, let loose with some serious demon howls during one of their songs that really caught my attention and their guitarist played this sweet little Epi Paul and he played it well. It's nice to see that kind of potential at work. The future's going to be an ok place, ya dig?

Their drummer, Jesse, was very gracious to us and lent us a cymbal. Very, very nice guy. Did I mention how nice the future's going to be?

I still wasn't drinking, I wasn't even remotely feeling it. Andy handed me his beer and I took a swill of it and handed it back, so complete was my disinterest. I didn't see the gain in driving around a strange town with a head full of beer, I didn't see the gain in drinking more of it than I should (which usually happens when I play a show). The energy of a rock show is perfectly intoxicating on its own and I can never tell if I'm actually drunk or not until after the show, when I level back out.

Don't take this to mean I didn't have fun - I felt like a kid with a bazooka.

Fuckshow vs. Pushy Lips vs. WtBR

We'd decided before the show to play a round robin again, only this time as a 3-way! I drew up this diagram, where we would place the two drumsets and the five amps and the two microphones, the pedalboards... it made so much goddamn sense and we just had to do it, so we did.

We set up this unlikely contraption and got to work. Two songs by Fuckshow... two songs by Where the Buffalo Roamed... one song by Pushy Lips... repeat four times. What you get is an orgiastic experience, a psychedelic olympiad, a world-shaping sonic experience that will cause your brain to grow a third lobe.

The room energy was amazing, lots of good people and they were totally into the bands. We played hard and fast, focusing on our wilder songs but occasionally stepping back from the ledge. Dan did what Dan does, playing trumpet and playing it well. I recall his trumpet lines on "Dirty Bomb Stratocaster" being especially on point.

There was a guy recording the show and I hope he caught some of this stuff.

Fuckshow is a three piece and Amoretta is a member (she had mentioned on Thursday, at Andy's house, that she played with them). Think early 90s treble punk, the noisy shit that came from NYC and was the next logical evolutionary step. Ignore Green Day, ignore the wave of terror and self-lobotomy they inspired... this is the direction the faithful headed. It wants to be sloppy, it really does, but these guys feel the music... dig the voice, dig the percussive drive, dig the guitar lines (a lot!), dig the soul of this stuff. There's an irreverence in Nashville, a gigantic middle finger to all things safe and harmless, and it's delicious. There's a desire to play loose, loud, and sloppy and even when it comes out tight the spirit remains the same.

Pushy Lips played tight and dangerous, killers on their home turf. Three nights in and the chants were moving into my subconscious... the simultaneous swagger and vulnerability of "One Night Stand..." the epic chameleon that lives in "Sawtooth..." amazing, simply amazing.

Then it was over. We'd played our last song, "Southport," which had culminated with me trying to kick in Andy's bass drum head and eventually headbutting it. It wouldn't break. Pushy Lips hopped up for their last, closing on "One Night Stand," and it was time for summer camp to be over.

I didn't want it to be over. I was finally myself again, finally over this demon funk that had me so down, and it was the last show of our short stint. I wanted to go on an enormous trip with these guys, sharing all the evils and triumphs of a week or two on the road, and it was time to pack up and go back.

I'm up on the 11th floor/I'm watching the cruisers below

Pushy Lips headed out to party down and we headed to Emily's. We loaded most of our gear into her apartment, carrying several amps and most of a drumset past a doorman whose neo-apathy said "Yeah, I've seen weirder." Odd, considering the large retired population in her building.

Up in her pad, a very swank place with granite floors, and I'm eating leftovers and I'm cracking my only beer of the night. I walk out onto the balcony and look out over the city. Eleven stories up isn't very high, but I still get a little vertigo - it doesn't take much for me. Street level, directly down and across, a cop has pulled over some guy in the parking lot of a gas station.

The cousins catch up for a while and I kind of just sit there, it's great to watch them together, until I'm too tired and I curl up on the couch. It's a restful sleep, I'm very comfortable, and I feel like I'm part of something very important as the lights of Nashville watch over me, shining until dawn.

Epilogue

I'm awake at 9:15 or 9:20 and there's a text from Rachel on my phone (which I'd accidentally left on vibrate) telling me to wake up. I got up, got dressed and woke the others, and we were packed and gone in about 30 minutes. I felt great, totally jazzed from a good night's sleep, and needing only coffee. The coffee we obtained and the road we found, rocketing through the concentric clover leaves of Nashville's beltline and escaping into the main channel, headed east.

Dan rode in the back of the Falcon with the gear, where he had arranged a nest for himself. He was back there, taking pictures, napping, playing his trumpet, for the entirety of the drive. Andy and I had a great conversation, I'd calmed down a lot and was the most like myself I'd been all weekend.

We stopped at a Steak 'n Shake in some town, which made Dan and Andy very happy. When I was in college, we satisfied our midnight appetites with Waffle House. Apparently Steak 'n Shake served the same function for the brothers Meier.

Our waitress was really nice so we left a CD with our tip. Why not?

The drive back to Asheville felt shorter than the drive the day before and I got Dan and Andy to their destination around 4:00. I was back on the road within thirty minutes, headed to Pittsboro, ready to be home. The mind plays nifty tricks on you when you've been behind the wheel for nine hours, and I would have to deal with those tricks before I could make it home. First, however, I called Dup and we talked for close to an hour.

"I never got to answer your question from the other day," he said, "and the answer is this: there is no dignity in what we do."

"I didn't think so," I said.

"We just do it anyway," he said.

Where the Buffalo Roamed and Pushy Lips momentarily lose the trail of the fickle and onerous Tennessee Wolf: a tale of crisis and redemption in three acts...

2009-09-04T22:30:00.471-04:00

Act Two: Johnson City

You'll find me where you left me, asleep in the bed of my truck in Andy's yard. Dan had asked me, somewhere in the silly blur of the previous night, how many times I'd slept in the bed of my truck and I'd dropped my jaw as if he'd handed me the keys to a goddamn time machine. I knew at that very moment that I had to get my sleeping bag and my pillow and sleep my first night in a truck bed.

I wish I could say it was the first time I've slept in my truck, but I've slept in the cab several times. Once after a catastrophic party involving a limousine in which I nearly got in a fight with a man easily twice my size (who later respected me for standing up to him) and the other time was after the first Drone Valley... I'd been up all night, inhaling PBR, in this damp and haunted hippie basement and there was no way to sleep with the terrible, terrible thump of Jay-Z at 5:30 in the morning. I had no choice but to go certifiably insane and I got in the faces of these hippies, talking mad shit, and then I left. I got some gas station coffee, indistinguishable from the walking dead, before crawling my way home... drive 2 hours... sleep 2 hours curled up painfully in the cab of my truck at some rest area and hope for the best... drive 2 hours... repeat (all the way to Greenville - 5 hours!). This was 2007. I think the party with the limousine and the hot tempers must have been in 2005.

Sleeping in the truck isn't good for you, no matter the year.

People were driving to work and it woke me up so eventually I got up. I went in the house and made some coffee, but it tasted like potting soil and not even light could escape. I think I used enough grounds to power a tugboat. I stepped outside and this nice guy was walking across the yard...

Gotta interject... Pushy Lips borrowed a church van from another band. This is an integral detail to the current story.

Okay, so this nice guy is walking across the yard and there I am with my Wayne Static morning hair and the porch is covered in beer cans and here's Amoretta's not-completely-empty bottle of wine and he says "Excuse me, friend. Would you be able to move that van so we can get a truck in across the street?"

I look across the little street and there's a loading dock and there's a semi idling in the road.

"Hold on, let me find someone who has the keys," and I go back inside & shut the door. It takes a few minutes, but Dallas has the keys and he goes outside and he very elaborately starts the van. There are all kinds of switches you have to hit, some of them under the hood.

"It's like you're starting up the Millenium Falcon!" I joke. I mean the spaceship, not my little red Mazda truck.

I can only wonder what the guy who asked me to move the van was thinking, what kind of debauchery he thought took place and how on earth a church van from Tennessee fit into all this wilderness. Maybe his imagination fell short... or maybe he thought we'd been out sacrificing goats and launching virgins into the sides of buildings with catapults.

Right. Dallas moves the van into the yard and commerce continues.

Pushy Lips rolled to Rosetta's and out of town. We watched "Buy the Ticket, Take the Ride" and then I slept like an absolute baby for another 2 hours. I wouldn't recommend sleeping in the bed of a pickup truck, not when it's a 6' bed and you're a 6'3" gork with a build that can politely be labeled "emaciated."

I kid. Emaciated people are generally considered attractive. I'm not skinny enough for heroin chic. I'd be a lot cooler if this were so.

Goddammit, get to the show.

Ok. So we headed to Johnson City eventually. It had been an easy day for me, lazing around Andy's and generally just taking up space. We loaded the gear into the Millenium Falcon (my truck, not the spaceship) and Andy, Dan and I packed into the cab and were off.

You may want to get comfortable, there's a lot to tell.

We had some good conversation as we made our way through Asheville. I was thrilled fuckless to be well rested. We rolled out of NC with no incident, generally just giggling our asses off, and into Tennessee... it wasn't until we stopped for gas that the freaks found us.

I was pumping gas when the first freak rolled in... he was talking to me before he even stopped. It was so weird that I wrote it down and I'm going to go grab my notes. He rolled up to the pump opposite mine in a faded S-10 that very badly wanted to die, window open, and said "What's up?" before his truck even stopped. I nodded and said "hi." He quickly engaged me in an engrossing conversation, something to the tune of "Oh, the pump's usually on this side." My response of "Yeah, some of them are broken. They have bags over them," fascinated him and if I'd known what I was bringing upon myself I would have probably elected to throw turds at him or climb a billboard, howling like a macaque, rather than risk further conversation.

He looks at me and says "you look like a musician." I nodded cautiously and said "I am." I would ordinarily be pretty jazzed to have someone out and say that, but this guy exuded creepy desperation and I couldn't put a finger on his motivations. Police station t-shirt, intense mannerisms, piglet eyes... I asked him directions to Next Door (more on that later) since we'd been too nitwitted to google map it. Got directions, committed them to memory, and he was still talking.

"So, what kind of a band are you?"
"Oh, I don't know..." it generally takes me a minute to construct an answer but he was already talking.
"Are you metal?"
"No, we're..." at this point I wanted to get away. He was interrupting at a fantastic rate.
"Are you an indie band?"
"Well, we're..."
"Indie is like Red Hot Chili Peppers or Blue October."
"Oh. Not really like..."
"Or Breaking Benjamin."
"No, I don't really know them. We're kind of like... kind of psychedelic?"
Blank stares. It's a shitty description anyway, so it doesn't matter. I think I may have even said we're like Beck, but this kid had the IQ of a broken toaster oven and my words were obviously bouncing off his forehead, never even making it to his ears.
"Could you guys get me a show? I have an acoustic act. I play solo."
"This is our first time playing Johnson City. We have no influence there at all. You should probably just email the Acoustic Coffeehouse."
"Can't you just write my name down on the list?"
"Just email them. Our word doesn't count for anything yet."
"I only have two shows coming up and they're in the spring. One at the apple festival and one at the Food Lion."
Dan and Andy were out and the Falcon was fueled.
"Ok, man... we're actually running pretty late and need to roll into town. Thanks for those directions."
"Put my number in your phone, man," is what he said.
"Here," I handed him an open notebook, the page that ended up being my observations on Johnson City. "Write it on this."
We piled into the Millenium Falcon and were on the interstate quickly, but somehow not quickly enough. Andy was laughing.
"Man, he asked you to put his number in your phone and you were not having it!"

Lost as fuck in the armpit of buttholes.

We followed this guy's directions, blindly taking an exit on the far side of town and proceeding to drive through the outskirts of Johnson City and away towards (?). We stopped at an Ingles and asked a guy who worked there, this literal-minded young caveman, how to get to downtown and he told us Johnson City had no downtown. We stared at him as he stared at us. Someone had come down from orbit with three eyes and purple skin and politely asked "Glerp forx?" and I was starting to think it was us. He points us back in the direction we came and gave directions, which we faithfully followed until we realized that we were just as lost as before... drifting past every chain store imaginable except for the good ones.

We pulled into a Blockbuster and asked a man with a fantastic mullet, permed to perfection, how to get to the part of town where venues were. He didn't know but he told us his son would, so we went inside and met him. They looked alike, only twenty years difference, and were both nice people, good-natured and genuinely sympathetic to our plight. His son aimed us in the direction of Next Door and we made tracks. I had a good feeling about this guy, he seemed like a very good person stuck in a very bad town, and he came through nicely. We made it to the venue in under five minutes.

Thanks, dude. Never caught your name.

Next door to what?

We got out of the truck and were immediately welcomed by Curt of Next Door. We were not so welcomed by the Acoustic Coffeehouse. We loaded our stuff in and it was still an hour and a half before go time, so we followed the rumor of free food to the Acoustic Coffeehouse. The people at the counter were nice enough, asked us if there was a cover. We thought there was, so we said yes and they said they didn't feed us if there was a cover. They told us they would feed us and give us two free drinks apiece if there wasn't one, these things were very explicitly stated.

We went outside and sat with Pushy Lips, who were enjoying their free food and beer, to discover that there actually wasn't a cover. Thrilling news, so we returned to the counter but by now the story had changed again and they were resistant to giving us food even though, not five minutes prior, they'd said they'd feed us if there wasn't a cover. One of them went to get the manager for some reason, they were exchanging nervous glances. The evening got really weird really fast. The manager swooped into our little huddle, Dan and Andy and me. He darted from face to face with a hyena's eyes, as if to say "which one of you criminal fucks is the ringleader?" Andy spoke.

"Hey. We're playing next door and I just wanted some clarification on the food deal for bands. We were told we could get free food and two drinks per person if there was no cover."
At this point our attempt at clarification was met with a stream of antagonistic insults. The owner of the Acoustic Coffeehouse got really red in the face and was facing off with Andy as if he wanted a fight. We weren't about to return the body language, the naked hostility was too fucking weird.
"How many of you are there? Huh?"
"Well, two bands... seven of us total."
"I can't afford to feed all of you."
"The other band already got fed, they're the ones who told us."
"Well, that was a mistake," he said with jack-bastard smugness. We would have walked away but he wasn't done ranting.
"What kind of a draw do you have?"
"We'll see."
"See, I feed people who play here," by 'here' he means the Acoustic Coffeehouse. Obviously he thinks we don't know that the Acoustic Coffeehouse owns Next Door. "You told me you didn't want to play here, so I can't help you."
Andy puts up his hands defensively.
"I never said that."
It's true, we've never even communicated with the place. We no longer had any idea what we were being accused of. Especially confusing, again, is the fact that the Acoustic Coffeehouse fucking OWNS Next Door! He's pissed off because some person out there, and it may as well have been Andy, decided to play one place he owns rather than the other? I don't think simple anger management is going to work on this guy, he needs some kind of happy pill or even an animal sedative capable of calming a thresher shark.
I didn't hear any more because I turned around and walked out. I had heard enough and life's too short for me to just stand there and take verbal abuse. Maybe this hawaiian-shirted fucker is the king of Johnson City, good for him. He can have it. I'd rather be a nobody in Chapel Hill than the king of Johnson City.

odd times in the land of maybe music, but probably not...

We started playing at about 10:00. I didn't even want to drink, not after the batshit insanity of the previous night, and I wasn't about to give money to the Acoustic Coffeehouse. We played really well, Curt had told us he'd be recording our set as well as broadcasting it on internet radio, so we took the set really seriously and gave that underpopulated room our best. Dan really distinguished himself on his trumpet parts and we sound like we always sound - like a band that practices even though we don't. True story.

Kids from whatever college is in Johnson City were milling around, drunk and shouting before it was even midnight. Somewhere in the middle of the set an older gentlemen with a cane shouted in mountain gibberish. He either wanted to hear "Amazing Grace" or Macy Gray, we never could settle on which one he wanted. He was loud and complimentary but, as we would discover later, he was thoroughly out of his mind.

Pushy Lips played to a few more people than us and their audience was more receptive (in that not just the loony old man said nice things). This guy with a pony tail and goatee who had been to the house show came out to Johnson City as well and proceeded to casually insult me several times. Awesome.

Dude - if someone is being humble and says "I'm not much of a singer" you're not supposed to quickly agree with them. That's a real jackass move.

Getting to know Pushy Lips' set over the course of three shows was a lot of fun. I maintain that Kristen is the anchor of this band. Around her do the others orbit. She's a really good drummer who doesn't have to prove it. She has excellent time and applies phrasing generally reserved for fills to her beats. She also has a great ear for dynamics, leading the others in the rise and fall of their fierce epics.

I said after my first encounter with this band that it was evolved '90s music, but I don't think so any more. Now that I know them better, I'd say it's prog-based but without the meandering selfishness generally associated with the genre. Yeah, there's prog in there, but it's been finely honed. Dallas can cut a serious groove, digging deep into the bedrock. Rivers change their courses, cliffs gently slope into rolling plains. Will and Dallas follow the same sonic landscape, establishing a neo-funk parallel structure. Much like funk, this creates a hypnotic groove and it is so sweet when one of them deviates from the groove for a brief, early 20th century jazz proto-solo. It's riff based but these are riffs for the patient. The elements of the riffs, the individual phrases, become almost as important as the overarching riffs themselves.

Amoretta is her own vocalist and the more I hear her sing the harder the style is to explain. There are Corin Tucker gospel howls and tremelos leading into Zach de la Rocha territory, words fired from a machine gun. Their lyrics are simple and are repeated, chant-like; building, evolving, a story told not by details but through raw emotion. Pushy Lips are agents of psychedelic hypnosis and Amoretta is their assassin. Her behavior on stage (and in real life, I discovered) is that of a predatory wildcat that's come out of the trees to hunt and to play and it's hard to tell which is which. I don't think she's much heavier than your average bobcat...

About midway through their set the crazy man shouted to Amoretta that he'd see her naked someday. During their next song he asked us to take his picture. He got up on the stage and stood there, so we got his picture.

What a strange place.

Journey to the lost heart of downtown

The show was over and the streets were getting drunker. The Acoustic Coffeehouse patio was a mess of shouting, falling-over-each-other people and there had been scattered talk of a show a block away we could play if we were up for it. A new metal bar had lost two bands on the bill and we could pull double duty if we wanted. We were waiting for Curt to finish our CD first, the recording of our show, so we decided we would walk downtown to see this row of bars Andy had been saying were really cool. I didn't want to drink but I definitely wanted to walk.

We got directions from a drunk stumbling the other way. "Hang a loosie, you can't miss it."

Got a picture by the Buffalo St. sign and made it to the strip, a brightly lit, antiseptic place permeated by pop country and stilleto heels. This was what 5th St. in Greenville would look if it were populated by the offspring of married cousins.

I don't expect - or want - to play Johnson City again. Right now I'm just having fun.

WtBR vs. Twang Bangers vs. nightclubs vs. sidewalks

The bars and clubs on the strip were overcrowded and spilled their wasted contents into the street. Outside of one particularly soul-sucking bar this country blond drunkenly encouraged us to come here the "Swang Bangers," who are (apparently) the best band in Johnson City.

I've found them. Turns out they're the Twang Bangers. Shitting evil hell, they're exactly as bad as I thought they were.

Andy replied (I wasn't talking, I was furiously taking notes) that we'd already played Next Door that night. The girl turned to her friend and asked "Who played Next Door tonight?" She casually assured us that we were nowhere near as good as Twang Bangers (she was still saying "Swang Bangers").

Dear god, we've located the fabled lost city of Asslantis - ancestral home of all rude jackasses. I was giddy at this discovery. "Man, this is going to make for a great writeup," is what I kept saying.

We abandoned the great debauch and went back to Next Door to wait for our CD. Members of WtBR and Pushy Lips went on a mission to the metal venue to see if it was worth playing and it definitely wasn't. Brand new place and this was their first night with beer. Some metal band was playing to five of their friends who would obviously be leaving with them. Our CD was under the Millenium Falcon's wiper blades so I took it, put it in the CD player, and we rolled through the dark East Tennessee night to Asheville. This time around we took the right way out of town. It turns out there's an interstate exit maybe a mile from the venue and the directions the gas station weirdo (remember him?) had given were unimaginably bad. No surprises at this point.

If I give you $30 will you kick me in the gut?

The weirdest thing was the recording. Curt was the nicest guy we met, we really liked him, I still like him, but the recording of our set is one of the worst things I've ever heard. It sounds like he only had the vocal mic live (and it's way up front) and an area mic barely on... then he applied this 4 second delay with high feedback to everything. It's the oddest thing I've ever heard, our songs transformed into nightmare cacophany. It's what schizophrenics hear when you talk to them... it's a lot like the fever dreams that hit when you're down with the flu.

The big waste of it all is that we (both bands combined) had to pay to play this show. We had rationalized it by the end of the night as "Well, if we get a decent recording out of this then it's not a wasted $15."

This is why I don't do pay to play. It's never a good idea.

Back to Asheville, laughing our asses off... what would you have done?

Doomed, doomed, doomed.

I'm not an idiot. I know Johnson City has good people - it would be completely illogical for it not to - it's just that we only met a handful of them and they were so overshadowed by the Bad Ones that it's hard to focus on them. Thanks Curt, thanks Blockbuster dude who finally gave us good directions, and thanks to the girl working at the Acoustic Coffeehouse who empathized with our plight moments before her boss treated us like a bunch of rowdy teenagers with spraypaint cans.

(concluded and resolved in act III)

Where the Buffalo Roamed and Pushy Lips on the trail of the elusive and dangerous and demented Tennessee Wolf: a tale of crisis and redemption in three acts...

2009-09-03T19:19:00.165-04:00

Act one: Asheville

It might have been Statesville, maybe parts west, when I rang Dup's phone and left the message. "Is there any dignity in this thing we do?" I wasn't expecting answers but I wanted a dialogue. Doubt, powerful doubt, logical doubt... did it make sense to plug my amps & pedals into strange and foreign outlets and play to empty rooms? Where did it all lead? Any real measure of success comes at a great cost, a cost I no longer felt I could bear. Even local shows are starting to wear me down. It's not that it's wasted effort, it's the time commitment and it's how tired I've been.

The songs exist, that's what counts, and I'm not even sure if it matters whether anyone but me hears them. Even these explanations fall short... I just woke up one day and I was over playing shows.

In this mindset did I approach Asheville. Plumbing the depths of anxiety and discomfort, feeling trapped by my own existence as a musician. I could have clicked my heels at any moment - there's no place like home - redemption is easy. You mean I had the power inside me all along?

there and back again - West Asheville edition... the A.L.E... thank Odin for shit luck...

At the first sign of bad luck I felt like myself again. Seriously. I could stop worrying and learn to love the bomb.

I'd just entered West Asheville and was headed down Haywood from Patton when I got Andy on the phone.

"Dude, I have maybe ten seconds to tell you all this. The owner of Mike's Side Pocket went to jail for some A.L.E. violation and they have to close early to go get him out. We're moving the show to my house."

This I can handle... this makes sense. I called Amoretta of Pushy Lips and delivered the information in similar fashion. Is "guerrilla" a verb? It should be.

I am my own favorite animal.

I landed the Millenium Falcon in Andy's yard and it cast a shadow, even after dark. The moon was full, Andy was pointing it out shortly after my arrival, and he was ready to go brainsplitting insane. This was the reason for the collapse of the Mike's show, he explained, and the animal energy awakened by his semi-mystical rationale wouldn't be wasted.

Everyone with an appreciation for the wilderness alive and well in us all needs their own personal Oscar Z. Acosta and they need to say "why not?" more often than "that's probably a bad idea."

The full moon theory was further proven when Andy's roommate Chad came home, having just been savagely attacked at the group home where he works and bearing terrible, bleeding wounds like unto an animal attack down the side of his face.

Heavy shit.

We played some music at this point. Pushy Lips had gone to find food so Dan and Andy and I played a few songs. Dan is Andy's brother and he and I have been trading MP3s for a while and he's written some trumpet parts to the WtBR songs. We put him through a multieffects pedal and one of my amps and let him go to town... that was one cool sounding trumpet.

So we started drinking PBR and Pushy Lips showed up about 10:00, maybe a little before. We set up on two sides of the living room, all our gear on the floor at once, and were soon trading songs. It didn't take me long to sing my voice out but I kept going anyway, not so much singing as imitating a snoring bear.

What we did was a lot of fun and it inspired greatness for the next two shows of this weekend... more on that in the Johnson City & Nashville editions. Read all about it!

What was really special to me was when Pushy Lips played "Sawtooth." I remembered this song from our show together at the Reservoir (link) and they encouraged the audience to participate during the instrumental break. So, during our set at Andy's house, I hopped on Andy's drumkit and Dan played trumpet... this was the shit. I locked in with Kristen's drumline, accentuating with an open snare and Ando's way-the-fuck downtuned toms, and it felt really good. This was my first time playing drums in front of people.

Golly.

We played for several hours, trading off and occasionally letting others take over. Eventually it deteroriated into some serious sitting on the porch and imitating animal sounds madness. I want to say it was a ton of fun, I know it was a ton of fun, but all I know is a faded narrative and I can't even keep my timeline straight. There was music and the music was fucking fantastic. There was this Nashville band called Pushy Lips and they played a ton of songs and they were amazing. There was Andy and Dan and me and I sounded like sloppy shit on the songs I sang and I sounded like some devil bastard drunk on feedback on the instrumentals. I climbed on the drums, I flubbed half my guitar lines, I jumped off the cap of my truck and collapsed in an idiotic pile, my chimpanzee impression ruined by my shot equilibrium. Amoretta and Kristen of Pushy Lips and I decided to go on a mission to the nearby Ingles... a short walk. It was closed and we decided instead to roll around in the street in front of Andy's house.

Eventually I crawled off to sleep in the bed of my truck, which we call the Millenium Falcon.

It seemed like the thing to do.

(continued in act II)