This week I had a Deerhunter moment. Tweaking from overstimulation on all fronts, unable to find pleasure in anything, turning away from myself and my tasks in ever tinier right angle spirals of repeated procrastination, it was suggested to me that I give Chicago’s Bottomless Pit an innocent listen. Jaded and beyond hope and seeing no harm in it, I plugged them into my headsockets and set the tunes to “blast.”
O, would that I could have felt anything.
And at the first golden guitar notes and motorik drumbeats of “winter wind”, the first track off their 2010 record Blood Under the Bridge, I felt the wintry ache of spring awaken in my bones, and in those in the human ossuary loved by God most of all—the hammer, the stirrup, and the anvil—first.
That is the Deerhunter moment, by the by- the sudden epiphany that something mind-blowingly good can appear from nowhere and change everything.
As a friend recently put it to me, music is a disease. We wake to life innocent, and we take things to mean what they mean. Like the addict deserving of compassion, all men are too ready to love, or perhaps not well enough prepared for the repercussions of discovering the grand, immediate secret that cannot be shared. When we give openly of ourselves, of our time and full attention, how much more often we find ourselves asking whether the losses we have sustained by not instead investing in the funds more hedged is the result of our misunderstanding at a hopeless, inceptive stage the valuable things in life, or whether our constancy has been undermined by others who reframe the straightforward task of living as enterprise. Like Bottomless Pit sing on “Is it a Ditch”, whatever it is, “…We won’t find what it is before we stop.”
O, the loss of innocence, the passing, as it were, of our first vain and fallible sorrow.
The cover of Bottomless Pit's Blood Under the Bridge
Of course, music is not a disease, and, further, it is a testament to our small human spirits, drunk and ignorant and swelled up disproportionately most of the time on the wrong things, that it takes five angels with five trumpets (and probably Ke$ha) in the terrible amphitheater of humanity to provoke the crowd into such anomie and torpor as befits opening up for Abaddon. In that tired club, where the bouncers have scales like iron breastplates, teeth like lions’ teeth, and tails in which is the power to harm people for five months, I affirm that the saved are the ticketholders who only came because they heard they might get to see Bottomless Pit sing songs that redeem. Let’s face it, no one could learn these songs except those who have been redeemed— particularly not those of whom they sing on “Winterwind” who are “waiting on a winterwind like they’re gonna get something”, but only those who are “waiting on a Winterwind for free.”
As the Old Possum warned us, in order to possess what you do not possess, you must go by the way of dispossession. And as I have said before, you have to live with yourself if you are to live at all. Bottomless Pit remind us of that simply by making some of the best music that’s ever been heard in defiance of the apparent impossibility of anything in today’s world for the artistically inclined who would invest everything.
Music is not a disease, artist, but steel yourself if you are going to venture to that bad club and cling to the medicine of that organ-grinder’s monkey on your back- I read somewhere there are still two woes to come.
There’s plenty more Bottomless Pit live to be seen at the Union Rockyards Youtube channel, and plenty of recorded stuff to stream and buy at their website. The digital end of things (CD-only and download purchases) is being handled by NJ’s Comedy Minus One label.
The indefatigable Ted Leo was at a small auditorium at the Henry Art Gallery on Friday, February 25 doing a solo show put on by UW’s Rainy Dawg Radio. Indefatigable may be a hyperbole, considering his recent comments, however clarified and defused, hinting at retirement and his postponement of about 2 weeks of dates at the beginning of his tour. The pictures tell the story. The lighting wasn’t so great, we were seated (a guaranteed mood-killer), the sound was sub-par, the audience was a bit too hushed, and Ted was fighting his way through the onset of a cold. All that said, it’s always a pleasure to see the hardest working man in rock managing not to sell out for one more year. He pushed through whatever he was fighting to deliver a solid performance. I don’t think this guy can put on a bad show.
I can (proudly?) say I contributed one moment of hilarity to the nearly nonexistent banter between Ted and the audience (I mentioned the audience was quiet, right?). Hoping to hear a favorite track off his debut solo record from ’99, a little ditty called “The Northeast Corridor”, I piped up during one of those airless pockets of absolute non-interaction the audience was showering the stage with to request… a nonexistent song called “The Northwest Passage.” In the abbreviated parlance of today, that was a superfan fail. It did manage to animate the audience a bit, though, and the gracious Mr. Leo was very nice about my request being for something on the opposite side of the country from where the subject of the song should have been and the fact that he hadn’t rehearsed that one.
Still a good show, though.
One question for the Ted Leo-lovin’ world at large- I guess I can understand why no one ever asks him to play the brilliant songs off the first record (that might be an obscure entry in the catalog, what with all the tape noise and effects noise tracks filling out the incredible songwriting), but why am I the only one who requests “The Great Communicator” at shows? Has everyone forgotten about that one?
Meany Hall Auditorium, University of Washington, 2/15/11
I had the pleasure of seeing John Darnielle of the Mountain Goats play a solo show at the Meany Hall Auditorium at the University of Washington in Seattle this past Tuesday, and aside from the warm memories of his always entertaining and eloquent between-song banter and the soulful renditions of his wonderfully-written songs, all I have to show for it are these shitty cell phone photos. Again, I forget to bring my real camera to a show. Playing a somewhat emotionally heavier than usual set, he thanked the audience repeatedly for our silently rapt attention to his renditions of songs he played in dedication to a friend of his he had just lost to cancer. The Mountain Goats aren’t theater, they’re poetry—a real attempt by a human being to communicate with others.
His opener was a young woman with whom I am entirely unfamiliar, one Jesy Fortino, AKA Seattle’s Tiny Vipers. She does chilling, quiet, long-form meditations on nothingness all alone up on stage with her acoustic guitar and her looping pedal. She sounds like Nico from the velvet underground singing Bradford Cox-produced variations on Cat Power’s “Crossbones Syle”. Somehow she loops the resonant sound from the notes she plucks from her guitar while managing to not actually record the pluck itself. The result is layered beauty, and the effect is soporific. And man, what a voice.
Behold: the most recent Old 97s recording for sale.
Some facts of secondary relevance: I’ve only ever seen or heard alt-country labeled bands at shows that are the provenance of guilty, guardedly fearful financial organizations (Son Volt upwards of 3 times during New York’s summer-long outdoor River-to-River festival, popularly known as “The-City-Makes-a-Nearly-Empty,-Painless-Gesture-to-the Sucker-Hopeful-Future-Bourgeois-Paying-the-City’s-Rents Concert Series”), as part of a neighborhood arts organization’s summer to-do (Wilco at Minneapolis’ Walker Art Center), thanks to a gesture of largesse by the caliph of an inland city-state to his teeming, restive plebes (Wilco again, debuting “I am Trying to Break your Heart” at the Taste of Chicago”), and by dint of that careworn, if obfuscative, axiom, “A rising tide lifts all boats” (enjoying the acoustic perfection from where I sat with my back leaned against the back wall of the bandshell during yet another Wilco set. They were playing for paying ticket-holders at Brooklyn’s McCarren Park Pool that night— this was before the gated-community set, whose fortresses continue to go up in Williamsburg, decided their kids need a place to swim other than the ocean since their money and numbers have ensured Frank Serpico’s services are no longer really required there, prompting the city to decree that the pool would be restored to working order, no longer used as a concert venue). And, recently, on Monday night I got to see the fantastic Old 97s play at the Showbox at the Market in Seattle through the good graces of Easy Street Records. This is to say I’ve only ever seen this brainy, frank, hopeful, tender, egalitarian and plain-spoken genre of minstrelsy performed gratis.
But why is that? Indie rock, I love you and every other over-confident, stars-in-their-eyes, innovative, cock’o the walk flavor of the minute blog sensation youthful bravura tempts into swelling your ranks, but how easy is it to enjoy the shows your stable puts on with all that courtly intrigue and those transactions of cultural capital poisoning the air? The concert venue is a house of prayer, but you are dividing it into a house of specialized niche musical self-marketing content exchanged so hipsters can get laid! Galilee’s scene is so over! Why am I swilling my beer money away at your shows? Alt-country shows— this is where all the other folks in western shirts have been taking their R&R. I think I’ve found my people.
Monday’s Old 97s show brought a smile to my face and reminded me of two reasons why I got hooked on seeing live music to begin with. The first is that hanging out in a room full of people who are just happy to be gathered to hear music- good or bad- is good juju. Alt-country, country-rock—however you choose to term this stuff, it is blessed with the best crowds. The second is that there’s something transcendental about being part of that artist-audience circuit when the performers are as happy to be there as the fans are.
Alt-country isn’t a form that requires a constant virtuosity. It honestly and openly relies on hokey tropes hearkening back to long-quelled booms and forgotten busts when there were such things as cowboys and overnight boom towns. The only thing this requires is that everyone be in on it. With a wink and a smile, the Old 97s most certainly are. This doesn’t rob the act or the genre of authenticity. If, as they say in the academy, I may make an intertextual reference, there are some Silver Jews lyrics that speak better to what I’m trying to get at than I can do myself,:
When you know how I feel I feel better/When you’re 15 you want to look poor./Do unto others, and run like a mother/I don’t want to look poor anymore. -Silver Jews, “Buckingham Rabbit”
No one wants to be the coal miner’s daughter, and most of us probably aren’t. It’s still good, in the knowledge we’re all, artist and audience alike, getting screwed somehow, to catch the momentary pit stop distraction of our collective candles burning brightest as we make our tumbleweed’s journey to the ignominy of the grave. It’s also real good to don a western shirt with pearlized buttons and stand in a loud room.
And did I say that alt-country doesn’t require virtuosity? Perhaps, but please don’t think I malign the headliners of Monday’s show. The harmony and the sorrow in Monday night’s rendition of “Valentine” brought a genuine tear to my eye, and the twanged-up Dick Dale fury of Ken Bethea’s lead guitar made me happy to be alive.
I can (proudly?) say I contributed one moment of hilarity to the nearly nonexistent banter between Ted and the audience (I mentioned the audience was quiet, right?). Hoping to hear a favorite track off his debut solo record from ’99, a little ditty called “The Northeast Corridor”, I piped up during one of those airless pockets of absolute non-interaction the audience was showering the stage with to request… a nonexistent song called “The Northwest Passage.” In the abbreviated parlance of today, that was a superfan fail. It did manage to animate the audience a bit, though, and the gracious Mr. Leo was very nice about my request being for something on the opposite side of the country from where the subject of the song should have been and the fact that he hadn’t rehearsed that one.
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