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It is true. On a day within the last range of days I attended the performance of Dan Bejar and his enormous band here in Seattle, in a club, and I was not sitting in an assigned seat. This was one of the very few shows that I’ve seen since getting here that was actually in a club without seats, a show that had an actual crowd standing will-he-nil-he in a room in front of speakers (albeit one that concentrated shoulder to shoulder at lead-like densities waaaay out back on the way to the bathroom, completely confusing those of us up front who were swinging our arms around wildly in an expression of the modern angst of 21st century alienation in the hopes of making even superficial contact with another human being without the aid of ill-fitting prostheses like the email or the iPhone).
Dan Bejar is traveling with a large, talented, and dedicated retinue on this outing in support of his latest record, Kaputt. The saxophonist/floutist alone worked hard enough to earn the ticket price back for the whole band.
One has to wonder, however, under what sort of fear the band works with Dan Bejar to execute live and on a small club stage the very complicated smooth jazz-meets-new-wave vibe of the new LP, as there were few smiles from the rest of the gang.
Perhaps that was just it- they were really trying hard to hit all the marks and put on a fucking amazing show. Mission accomplished, and kudos if that’s all it was. The idea that kept a smile on my face, though, was that Bejar might actually be the eccentric his lyrics portray, that the band may really be working strenuously aviod the oblivion inside the annoyance of Dan Bejar, the artiste. Whatever it was, thanks for coming to town and playing flawlessly through Kaputt, and through a lot of Your Blues, to boot. The show was excellent.
Openers The War on Drugs brought some much-needed East Coast rock and reverb to the stage, doing that Philly new-psych thing they and all the acts that have split off from them the past few years do so well. Good times all around.
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.
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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