You and What Army

ON THE OCCASION OF LADDIO BOLOCKO — LIVE AND UNRELEASED 1997 – 2000

    One fortuitous evening in the autumn of 2000, I walked into the Bowery Ballroom in New York. I was there to see Trans Am. But I happened to get there early and caught the entire set by the opening band. They were all pallid, malnourished guys in black turtlenecks; they looked like characters in a Beckett play or a painting by Egon Schiele. And they were amazing: pounding, odd meter rhythms that would be the envy of any prog band, but with a brutal sense of sex and violence that very few prog bands ever attain. Savage and brainy, they grooved so hard that you could dance to even the craziest rhythms.
    They would play motifs, as in jazz, then riff on variations on them, then move on to a new section. They were listening to each other like jazz musicians, and with the extraordinary technique of jazz musicians too, but with the incantatory repetition of the so-called (I hate this term) krautrock bands. Those German bands called their music "motorik" — expressly designed for driving — but I'm not sure you'd want to drive to this music. You would wind up zooming off a cliff and hitting the ground in an earth-shaking fireball.
    It was freakin' intense. I was blown away.
    Afterwards, between sets, they were hanging out in the audience, in front of the stage. I really wanted to know who they were. But I also didn't want to know who they were — I kind of didn't want to hear them speak, because I thought it might ruin the spell. I couldn't even figure out whether they were American or not, because they didn't sing, or even say anything between songs. They seemed maybe Eastern European, but only because they were so pale and dissipated-looking. But curiosity got the better of me and I worked up the nerve to walk up to one of them. "Man, you guys are great! Do you have a mailing list? When's your next gig?" And the guy said very flatly, in straightforward American-accented English, "That was our last show." There must be a German word for feeling both lucky and sad.
    I had the foresight to buy the CD they were selling at the show, which was great because in the months that followed I was able to find very little information about the band, and it was nearly impossible to buy any of their records. They had no website, there was no current contact information on their CD, and there had been very little written about them. So I had to satisfy myself with the memory of that mind-roasting set, and until now one single CD would have to be my souvenir.
    Later, a couple of them formed the Psychic Paramount, who are jaw-droppingly amazing in a different way, and I have since made it my business to see them whenever I can.
    Anyway, the moral of the story is: always catch the opening band.

Laddio Bolocko's Live and Unreleased 1997-2000 is available on the redoubtable No Quarter Records.

 

 

OVERHEARD: OVERSHARING

The time: 9:20 on a balmy summer evening
The place: The Prospect Park Bandshell
The players: a hefty thirtyish guy and his apparent girlfriend

Hefty guy: I have to make sure Facebook can't access my photos on my phone
Apparent girlfriend: Why?
Hefty guy: Because I don't want my dick-pics to go up there by accident.

OVERHEARD: HOW TO SPEAK TO A LADY

The time: A Friday morning in spring
The place: University Place in Manhattan
The players: Two young men walking down the street

Young Man #1 suddenly veers toward a newsstand which displays a copy of the New York Post, whose cover prominently features a buxom blonde.

Young Man #1: Man, why can't I ever get with these kind of bitches?
Young Man #2: Because you call them bitches.

ENO'S APOLLO MUSIC AT THE WINTER GARDEN

    When Brian Eno made his classic semi-ambient 1983 album Apollo: Atmospheres and Soundtracks, he probably didn't mean it as a requiem.  But that's how it came off Friday night at a live performance of the album at the Winter Garden in New York City.
    Composed for a documentary about the Apollo space program, the music was originally recorded by Eno on a variety of heavily processed synths, accompanied by his protégé, pedal steel virtuoso/guitarist Daniel Lanois, and Eno's brother Roger.  This time there was a core band of pedal steel guitar, electric guitar, electric bass, violin, and a vintage Yamaha DX7 synthesizer (which host John Schaefer pointed out now qualifies as a historical instrument).   As a large screen behind the band displayed stock footage of space missions and lunar landings, some guest guitarists — David Torn, Noveller, and Tortoise's Jeff Parker — wandered in and out of the soundscape.
    The vast, reverberating Winter Garden is tailor-made for long, slow tones such as these, and the music produced apt sensations of weightlessness, distance and stasis.  The accompanying footage of spacewalks and booster rockets looks quaint now, and although the musicians were funneling their instruments through what must have been a battery of digital effects, the gesture of painstakingly rendering this synthetic music by hand seemed an appropriate way to evoke a thoroughly bygone era.
    Apparently some of the Apollo astronauts brought along Buck Owens and Merle Haggard tapes, hence the pedal steel, played by session ace and longtime Dylan sideman Larry Campbell.  But the instrument's distinctly country flavor also recalls those Texan accents from Mission Control and the uniquely American nature of the achievement.  More profoundly, it conveys a sense of, appropriately enough, wide open spaces, the frontier.  As that quintessential rural American sound brushed up against the otherworldly, Campbell's pedal steel softly sang like a space cowboy.
    But that night, the pedal steel, along with the Apollo footage, seemed even more poignant than it usually does.  The last manned lunar landing was in 1972.   Well over half the current population of the United States was born after that, and has no memory of people walking on the moon, or of any really colossal feat of human exploration.  The Apollo music, with its long, tolling waves of sound, became an elegy for the ghosts of American astronauts.

OVERHEARD: LOVER MAN

The time: 9:35 on an early December morning
The place: The BX40 bus going eastbound on Tremont Avenue
The player: A heavy-set, middle-aged African-American man with a cane

[His cellphone rings. The ringtone is the "voulez-vous couchez avec moi" refrain from "Lady Marmalade"]
Man with cane, brightly: "Hey, baby!"

OVERHEARD: THE REAL BIG EASY

The place: A physical therapy center on the Upper West Side
The time: 11:15 on a beautiful Friday morning in October
The players: A middle-aged gentleman awaiting treatment and the office receptionist

The gentleman (addressing the receptionist):  New York is the top. If you can't make it here, you can't make it nowhere.

 

OVERHEARD: BOURBON STREET, BROOKLYN

The place: N. 6th Street in Williamsburg
The time: 9:00 on a beautiful June night
The players: A non-hipster couple in their late 20s

Woman: You don't walk around here much, do you?
Man: Not when I'm sober.

OVERHEARD: DEATH OF THE COOL

The place: 6th Avenue and Bleecker
The time: an early May evening
The players: a thirtyish woman and her thirtyish woman friend

Thirtyish woman #1: And I just thought, get over it — just because people have heard of your bookstore, it doesn't make you cool.

OUR BAND COULD BE YOUR CONCERT

PRESS RELEASE
For immediate release: March 8, 2011

    Music journalist Michael Azerrad and Tiger Mountain Presents are pleased to announce Our Band Could Be Your Concert, a very special evening of music at the Bowery Ballroom on May 22nd, 2011.
    In celebration of the tenth anniversary of Azerrad's classic history of the '80s indie underground, Our Band Could Be Your Life, some of the best bands in contemporary indie music will play songs by each of the 13 bands in the book.
    "For years, all kinds of people — musicians, people who run labels, concert promoters, journalists, whatever — have told me that they've been very inspired by Our Band Could Be Your Life and the bands it profiles, which is incredibly gratifying and totally unexpected," says Azerrad.  "The tenth anniversary of the book was a great occasion for the current generation of bands to celebrate these pioneers."
    The bill so far, in the order the original bands appear in the book:

Nat Baldwin, David Longstreth and Brian McOmber play Black Flag
Delicate Steve plays the Minutemen
Ted Leo plays Minor Threat
Titus Andronicus plays the Replacements
Tune-Yards plays Sonic Youth
Dan Deacon plays the Butthole Surfers
St. Vincent plays Big Black
Wye Oak plays Dinosaur Jr
Buke & Gass plays Fugazi
More bands t.b.a.

    Special guest hosts also t.b.a., and who knows, maybe some surprises too.
    Tickets for Our Band Could Be Your Concert are $25 and go on sale Friday, March 11th, at noon via the Bowery Ballroom/TicketWeb site.  Doors at 7:30.
    For more information e-mail tigermountainbk (at) gmail (dot) com

  ###

IT'S THE BEGINNING OF A NEW AGE

    Back when I was a lad, being cynical was the sine qua non of coolness.  People equated optimism and a sunny disposition with clueless naivete, and so life was a continuous contest to see who could be the most jaded and sardonic.  And sure enough, virtually all the bands I listened to were dark, angry, depressing or even nihilistic: Joy Division, Echo and the Bunnymen, the Cure, Sonic Youth, Big Black, Hüsker Dü, etc.  Don't get me wrong, those are all great bands, but that attitude got ingrained in me pretty hard, to my eventual regret.
    But Saturday night as I was watching Dustin Wong play his riveting solo guitar piece Infinite Love, and then as the delightful band Delicate Steve celebrated the release of their aptly titled debut album Wondervisions, at Public Assembly in Brooklyn, I was reminded yet again that things have changed.  Both Wong and Delicate Steve make instrumental music, but it's strongly major key and unabashedly imbued with what can only be called a sense of joy and wonder that speaks louder than words.
    Twenty years ago, a roomful of New York cutting-edgers would have been in the East Village; instead they were in Williamsburg, which was a sleepy hamlet back then.  But much more importantly, these same people would have been listening to banging, clanging angstmusik.  Don't get me wrong, that type of music still exists and there's still a place for it, but as a whole underground music is just vastly different now.  I've said it before, but it's hard not to read some significance into that.  After all, music isn't just recreational sound — it's ideas encoded into rapidly fluttering pulses of air.  And a lot of the ideas that are flying around right now are positive and inspiring.  It bodes well.

    Dustin Wong live.  Delicate Steve's video for "Butterfly."
    Great thanks to Andrew St. Clair for the Delicate Steve photo.