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The Real Folk Blues
Sun
City Girls, live at the Empty Bottle, Chicago, November
15, 2002.
It
occurred to me while watching this show that it was possibly
the best rock show I'd seen in my life. Sure, there were
at least 10 other contenders, including ZZ Top, Lightning
Bolt, Prince, and Michael Jackson (1984 Victory Tour) but
I wasn't convinced that the SCG hadn't pulled the upset.
I never saw the Minutemen
play, but I couldn't help but think of them during the SCG
set. After all, the SCG were contemporaries, putting out
their first album in 1983, and they were another trio of
dudes who came up through hardcore, pulling the same trick
of simultaneously celebrating and refuting the scene by
playing an expansive combination of rock, folk, blues, jazz,
dada, and poetry forms. And how about the Meat Puppets,
also contemporaries, also expansive, also from Phoenix,
Arizona, and also having two brothers on guitar and bass
and vocals?
But, the 'dude'
thing is important. Alan Bishop reminded me of Mike Watt;
an excellent musician without muso pretension, a raggedy
older guy who is smart, funny, friendly, and slightly incoherent,
and isn't trying to be cool. I don't know, after moving
to Chicago, where you can find almost any kind of person,
I find myself gravitating towards my rural Iowa/Nebraska
dude roots. In Blastitude, I try to express that the Iowa/Nebraska
dude in me is certainly tired of mild-mannered (read: pretentious)
experimental styles of music, but that I'm just as tired
of the doggedly harsh/cynical dada extremes that seek to
destroy these. Not to mention the reactionary classicists
who renounce anything experimental in favor of 'the song,'
as if the only way to show you love 'songs' is to exclusively
listen to British Invasion bands, and as if "Meet Me
At The Jailhouse" by Wizzard isn't experimental as
fuck. I'm looking for the dudes in between who play and
see music from as many angles as possible and can do it
SIMULTANEOUSLY, and perhaps most importantly I'm looking
for the blue-collar problem-solving ability that only the
cream of the crop dudes exhibit.
All of this, I
got from the Sun City Girls, live at the Empty Bottle on
November 15, 2002. Blastitude readers know that I like quite
a few things, but I like the Sun City Girls the best. The
Sun City Girls ARE Blastitude. Their show was the greatest
'fuck you'/reclamation I've ever seen by the hippie/folkie
spirit of punk rock. They are a jam band, unequivocally,
but they are the best jam band that ever lived while also
being a hardcore fuck you punk rock band (i.e. old school,
Reagan era and shit). Meat Puppets were the same way, and
even Black Flag let more and more of their true hippie side
out as the years went on. Right now, you've got NNCK and
Suntanama doing serious hippie work in what is still a very
post-hardcore scene, and I'd include other bands too that
aren't afraid of their 'roots,' such as Black Dice and No
Doctors.
Thing is, the
Sun City Girls are not just a great fuck you from the hippie
side of punk, they're a great fuck you from ALL sides. You
can include the unfashionable side (i.e. not trying to be
cool), the forty year old dude side, and the astounding
musician side. You can include the good-time side, too,
because they were having a good time up there, without any
dour Brechtian art poses to 'challenge' the audience. Some
people commented about how NORMAL Alan Bishop seemed, because
they were noticing that he was just a dude after all, and
because of the way he said, before the first song, "Thanks
for packin' this fuckin' place! We really do love it."
They were expecting maybe robes and exotic balinese rug
masks (and dour Brechtian art poses), but hey, it's not
like he was exactly normal. For example, also before the
set started, he had this exchange with the audience:
Alvarius (unprompted):
"Yeah, fuck Kissinger and all those other monkeys.
And fuck homeland security!"
Someone in audience:
"ASHCROFT!!!"
Alvarius: "Yeah,
he's just another appendage. Seals & Ashcroft! That's
what I'm talking about."
Anyway, the music.
Their 90-minute set was a real 'play the hits' kind of affair
for a long-time listener like me, although now I'm already
starting to mix up what they did and didn't play. Did they
play "Rookoobay"? I don't think so, but they might've.
They opened with an upbeat modal VU jam in the spirit of
the original "Paris 1942" or "Dead Chick
In The River" which drifted into "Opium Den,"
followed by the joyous "Esta Susan en Casa?" from
Horse Cock Phepner. Things started to get slippery,
and I don't quite remember the next couple things they did
(except for a weird-ass Gocher rant and Rick Bishop asking
"Could I get more guitar in the monitors, please? And,
could I get more mushrooms in the monitors?") until
Alan put down the bass and sang his very best Bollywood
torch ballad to guitar and drum accompaniment, a crowning
moment for the set and an introduction to the 'chapters'
section. If the first chapter of the set was a general "Greeting"
with a few various songs, the second chapter was called
"Solos." One song turned into a Charles Gocher
drum solo, which he carried for a good six or seven solid
minutes of riotous and expert jazz. I love the SCG home-recorded
fidelity, but live, you get so much MORE of Gocher's drum
genius. On tape, he's a presence, but live, he's a powerhouse.
Alan and Rick sat down at the back of the stage and smoked
cigarettes, visibly enraptured by the drum music. Then Rick
stepped up to do a guitar solo, very jazzy, very solo flamenco
rasquedeso, which turned into a sort of plaintive, powerful
Dick Dale homage, the whole thing a continuation of his
trad-folk Salvador Kali persona. (I love how he
plays guitar all trad and pretty-like, but sets his amp
so that certain notes are really trebly and in-the-red and
cut right into your brain.) Rick's solo ended, and there
was a pause while all eyes turned to Alan and his name was
shouted. He was sitting stage left with an acoustic guitar
and started strumming a chord, singing those immortal opening
lines: "Buy low, sell high/A centipede between the
eyes..." That's right, "Cooking With Satan,"
yet another example of how Alvarius B really does have his
finger on the pulse of America with his cryptic vision of
post-everything social malaise, singing about how a "White
trash riverboat Tom Sawyer/Tried to sue my voodoo lawyer,"
and descriptions like "Dressin' down with your cell
phones." That line was recorded back in early 1995,
and just look at us now. During the song I noticed that
Gocher and Rick, sitting back behind the drums, both had
their eyes closed and were nodding their heads intensely,
as if they were hearing a sermon.
Bishop kept the acoustic
guitar on for the next chapter, which was a long sit-down
slow-jam kind of thing. This was the only point of the set
where the momentum might have waned a bit, but that might
have been intentional, because it was kind of opium den-ish.
(This chapter was probably why Dave Chamberlain, music critic
of Chicago's New City paper, called the set "a Grateful
Dead-like miasma." If he wasn't so busy checking out
what the 90 Day Men are wearing to the bar on any given
night, he might have figured out by now that at least 20%
of the Grateful Dead output is a miasma that RULES.) And,
everyone got snapped back to attention by the next chapter,
which was a loud hellish set of protest folk cum pan-ethnic
global war metal, just as topically on-point now as it was
in the Reagan years that spawned it. Centerpiece: Phepner's
"Without Compare." As on that original track,
the music suddenly stopped mid-song and the Brothers Bishop
performed a simultaneous rant for contemporary times. R.
chattered expertly in 'irate pan-Asian cab driver,' while
A. seemed to be trying to singlehandedly summon up all the
defiance the entire country should be feeling against our
war-mongering president. He briefly commented on some of
that day's sports news, "The Cubs got Dusty Baker,
I can't believe it," which turned into a huckster riff
for the "greatest game of all time! Only one will win!"
which turned into a desperate plea to "Fuckin'
destroy 'em all!!! Blow 'em all up you motherfuckin' cocksuckin'
fucks!!!" which turned into a "There's no
happiness in a 30 year mortgage! There's no happiness in
surfin' the fuckin' internet!" and something about
a website called "1-800 fuck you dot fuck."
When all of this shrapnel
settled, they went right into the next chapter, an amazing
10-minute section of their trademark scatter/skitter improv
style. It was revealing to see them do this live, because
their body language has a lot to do with the music. Gocher
actually stands up and walks around while playing his kit,
staring intently at his band-mates, a hilarious parody of
'musicians communicating, man.' Alan acts retarded and fires
his bass at the audience like it's a machine gun (making
noise with it appropriately). They are spoofing a form of
music ('downtown' improv) while simultaneously doing it
MUCH BETTER than the people they're making fun of. (The
only other musician I've seen achieve this zone while 'improvising'
is Chuck Falzone, during his set-opening guitar solos with
My Name Is Rar Rar.) After that, the set was about over....again
it's all a blur....but I remember that they encored with
"Eye Mohini" and something else great that I've
already forgotten...oh yeah, "Me and Mrs. Jones"!
Midnight Cowboys represented!
Anyway, I don't
know what else they did or even if I have all the chapters
in the right order. Somewhere in there they did do a truly
beautiful version of Love's "Alone Again Or."
The sadness and loneliness of the original was even further
accentuated, especially during the solo guitar filigree,
which R. played beautifully -- and then he copped the original
mariachi-punk trumpet solo note for note too. (With more
of that aforementioned 'piercing' quality, done perfectly.
Guitar magazines call it 'phrasing.') This kind of poetic
sadness and middle-aged wisdom was there throughout the
set, but it's not like it was at the expense of fun and
chaos and anti-conformity and all that shit. (I.E. "hardcore
fuck you punk rock.") Believe me, the mix was heady.
Here's to the dudes.
Date:
Sun, 24 Nov 2002 19:27:10 -0800 (PST)
From: "Brad Sonder" <appearnance@yahoo.com>
Subject: having a wild weekend
To: blastitude@yahoo.com
After Sun City Girls show the party didn't stop. "Jakamahaka"
Maly was having a karaoke party way out northwest, so we
hopped in the car (I had been partying responsibly so I
was very good to drive) and buzzed onto the Kennedy freeway
all the way up to the Montrose exit. Less than a block off
the Kennedy sits the karaoke bar Sidekicks, extremely unassuming
in that Northwest Chicago karaoke bar way. We walked in
and the whole posse was there: Fuff, Starck, Blaha, Chewb,
Pricilla and her twin sister, brother John and brother Mike...shit,
maybe more, although Mr. Maly himself had already left because
he was vomiting (bummer), and Jack Jackson left too. Fuff
was getting ready to sign up for Rundgren's "Hello
It's Me" and I was going to join him and we were gonna
trade verses, right when the DJ called it for the night.
(It was getting close to 3AM after all.)
We had only heard a
couple songs, and man, karaoke was sounding good, the craziest
muzak ever, and we all decided to head over to the Hidden
Cove because they had karaoke right up until they closed
at 4AM. We knew the waiting list to sing would be way too
long for us to even bother signing up, but when I got there
I signed up anyway (for "Hello It's Me"), just
as a gesture of good faith, because didn't even care to
sing it, we just wanted to HEAR it!
Our instincts were correct;
the Cove was a blast. People were there to party, and the
mix of Chi-town grotesque and Chi-town sexy is never more
apparent than it is at the Cove (as opposed to say an indie-rock
show where everybody is cute, hardly a mix at all for a
city this mixed). This incredible blonde in a leather jacket
and big-hip blue jeans sang "D'yer Mak'r" by the
Stones. She really knew how to wear lipstick, and her lips,
rounded for that chorus of "oh, oh oh oh, oh oh......,"
were really, well, oof, use your imagination. Some gnarly
young ponytailed dude danced in front of her the whole time,
I thought he was her boyfriend, but it turned out they didn't
even know each other, and after the song she ended up talking
to me, with her gay man friend who had KILLED earlier with
"Kiss" by Prince, and I'm like holy shit, I'm
scoring! With the girl with the lipstick, oh, oh oh oh,
oh oh! The joke Hischke and I made when she wasn't looking
was the "hand-off," where I slip off my wedding
ring and hand it to him for safe-keeping. Ah, but the real
hand-off was to Bob Chewb, who happened to be sitting at
the closest bar-stool. He started to join in on our conversation,
at which point I made a graceful exit to take a piss and
buy another beer 'wid da gise.' Chewb and C-----, the girl
with the lipstick, ending up exchanging numbers. She's an
actress and her play is running right next door to S-----'s,
where Femur's playin' tonight, and they told her to come
to the show and she's gonna comp them for her play, whatever.
Then we went back home and drank until 7AM! My first time
seeing the sun rise in Chicago.
Then came Sunday....shit,
we sat around until 2PM. J & A's official alarm clock/running
joke for their entire visit is side one of Bob Dylan's New
Morning. I A/B it so it plays in the guest room and they're
pretty much out of bed by the second song, "Day of
the Locusts." Beautiful song to wake up to, seriously,
but they can't stand "If Not For You" right now.
Went to eat at Penny's, then went and had the usual uninspired
shopping trip to Reckless, although Jeremy got some dollar
LPs and I bought...what what....shit....forgot....oh yeah,
I bought MX-80 Big Hit/Hard Attack for like $3.99, and it's
awesome. That night was Black Dice and Wolf Eyes of course.
I decided I was gonna definitely go but J&A weren't
too into it, so I took them over to Jackson's because Jackson
and Colby were going to a big art party/happening at Buddy
where Eleanor & Jamie from Cheer-Ax were gonna play,
and Bobby Conn, so that was a party, but I've already made
that scene a few good times, so I went to Black Dice/Wolf
Eyes by myself, which was very fucking good. No Docs and
Sir Reggie Queequeg were there. The Abbey sound system deserves
absolute highest marks. It was both the loudest and cleanest
noise show I'd ever been to. If you even call it a noise
show, which it wasn't. It was post-noise, man. 2nd best
Wolf Eyes show I've ever seen. Black Dice ended up being
pretty amazing. I mean, it was like whale-sound guitar and
even Police-sounding textural guitar at times, but they
really did have a pulse going throughout. That's why everyone
compares it to Vision Creation Newsun by the Boredoms. Because
both have a pulse going throughout, and they aren't really
songs, just epic sound explosions with a backbeat. For example,
the drummer wouldn't play for minutes at a time and then
he'd break into a double-bass roll for the next 5 minutes.
I don't know, it wasn't noise, or hardcore AT ALL, it was
just big sky music, hippie music almost definitely, and
it's a set that's even better now than it was then, kna
mean? And no, they are NO LONGER turning into Flies Inside
The Sun. (Not that there's anything wrong with that, really,
except redundancy, but who isn't redundant?)
After all this I buzzed
back to Wicker to catch up with the rest of the gang. J
& A and Jackson were actually standing outside of Buddy
catching some fresh air among all the frat guys and bums.
We went upstairs and it was chaos as usual up there -- tons
of people and those guys really don't know how to run a
venue. I missed the Eleanor/Jamie thing and Bobby Conn but
I did see Gregory Jacobsen do a solo set which rocked! I
can't really describe it, it didn't sound anything like
the Lovely Little Girls, it was more good ole rock 'n' roll
and he was doing Russell Mael moves. Anyway, after waiting
in line for hours to pee we decided fuck it, let's just
leave and pee in the street, but those geniuses at Buddy
WEREN'T LETTING ANYONE LEAVE because of some 'shit' going
down outside. Man, you can't have a party and not let anyone
leave, EVER. We said fuck it and left through Heaven even
if we did have to tear down some duct tape that was blocking
a door. Some girls who looked on the verge of tears said
"Can we go out this door?" to us like we were
the only sane people in the place because apparently we
were. We didn't notice any 'shit' going down anywhere and
calmly left, stopping to pee in an alley while lake-effect
snow softly fell on us. Went back to my pad and partied
again, this time only til like 5:30 AM. Next morning, "Day
of the Locust" and we ate at the Flying Saucer, and
it was NOT too hip. Not much else. Recuperated. I guess
that's just the glamorous life.
Sabir
Mateen Test Quartet @ Velvet Lounge, Sept. 2002
When I noticed in the small print of the Chicago Reader
live listings that the “Sabir Mateen Test Quartet”
was playing at the Velvet Lounge on a Tuesday night, I got
real excited. Test?? That twisting/weaving whirling dervish
of a New York City free jazz quartet themselves? The quartet
that perhaps offered the first real advancement of the free
jazz idiom since, I don't know, 1976, via their surprisingly
unique ‘non-stop tandem weave’ approach, as
documented in 1999 with a slew of great records, and then
not really heard from since?
After getting real excited
like this, I started to get skeptical. Why was it billed
as the “Sabir Mateen Test Quartet”? Why wasn’t
there any hype anywhere in the city about this event? No
Peter Margasak/Kevin Whitehead critic choices in the Reader,
and everything I could dig up about Test on the internet
referred to the glory year of 1999. Either way, I still
had the evening blocked out on my calendar, but before driving
down to the Velvet, I had to make sure, and called them
up. Fred Anderson himself answered, and I asked, “Is
Test playing tonight?” “Yeah!” he said.
“From New York City?,” I said, wanted to clarify
somehow. “Yeah!” he said. “Okay, I’ll
be there!,” I said. (That's actually what I said.)
I arrived and
handed over the $10 admission fee to Mr. Anderson, and,
almost immediately after that, noticed that the drummer
was definitely not Tom Bruno. I then noticed that the bassist
was an Asian woman that assuredly was not Matthew Heyner.
I asked Mr. Anderson who was playing, in hopes that it might
be an opening act. “Test!,” replied Anderson,
somewhat indignantly, because he seemed to know I was the
guy on the phone, and perhaps he was aware that he had been
somewhat misleading to me about the fact that Sabir Mateen
was the only original member.
Ah well, it was
only the second time I’d ever been to the Velvet Lounge
in two years, and it’s a fine place no matter who’s
playing, one that I can certainly donate $10 a year towards
keeping it in business. And I had to admit that there was
some cooking going on – Mateen was rather awkwardly
and humorlessly standing there, but the pianist, bassist,
and drummer moved through solo sections and spontaneous
duo/trio ideas that were pretty involved. However, as the
night wended on, things got a little weird....the drummer
was indeed playing his ass off, so much so that I was starting
to go, man, a little less drums, how about? Mateen obviously
agreed, because at one point he was playing a reed instrument
and the drummer was playing too, non-stop cascades of notes,
all sweaty with his eyes closed, and Mateen starting like
waving one hand at him (while playing with the other) to
try and get him to stop. Of course, the drummer's eyes were
closed so he kept going and going until Mateen finally had
to stop playing and walk back to the drumkit and shush him.
The drummer tried to save face by climaxing into a big fill
before stopping with a big cymbal crash but....it was awkward.
I've seen a lot of free jazz shows, but that was the first
time I've ever seen a group have an obvious failure of communication
onstage. There were further problems onstage, more of them
(but not all of them) involving the drummer, but I blame
Mateen. He just didn't seem like much of a leader, and after
the first incident with the drummer, if felt like everyone
in the band was being too careful, for fear that they were
gonna get shushed too. Plus, any guy with a dread ponytail
THAT long gets some demerits in my book, but seriously,
he just seemed so HUMORLESS up there. It made me miss Daniel
Carter's effervescence even more. Not too fun of a night.
Get
Hustle, The Lovely Little Girls, Flying Luttenbachers, Tales
of Genji @ The Pink Section
This was the first show to ever happen at an extremely promising
new Chicago venue called The Pink Section. The place had
an obscure South Side location, which was refreshing enough
already, but then I was greeted warmly by the hosts before
I even walked in the door, and offered free cans of PBR
with my mere $5 admission. I know, I know, that sounds way
too good to be true, and indeed, the show/party was eventually
busted by the police (it was in an industrial but still
fairly residential area) and I haven't heard anything from
the place since. But, every band did get to play and it
was a damn fine bill. Notwithstanding the first band, that
is, a Chicago group called Tales of Genji. The Pink Section
website said "(skingraft)" to the describe the
band, but I'm not sure why because there's no mention of
them on the Skin Graft website. They seemed a little too
run-of-the-mill screamo HC for Skin Graft. Some kinda cool
revved-up crunchy classic rock hooks to go with the
standard hipster grind, but haven't Rye Coalition and whoever
been doing that for a few years now?
Next up was my first
viewing of The Flying Luttenbacher. If you hadn't heard,
for the first time Weasel Walter has pared his long-running
avant-chaos unit down to a one-man band, featuring himself
on fretless bass guitar playing to madcap backing tapes
of his compositions. Watching him freak out, I wondered
why he hadn't cut to the chase like this earlier. It made
sense, and it was definitely entertaining to have him out
from behind the drums, strutting around and spazzing out.
It is a little goofier and sloppier (Weasel didn't seem
to satisfied with his performance), but as an audience member
I was ready to move on from the superhuman discipline trio
thing, which was was like an amazing 900-page novel that
I had already read 7 or 8 times and didn't really feel the
need to revisit any time soon. Weasel solo is like the comic
book version and I had a good time.
Next was another
local act, relatively new to the scene, that I hadn't checked
out yet: Gregory Jacobsen's Lovely Little Girls. I've been
thinking lately how all this Neo No Wave is rock music with
NO blues or country inflections whatsoever, with perhaps
a more European cabaret influence in their place. The LLG
definitely seemed to illustrate this, with Jacobsen mincing
and preening in a arch, showy, and genuinely kind of disturbing
way. I especially liked the creepy poems he barked out in
between songs. The band itself actually did have a whiff
of the blues in there, in an even Waits/Beefheart kind of
way, but it was more demented than that, and the cheesy
keyboard tones threw it off further. The lineup also included
spectral guitar and bowed contrabass, with a drummer who
played pots and pans in addition to his kit. I'm looking
forward to seeing them again.
After all this, San
Diego's Get Hustle took the stage. I was a fan of Antioch
Arrow back in the day; at the time they were one of the
most extreme new developments in underground rock I had
heard. Get Hustle features two former members of A. Arrow,
a drummer and guitarist, but the guitarist has switched
to keyboards, and I had heard that Get Hustle was a maturation
of sorts. But that didn't prepare me for what was to come,
because these people are onto something really deep. Yes,
the lineup has two keyboards and no guitars, but they are
playing absolutely no 80s-fetish tricks WHATSOEVER, no pseudo-dance,
none of that crap that everyone else is doing that you might've
feared. Instead, Get Hustle are getting into a very serious
dark-night cabaret soul thing. It is an intensely brooding
sound, and when the cops broke it up after 6 songs or so
I realized that the band was just getting started. They
could've played for a good 2 hours, I think, which would've
probably turned the crowd into a seething naked mass. People
were really starting to lurch and sway when the set ended.
I remember back when I was less jaded, and I would sometimes
see a band and, after it was over, I almost immediately
started looking forward to seeing them again, whenever and
wherever it might be. That's what Get Hustle was like....good
to know that it can still happen again.
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