Nirvana

He doesn't recall whether or not it's been mentioned that since 1986, when he first moved to upstate New York, he worked as a whitewater river guide on weekends, taking rafts of passengers down a 17-mile wilderness stretch of the Hudson River up in the Adirondack Mountains.  No matter how bad things got, he always had a bit of adventure waiting for him on the weekend.  His passengers might have had more of an adventure than they had paid for if they only knew that their guide truly didn't care if he lived or if he died.

Also, by 1991 he had shaved off his trademark beard. A new look for a new decade.

1991, of course, was the year of Nirvana, putting Seattle and the Pacific Northwest in the spotlight.  He liked Nirvana, a lot, and it was something new, even if its punk roots and its rock melodies sounded familiar to him.  The music of Kurt Cobain and the other grunge bands of the time (Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, Alice In Chains, etc.) fit nicely into his 1991 playlist and were in heavy rotation on his new CD player.  And there was nothing sweeter than driving up north for a weekend of whitewater adventure with Smells Like Teen Spirit blasting out of the Jeep's speakers.

Little House He Used to Live In

In 1990, he finally broke down and bought a CD player, and began the long process of reacquiring his library of LPs and cassettes in disc form.  His inclination toward industrial and post-rock music began to be tempered somewhat by listening again to a lot of his earlier music in the new CD format, and also by the shimmering sounds of  a new generation of melodic rock bands, including Glasgow's Del Amitri and London's The Sundays.  Slowly, he backed down from the ledge of extreme music and back to appreciating somewhat more human - and humane - sounds.  

To this day, he still considers The Sunday's first two albums, Reading, Writing, and Arithmetic and Blind, to be timeless classics that he can (and does) still enjoy anytime he hears them.  It never gets old for him.  He's fascinated by the sound David Gavurin gets from his guitar as well as by Harriet Wheeler's vocals. How could a voice that sounded so sweet sing such mean-spirited lyrics? "If I could have anything in the world for free, I wouldn't share it with anyone else but me" she sings in A Certain Someone, and "Just give me an easy life and a peaceful death" in Goodbye.  The lyrics might be considered downbeat to some, but anything less would have sounded too saccharin sweet for his still lingering pessimism, that "little souvenir of a terrible year" (Here's Where The Story Ends). 

Also, a full two decades before the current enthusiasm for alternative housing, he rented a small, barely converted barn out in the New York countryside and made his home there.  The barn notably had the Ben and Jerry's logo painted on its side, and the deal included a chicken coop (although he allowed the chickens to range freely around the property), a vegetable garden, a couple outbuildings for storing firewood, etc., and even an in-ground swimming pool. The owners' black lab would stop by from time to time to keep an eye on things, but otherwise he pretty much had the run of the place.

Autumn, spring, and summer were pretty sweet, but the long New York winters were harsh and he only had a single wood-burning stove for warmth.  But he was only a mere mile away from the old Erie Canal, and once it froze over, he could ice-skate along it for miles on end.

Listening to The Sundays, things didn't seem quite so bad to him after all.  With the 80s now finally behind him, their trauma and heartbreak and melancholia finally over, he was emerging out of the darkness and back into the light.

Head Like A Hole

In 1989, he was still part zombie.  On the outside, be appeared to everyone else like a normal, living person, working, playing, even dating, but inside he was empty, still trying to build a new persona to occupy that burned-out shell.  Like Devo's Mongoloid, he wore a hat and he had a job and be brought home the bacon, but few people knew that there was no one there inside.  To this day, he still considers himself to have been dead for those years, which is part of the reason that now it's easier for him to consider that past incarnation as a "him" rather than an "I."

Nine Inch Nails' Pretty Hate Machine was the musical successor to Ministry's Land of Rape and Honey, but in many ways it also represented the mainstreaming of the angry industrial sounds that he often thought that he and he alone appreciated.  The album gave "industrial music a human voice, a point of connection" with its "tortured confusion and self-obsession," and brought "emotional extravagance to a genre whose main theme had nearly always been dehumanization" (Allmusic).  Rolling Stone called it "the first industrial singer-songwriter album."  The song Head Like A Hole got heavy airplay on MTV and it was a little bit jarring to hear the snarling sound of the song sandwiched in between commercials for acne medicine and pop-music videos.  But the commercial success of the album opened the doors for other adventurous bands to be heard as well, and as his healing started to near its completion, there was a lot of new music and new sounds to help him complete his transition back to the living.

Oh yes, and at the end of the year, he moved out to the countryside.

Little Dragon at Variety Playhouse, Atlanta - June 14, 2014

The Little Dragon Nabuma Rubberband tour rolled through Atlanta last night, placing the band in Variety Playhouse on a Saturday night (fortunately, no one apparently told them that touring bands avoid Atlanta on weekends and leave the stages for local bands).

One of the big mysteries of the night was who would be opening, as no one was listed on the venue website, the marquee, the press, or anywhere else I could think of looking.

The answer, as it turned out, was someone named Lawrence Rothman, a soulful, R&B-influenced singer accompanied by a backup singer and a hip-hop dj.  "I'm from Missouri," he said by way of introduction, and came across as something of an All-American good-old-boy with a penchant for danceable, blue-eyed soul, but a little bit of Google searching reveals him to be a somewhat more complex character.

He formerly performed as Lillian Berlin of the St. Louis band Living Things, and he's now something of a conceptual artist/performer who, as opener for Little Dragon, takes on a different character each night, so what we saw in Atlanta is probably very different than what others saw in different cities.  Last year in New York, he was flanked by two gauze-covered dancers and performed in silhouette in front of flood lights.  His Facebook page shows many different looks for him, from a bald-headed, face-tattooed punk to a bruised, black-and-blue goth.  

Last night, he performed a short, 25-minute or so set of about a half-dozen songs in his everyman,  persona, frequently embracing his backup singer.  The songs were good and his baritone voice was in fine form, and the audience seemed to appreciate his set.  It will be interesting to see what he does next and where he goes from here.  

But make no mistake, the sold-out audience was there to see Little Dragon.  Interestingly, the audience was much more diverse than most shows I've attended.  The audience was at least 50% black, indicating Little Dragon's cross-over appeal, and there was a fairly large contingent of gay men, who often seem to appreciate female-fronted dance-music bands.  In other words, the audience was much closer to Atlanta's actual demographics than the predominantly white audience at most of the shows that I go to, and a refreshing opportunity to rub elbows with some new and different fans.    

We've seen Little Dragon twice before, on a big stage at Seattle's Bumbershoot in 2001, and at an intimate, early-morning show in Portland's Doug Fir Lounge as part of KEXP's MFNW coverage that same year, with singer Yukimi Nagano performing barefoot and still in her pajamas.

Yukimi wasn't in her p.j.'s last night, and looked terrific if a camo-patterned, midriff-baring sundress.  Like in 2011, she was an energetic performer, dancing along to the music and cheerleading the band when she wasn't singing, but she's also abandoned some of the Bjork-like quirkiness of the past.  

Gone were some of the science-fiction electronics that were parts of their past sound, although elements of krautrock can still be heard in their EDM sound (they played Kraftwerk's Autobahn over the PA before the set).  Many of the songs from the new album, such as Twice, are slower and more toned-down than the more aggressive dance music of past albums, and Yukimi has said in interviews that the inspiration for a lot of Nabuma Rubberband's songs came from the dreamy state she used to get from listening alone to some of Janet Jackson's slower ballads. 

This new approach has probably led to their increased popularity but it's apparent that this is a band that's not likely to include songs like Blinking Pigs in their set list again any time soon.  

The ballads and slower-paced songs might have caused the energy to drop in the hands of a lesser band, but Little Dragon wisely devised their set list to mix the slow and the fast, and when they launched into Ritual Union, the title track from one album back, the audience went wild.  

A video crew was filming the entire show and during the encore, Yukimi announced that they were going to shoot a live video that night for their song Klapp Klapp, if we could put up with them performing the song a second time (as it turned out, we could).

Little Dragon will be playing the Bonnaroo Music Festival today (Sunday, June 15), with a webcast from 9:30 to 10:15 p.m. Central Time, competing against Elton John on the other of two web channels. Hopefully, video of that performance will be available someday, as well as their Live-at-Variety-Playhouse video for Klapp Klapp. 

Stigmata

According to John Barth's classic tragi-comic existentialist novel The Floating Opera, one of his favorite books and one he's read over and over numerous times since he first discovered it in 1976:

1. Nothing has intrinsic value.
2. The reasons for which people attribute value to things are always ultimately irrational.
3. There is, therefore, no ultimate "reason" for valuing anything.
4. Living is action.  There's no final reason for action. 
5. There's no final reason for living (or for suicide).

Healing takes time, but by 1988, he felt like he had been tried by fire.  He tried to silence that untrustworthy narrative that he had been telling himself ("The story of your life is not your life; it is your story," Barth later wrote) with alcohol, loud music, and nihilism until he was partially dead inside, all charred wood and cold ashes like an old burned-out house that somehow still remains standing.  In a manner of speaking, part of him did die that night on the bridge. 

Healing takes time, but during the healing process, it needs a protective layer of gauze and bandages to protect the one recovering.  To keep the painful feelings at bay, he cocooned himself in music that was cold, unemotional, and free of sentimentality, and not necessarily even human sounding.  He had seen where raw emotions could lead (the I-90 Bridge).  Ministry's The Land of Rape and Honey provided just the right amount of cold industrial metal to protect him, and provided his soundtrack for 1988.  

One other note: the sound in the video version of Stigmata is as good an example as any of how digital compression can destroy analog music.  Dynamic range compression reduces the volume of loud sounds or amplifies quiet sounds in music by narrowing or "compressing" an audio signal's dynamic range. On the positive side, this makes it easier to hear the vocals in a recorded version of a song, but on the other hand, it takes away one of a musician's creative means of expression (variations of volume).

In the analog version of Stigmata that he used to own on cassette tape, the opening electronic sounds were relatively quiet, but the first drum line ("bum-bum-DA-bum") was shockingly loud.   As the drum line got repeated several times over at irregular intervals, it created a dramatic tension, an expectation that all hell was about to break loose and break loose very loudly, which it did with Al Jourgensen's scream and initial guitar attack.    

In the digital version heard in the video, everything's at the same volume - the opening electronic sounds are cranked up much louder, but the drum figure is muted down to that same volume level.  As a result, there's no dramatic tension before the scream starts, and when it does, it's not only not louder than anything else before it, it's actually so quiet it's almost lost in the mix.  Boring, and a sad defacing of Jourgensen's original artistic statement. 

It makes him wonder what he's missing out on in music that he's only heard digitally.

In Which Paul Weller Saves His Life

So let's see, where were we?  Oh yes, I was halfway home, I was half insane, and every shop window I looked in just looked the same.  I said, "Now send me a sign to save my life 'cause at this moment in time there is nothing certain in these days of mine."

No, I'm kidding, but just partly.  Those are song lyrics, Shout To The Top by The Style Council, but it was 1987 and it was in fact raining, and he was driving back from the girlfriend's house in upstate New York. She had been distant for several days, and he had been calling her over and over again that day and she wouldn't answer, even though he was sure she was home. That night, he finally decided to drive over to her house and caught her in flagrante delicto with a bearded, grey-haired old man who looked old enough to be her father but was in fact her former boyfriend.

He had unwisely transferred onto her all of his unresolved feelings and emotions about the previous girlfriends, the ones who had stayed behind in Boston and who had moved off to Denver, and this betrayal was more than he could take.  Driving home, the tears running down his cheeks mimicking the rain on the windshield, he attempted to drown out his anguished thoughts and blot out some of the pain by turning the volume all the way up on the cassette tape he was listening to, Internationalists by The Style Council. When the lyrics of Shout To The Top came on, it just sounded too similar to his present condition to believe. 

I was halfway mad, I was half in need
And as the rain came down
I dropped to my knees and I prayed.
I said, "Oh heavenly thing, please cleanse my soul
I've seen all on offer and I'm not impressed at all."

He was, in fact, halfway home; as a matter of fact, at that very moment he was halfway across the I-90 bridge over the Hudson River.  There was very little traffic on the road at that late hour of night, and it crossed his mind to stop the car right then and there in the middle of the bridge, and as he did and got out of his car, he knew that even though he hadn't been impressed at all by all that he had seen, he wasn't getting out to drop to his knees and pray in the pouring rain.

The bridge was about 60 feet above the water, and he reasoned that a five-story fall should be enough to end all of this pointless suffering.  The fact that it would also shame those who had done him wrong was just an added bonus.  Looking back, he knows that this was madness, but he was so enraged and out of his mind with emotion at the time that a single jump seemed like a reasonable thing to do and was quite within his capability.

He could still hear the music from his car as he stood out there in the rain, and Walls Come Tumbling Down, the next and final track on Internationalists after Shout To The Top, came on.

You don't have to take this crap,
You don't have to sit back and relax.
You can actually try changing it.

Hearing those words, a light bulb went off in his head.  Paul Weller was right - he in fact didn't have to take this crap, he didn't have to play the victim, he didn't have to passively accept this role.  He could change things, and simply just by looking at it differently.  Everything is perception, he realized, and he got himself into this situation by perceiving things one way and when confronted with contradictory evidence - when his fantasy collided with reality - he considering it a catastrophe.

The realization went something like this:  he was the one who had left the first girlfriend behind in Boston, just like the second girlfriend had left him for Denver, but he still perceived himself as the victim when the first girlfriend wouldn't leave her own life behind and move down after him.  Later, he perceived himself as the victim again when the second girlfriend left for Denver, even though she was just living her own life and acting exactly as he had when he had first moved to Atlanta and, just like the first girlfriend, when he didn't leave his own life behind to follow her out west.  And then he went and projected all of his confused feelings of abandonment and betrayal onto the third girlfriend in New York, who had no idea she was carrying all of his baggage, and when she went back to her old (in both senses of the word) boyfriend, she was just acting naturally, being who she actually was, but not who he wanted her to be (or something like that).

Anyway, all of this came to him in an instantaneous flash of intuitive insight, not all drawn out in words like above. Simultaneously, he also realized that if he just looked at this whole situation differently, then poof!, all the pain and suffering went away, and there was no reason to examine up close and personal just how far a drop it was from the bridge down to the water below.

"Fuck this," he thought and got back in his car and drove the rest of the way home.  As you can imagine, he listened to the Internationalists album a lot that year after the incident, and took the lyrics as life-affirming exhortations.  Paul Weller, he realized, had just saved his life. 

Are you gonna try and make this work
Or spend your days down in the dirt?
You see things CAN change
And walls can come tumbling down!

Weller, he knew, had absolutely no intention of saving his life or any idea what his lyrics would later trigger in that particular listener when he wrote that particular song.  In fact, listening to the lyrics of the album as a whole, it's apparent that Weller had hoped, if anything, to trigger a sort of Marxist response to Thatcherism and to class struggle.  But if Weller hadn't written those particular words and hadn't performed that particular song in a way that appealed to that particular listener, who knows what could have happened?

This is the first time he's talked to anybody about that night. Not to family, not to friends, not to clergy (why?), or any one else.  He's not blogged about it over at the other site.  Let's keep it just between us - our own little dark, emotional secret.

To be sure, despite the revelation on the bridge, he still hurt and the melancholy of the 1980s continued (healing takes time), but he clearly had turned a corner on that dark and rainy night.

Kishi Bashi at Terminal West, Atlanta, June 11, 2014

Meanwhile, back in the here and now, Kishi Bashi performed last night at Atlanta's Terminal West.  Added bonus points for the dream-team match-up of Atlanta's own Takenobu opening up for him. 

Takenobu can be described as the Andrew Bird of the cello (or the Kishi Bashi of the cello, for that matter) for the way he used a loop repeater to build up layers to play over until he sounds almost like a one-man orchestra.  We've seen Takenobu before, but never on a stage this big or in front of an audience as large as last night's sold-out Terminal West.  Despite some technical problems with a fuzzed-out cable, he performed a great set and hopefully took at least a small step forward in getting the recognition he deserves. 

Next up were Kishi Bashi's tour mates Buried Beds. The band includes members Eliza Jones of Strand of Oaks and Dave Hartley of The War On Drugs, some of my favorite bands, and I've long maintained that bassist Dave Hartley is the best in the business at what he does.

Their songs are inspired by folklore, fairy tales, local Philadelphia legends, science theories, and family stories, and contain underground giants, children of the sea, and the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics.

Somehow, it didn't all come together for me.  They're all skilled musicians and didn't play a single false note all night, but I didn't warm to the fairy tales and poppish nature of the project.  However, given their pedigree and musicianship, I think this could be a great band if they ever get serious and decide to start rocking. 

Last night was the end of the Buried Beds/Kishi Bashi tour, 33 gigs in not too many more days.  We last saw K. Ishibashi in Athens back before the tour began, and if I could get my way, I'd try to see him at least every 90 days or so.  He didn't play or do anything new compared to the Athens gig, but that's not to say anything sounded old or stale either - both nights, he served up his own unique, complex brand of pop rock exactly the way we fans want it.

He opened the set with Philosophize In It! Chemicalize With It!, covered Bright Whites somewhere toward the middle of the set, and held It All Began With a Burst back for the encore.

Amidst all the pop and hit songs, he even found space for a few improvisations, a little bit of experimentalism, and a few spaced-out passages.

As always, props to his sideman, Mike Savino (Tall Tall Trees) on "space banjo."



The set ended with three solo songs by Bashi, including a lovely version of I Am the Antichrist.

The encore included (but was not limited to) a tour finale group shot featuring the band, the entourage, openers Buried Beds, and the audience, followed by It All Began With A Burst, followed by a crowd surf, followed by a cover of Whole Lotta Love.

Good times.