Dan Deacon at The Mammal Gallery, Atlanta - April 18, 2015

My wristband for the Sweetwater 420 Festival was still valid for Saturday, but rather than return to Centennial Park and the mud, the blood, and the beer (to quote Johnny Cash) and see Gov't Mule, Primus, and Cage the Elephant, I instead packed it in with what seemed like a thousand other people at The Mammal Gallery to see Baltimore's Dan Deacon.

Atlanta's Shantih, Shantih opened.  Shantih Shantih is a four-piece, all-woman band playing "fuzzed out, desert dusted rock n roll" featuring Anna Kramer of The Lost Cause.

It was a nice start, and after that things got weird.  First we got - I don't know what to call him (comedian?  guru? motivational speaker?) - Ben O'Brien, or as he likes to call himself, "Earth Universe."  "I am not a spiritual guru who travels the world convincing people to join my wicked sweet cult," he claims.  Earth Universe explained how he became awakened by reading a mint Dr. Bronner's bottle while seated on the toilet.   

"I used to be a really inspiring cool filmmaker, but I gave all that up the day I became enlightened," he explains.  He may no longer be a filmmaker, but he spent most of the rest of the evening videoing Dan Deacon's set.

More cosmic truths, but ones you could dance to, came next when sisters Taraka and Nimai Larson, aka Prince Rama, took the stage.  For those of you keeping score at home, this was my fourth time seeing the band after previous appearances at Farm 255 in Athens, at The Earl, and at the Hopscotch Festival in Raleigh.  Ironically, the sisters' parents have also been at every Prince Rama show I've attended as well.  The band has added a third member, a keyboard player, freeing up Taraka to focus more on vocals and guitar, and with interacting more with the audience.  They also had a lot of new songs in their set as well.  

By this time (I'm not sure what hour it was as I had lost all track of time), the venue was packed and it was getting incredibly hot in the under-ventilated, non-air-conditioned Mammal Gallery.  But as soon as Dan Deacon took the stage, he brought the energy level up to a fever pitch with his manic music, dance contests, guided meditations, and general insanity.

I'd like to say it was as hot as the surface of the sun in there, but I always think of the sun's surface as being arid, so let me say instead it was as hot as, oh I don't know, Venus?, in The Mammal Gallery during Dan Deacon's set.  It was a swampy, sweaty, down-on-the-bayou kind of hot, and condensate was dripping off the pipes along the gallery's ceiling.  It was so crowded that some people were standing of the backs of the few furnishings in the gallery, and others were literally climbing the walls.  It got so frantic that the floors were literally bouncing as people danced.   

In other words, it was a perfect Dan Deacon performance - a sweaty, pipe-dripping, floor-bouncing, wall-climbing, lights-flashing night of insane music.  If you think I'm exaggerating or improperly using the word "literally," here's video proof, part of my very occasional 30 Seconds of video series (very few of which actually are 30 seconds in length).  

In all, it was a great show, and to enjoy it you just had to go with the flow of it all, no matter how ridiculous, how outre, how manic, it all became.  But one of the best parts of the evening, to be honest, was finally stepping outside after the show at what turned out to be 1:00 am and finally getting a breath of cool, fresh air.