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The Disco Biscuits at the Crystal Ballroom
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Essay by Max Dawson
Images by Chris Morris |
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By the time the band had taken the stage, the floor had already began to thump.
I mean, the floor. Sinking, sliding, slipping out from underfoot when you went to take a step or bust a move. Try to imagine the scenario: there are murals on the walls, crystal chandeliers hanging overhead. Really, though: its kind of absurd. You're in one of the classiest jamband-friendly rooms in America, a place with nearly a century's worth of history as a ballroom, a brewery, and a live music venue, and here you are, stumbling around like a drunk, struggling to stay upright as the floor pitches and heaves below you. According to the Ballroom's web site, there are rockers and ball bearings under the maple. The result is that the slightest bit of motion-for instance, a lone stage hand walking across the floor-can set these invisible mechanisms off in a manner reminiscent of the time your little brother didn't take his Ritalin, found where your mom was hiding the Halloween candy, and then started screwing around on your next door neighbor's backyard trampoline. Now, if that's what happens when just one pair of New Balance makes its way across this floor, imagine the results when that same hardwood is formally introduced to the feet of hundreds of insane Disco Biscuits fans
 Everybody knows that The Disco Biscuits guitarist Jon Gutwillig loves to play Bazaar Escape at the Crystal Ballroom. He told us so, only five months earlier, from the stage of the All Good Festival. According to Jon, the version of Bazaar played last fall at the Crystal was his favorite ever. He tried to describe to a slightly bewildered crowd of East Coast heads the dance floor, the bouncing, the people losing their minds. But, really, who could blame them for being confused? If I didn't live here, in Portland, ever aware of the presence of the Crystal's pervasive mystique, I don't think I would've believed the nonsense about the floating floor, either. That said, when the band fired up Bazaar Escape to open their most recent visit to Portland, it came as little surprise. For some reason, the awkward angularity and odd juxtapositions of Bazaar seems to mesh perfectly with that which goes down at the Crystal on a nightly basis. As in, you're in a ballroom! With a floating floor! Seeing a rock concert! Roll Tide! Within minutes, fans were ricocheting off the floor, the ceiling, and one another, forced to display the same kind of agile footwork that Cornado, the Bazaar's protagonist, summoned in his daring escape through a bustling central square marketplace.
 Rather than bringing Bazaar Escape to a close, the band rolled on, performing a drawn-out segue into the stately introduction of The Very Moon. During the song's body, Jon shuffled through a number of tones in search of a specific voice. Shortly after the first jam began, he found the exact sound he was looking for. It was a tone I had only heard him use once before, nearly eighteen months earlier, during a performance of Aceetobee in Towson, MD. His guitar began to mimic the sound of a violin, achieving a delicate stretching of notes which, according to Evan Leon, is accomplished by using a slight chorus, a little bit of reverb, and a subtle use of the volume pedal to fade each note in and out.
 The result was every bit as elegant as the ballroom itself. As the band worked their way outside of the confines of The Very Moon, lighting designer Matt Iarrabino aimed his techno beams towards the Ballroom's walls and began to spin kaleidoscopes across the murals and ornate fixtures that adorn them. The jam began to build, accelerating gradually from delicate ambient tinkering into raging trance until, literally, the band achieved flight. As the intensity peaked, Jon somehow found his way into the reprise of the version of "The Hot Air Balloon" that the band had left unfinished the night before, bringing a three-song medley of selections from the rock opera of the same name to an appropriate end.
  After hopping on the back of Shelby Rose for a concise and frenetic visit to the land of hard drum-n-bass, the band shifted gears in an attempt to once again lock their music into synch with their surroundings. The vehicle for this endeavor was a take on Magellan which, over the course of their current tour, has served as a template for a new way of approaching this epic. Unlike the spacious, ambient seascapes evoked by other renditions, this playing was sharply focused. It was as if Ferdinand had set sail with a detailed itinerary: rather than having his journey compromised by treacherous storms, the explorer had instead washed down a handful of Mini-Thins with a 32 oz Mountain Dew and entered into a caffeine-induced trance before streamlining his vessel across the seas with his destination firmly in sight. As Magellan's journey progressed, the band pushed harder. The floor heaved to keep up with the dancers and the band, launching fans off in a variety of directions. Bodies collided; leapers found extra spring. The knees of the low-down deep-groove dancers melted into the maple. The floor propelled me higher, upwards, until my head was even with the band's vocal mics.
 Once, during a Magellan, the guy next to me saw God. This was almost as an intense of an experience
Intermission. Returning to the stage after a short break, The Biscuits began their second set with a funked-out Mulberry's Dream. Keyboardist Aron Magner's new Korg MS2000 cranked out a crunchy rhythm throughout the song's second jam, which, like The Very Moon before it, built from psychedelic ambience into raging guitar rock. As the jam approached an obvious apex, the band fell into a composed breakdown lifted from another song. It was a song that the band had only played four times before and never once with bassist Marc Brownstein on stage. Jon stepped up to the mic and began to recount the story of the time he had "Woke up in the basement, woke up in a full on Sixty-Nine." It was as if, having already displayed their gentle, tasteful side during the first set, The Biscuits were eager to bust out the flesh hooks. Crystal Ball. They're playing-strike that, raging -a song called Crystal Ball at the Crystal Ballroom. The nerve!  VII. As has been the case all fall, when, deep into the second set, it came time to get nasty, Aron turned away from the JP8000, his traditional weapon of choice, and focused his attention on the new bank of keyboards which sits to his left. Having added a Korg MS2000, a Roland MC 505 Sequencer, a Vocoder, and two other keyboards to his arsenal this year, Aron has taken it upon himself to almost single-handedly reinvent the signature sound of The Disco Biscuits. Solos that had become predictable and repetitive during 1999 have since been refigured, filtered through Aron's new array of hardware, reclaiming segues which look textbook on paper as avenues for unique improvisation. Pygmy Twylyte -> Vassillios. Played out to death during the days of the JP's dominance. Pygmy Twylyte -> Vassillios, one year later? Stunning. Led by drummer Sam Altman's relentless thrash, the band slashed their way through the head-banging metal section of Vassillios. The floors rocked harder; the murals rocked; walls buckled and the chandeliers swayed, teetering ominously overhead. Suddenly, the giant wood backdrop sculpture which hangs suspended above Sam's kit came loose from its supports, sending the enormous frame crashing down onto the stage! Both Sammy and the vicious, mangy llama reared their heads and bellowed in approval. We were on the brink, the brink of destruction. We were finally doing it! Bisco was tearing the building down
 Perhaps sensing the disastrous consequences which would surely accompany the wholesale destruction of the venue, the band downshifted out of Vassillios and into Humuhumunukunukuapua'a, one of their most tender and heartfelt songs. Originally performed by Marc Brownstein's Maui Project, Humu provides The Biscuits with the show-closing ballad that their repertoire has always lacked. Coaxing deep, melodic tones out of his new five-string, Marc lead the band through a jam which began as melancholy and pensive before finding resolution and redemption in Jon's closing solo.
 Rather than letting us down easy, the band returned to the stage and encored with I Man. Jon emerged from the shadows, lit by a solitary techno beam from above, the insane genius peaking out from the dark to deliver an uncharacteristically moody read on one of the Biscuits' most upbeat anthems.
 Jon's first solo withdrew the band deeper yet into the somber, almost funereal motif before finding a progression better suited for such feelings. It was a progression that introduced another debut for this incarnation of The Disco Biscuits, Widow in the Rain. If the song structure and lyrics of Humu best illustrate the themes of loss and redemption via an exploration of their musical analogues, Widow, The Biscuits' most introspective and despondent song, can be interpreted as representing the exact opposite. Even as Jon's narrator promises, "Someday I'll be better, like myself of old," the optimism of his words is undermined by the despair that drips from his bluesy solos, betraying his true lack of hope. The room swayed silently, awed.
 Somehow, on their way out of this solemn debut, the band managed to turn a yet another corner. Building from the desperation of Widow, they found a groove, locked in, and rode it to a climax which dropped them into the second verse of I Man. Clearly, the moods that had inspired Humu, Widow, and the first portion of I Man had been exorcised, as their next jam crashed them straight into the silly funk of Pat and Dex. Cavorting around like the song's namesake turtles, The Biscuits once again filled the Crystal Ballroom with the lighthearted bounce that had characterized the evening's first set.
 Upon completion of the "Ornery Funk" section of Pat and Dex, the band swerved off its expected path, opting to perform a dyslexic completion of the medley they had opened the previous evening's show with. For those of you without PhD's in Biscology, dyslexia in a setlist refers to instances in which the ending of a song is performed before its beginning. As the preceding night's show had opened with Stone -> Liquid Laser, Portland's closer paired Liquid Laser's beginning (Pat and Dex) with Stone's end (The Devil's Waltz). Short of dusting off a genuine ballroom classic from the 30's, no closer could have been more appropriate for the Crystal than The Devil's Waltz. At once both regal and demonic, Waltz, which has been likened to a dance between an innocent virgin and the cloven-hoofed one himself, demonstrates more than any other original composition in The Biscuits' catalogue the influence that classical music has had on Jon Gutwillig's songwriting. What else for us fans to do but challenge the floor once again and attempt a sweaty, show-closing waltz?
 In retrospect, that kind of juxtaposition-virginal purity thrust up against relentless raunch-seems the perfect descriptor for the evening's music. Fairy tale, meet flesh hooks. Cocky accounts of dirty one-night stands? Let's just shove those right up against the epics about journeys across the ocean. Dead turtles? Those can hang over there, right next to the tune about the lonely widow's trip across the street in downpour If your mind ends up feeling as confused as your body does, don't fret. It's just Bisco.
Crystal Ball:
Widow in the Rain: Bret Maxwell Dawson's favorite decade is the 1890's.
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