innerspace #16 - Something Old, Something New...Notes From the Edge of The Outta-The-Blue FUTURE!

"New years" -- even if they are just an aggregate of useless numbers embedded in a totally subjective, calendrical view of the passage of time -- somehow persist in meaning a lot to me. I recall a newly-turned nine year-old on the cusp of the New Year 1984. A notoriously bookish, sulky and intense youngster, I sat alone in the kitchen, with chin propped in hand at about fifteen to Midnight, turning my head wearily every so often to gaze at the at clock and think, "I hope the world doesn't blow up. I hope that Orwell guy wasn't right. I hope they don't make us all into robots, or mindless zombies enslaved by technology."

Luckily, the bomb didn't drop, and Big Brother posters didn't start showing up all over the place. The lights went out briefly (and I flipped), but nothing much else went wrong. I did, however, begin taking the first state-funded computer courses at my elementary school that Autumn, contributing to what was, and still is, my eventual downfall at the filmy, invisible hands of floating binary gloam.

Speaking of the future-past, around the same time, sitting and stewing and brooding about the trials of man, I thought, "What the hell's the Year 2000 gonna be like? If I'm worried *now*, what the heck am I gonna do then?" With some calculation, I discerned that I'd be twenty-five years old in 2000. That's pretty old to a nine year-old, especially one morbidly obsessed with the absurdity of modern society, and the vastness of the unknown. Very scary. Electronic everything? Flying cars? Flying...people? Dishevelled, pollutant-charred landscapes, a la Ridley Scott? I think I decided right then that the odds of any of us even making it that far were about 50/50.

And -- craziest of all -- what would *I* be like then? Who would my friends be and what would I be doing? Where would I be, and where to be going? What kind of...music would there be then? Would it all be like Kubrick, and the Star Wars Cantina?

Flash-forward to December 29th, 1999. It's morning, and as usual, I'm confused and hurried, stuffing all my things into a hiking backpack (the highly recommended VauDe Asymmetric), and looking around sheepishly at all my belongings lining the walls of my apartment. Will I ever see them again? Twenty-five years old, and I'm standing in the middle of my living room with my fingers shoved in my mouth, practically crying. "We could still blow up, " I thought, harrowed. "This could all be gone, along with everything I've ever known...including (oh gawrsh) myself!" I don't know why I thought it, or what I thought was gonna happen. What did any of us think would go wrong?

The absurdity soon revealed its pearly key, and I discovered why there was nothing to worry about, and why I needed to hurry the @%*&! up and get out of the house, to complete my very last day of work at Columbia University. On a well-contemplated whim which glideded with skyborne ordinances, I decided to quit my full-time job in order to get part-time work, in hopes of more fully spending time doing what I'm doing right now. I was indeed, that day, bidding a shrill, weird, yet wholly voluntary farewell, to everything I knew and was accustomed to, specifically to afford myself more chances at glimpses of the ways to let go of it all, ardently digging in search of the Big Note, the Ambrosial Chord, and the glowing, abstract intoxicant known as Art-as-Life. If I wasn't around to see the potential destruction, then who was I to care? Might as well just GO, and piece it all together later on, if need be. Eventually, I watered my houseplant, checked the stove knobs, looked over my shoulder with a wry smirk, and trudged out the door towards fate.

My New Year's activity plan (thanks to all that speculated last month) was to include a simple three-night Bacchanal of musical debauchery of both old and newer varieties, featuring preoccupations of ancient days, and those of a fresher sort.

In the end, it all ended up starting, semi-theoretically, in Hampton, Virginia, the week before Christmas with gales of mounting frenzy. A slow bump over the holiday, souls mounted and rocketed straight downhill, oozing into three final nights of hardcore partying and butt-blistering music on the edge of improv rock frenzy, followed by two MORE nights of epochal partying straight from the pages of "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" (sans human adrenachrome, tremendous fear or very deep loathing, pink fur walls and slot machines), followed then by two nights of tomblike sleep, and yet three MORE nights of ass-scalding jamband joy. "The age old saying is right..."

The cold wind brushed my hair and face as I stepped out of Avery Library, as an toiler for the vast ivy empire one last time, on that 12/29 afternoon. My pack set firmly on my back, sleeping bag in hand, I reeled in the reliable frequency of this mad profession I've undertaken. "Traveling Scribe"? "Wayward Recorder of Minstrel Activities"? On the train to Poughkeepsie that night, I silently sat, attempting to absorb the significance of my trevails. "I'm moving my humanity," I thought, "through space, in order to wonder the motives of sound in airy fluidity." The wheels turned. The sky was dark. It was evening.

It's kind of funny how life just goes on, whether you'd like it to or not. One takes well for granted the simple things, like the fortune cookie I got earlier that morning, which said, "The stars appear in the sky at night. All is well." The aura of change in the city air was glass-shattering. I'm positive in surmising that if I *wasn't* at the moe. show that night at The Chance (an small, elegantly bawdy Music Hall of vaudevillian style in the Mid-Hudson Valley Region of New York), that life would've most predictably have continued on without me. Likewise, if I decided to hide entirely from Y2K proceedings in a cottage in rural Vermont like I'd considered, the only thing that would've happened is having to endure the agony at examining all the setlists I'd foregone, when I got home. And the pain factor of that? Minimal at best, and nebulously un-damaging in any real sense. But I know now that I made the right choice for me, and boy, am I glad. I'm beginning to think I couldn't attempt a "normal" life if I wanted to.

Not for long, anyway. Something's always grabbing me by the ass.

Could the New Year have begun, really, zooming in a rebel stylee through the afternoon traffic of Arlington, VA, en route to where the roads collide, to spy words from songs and licensed plates of random wisdoms, on the road bending toward the wish-fulfilling orbital probe? Hectic in the HOV, we ground our teeth but calmly sighed and knew the future, to the rich, ready exhortations of Brothers Past (of Philly). Darkest dusky Virginia dim unfolded to a blue-blackness, crisp and charmed CD dankness (courtesy of one Evan Leon) of the NEW DEAL variety, coasted us through space and ever nearer the catacombs of frothy entertwine...

I slept under a ledge which supported a small fridge, a coffee machine, and a microwave oven. I thought it was sort of nice, like an exploratory pod. I dreamt of e-mails, and prairies. Jiboo was nice enough to swallow me twice, and we rode on Mike's Groove till the range.

The Annual "Jewsapalooza" Festival at the Knitting Factory showed me the light of YOSI PIAMENTA (the "Chasidic Hendrix", among other honorifics), as well as Pharaoh's Daughter, fluid and conflagatory Middle Eastern jams with guitar, oud, percussion and exotic array.

Spent Christmas at Wetlands with sushi, Jews, Bolivians, and THE MACHINE...utterly superb Pink Floyd tribute material from Poughkeepsie and environs. Despite a "Dark Side of the Moon" that nearly caused me to split an atom in my brain, and a "Young Lust" jam sick enough to tilt a quasar, this band (much to my chagrin) is rumored to be not long for creation, with final shows slated for March! Please stay on, olde MACHINE!

Finally, more partying, one final night of meditation, and a morning's packing brought me down to the Water with an easy deal to make at THE CHANCE. moe. began their 12/29 show with a sock in the eye straight from the vaults, the swaggery "Johnny Lineup", and pulled out a whole bunch of strictly satisfying stops along the way to an uncompromising "Down By The River" encore. Gems among the jewelry included a reprisal of the grit-brutal, slow-movin' version of bassist Rob Derhak's Lowell George salute, "Stranger than Fiction," and an otherworldly "I know You Rider" which transported me subtly to other realms. I left the place glad to know that there's a home that welcomes me under moe.'s feet, the wily smiles and rising inclines of an interstate's worth of explorin'.

The next morning, I reclined on the living room couch of a welcome new recruit to the Jambands.com fray, Erica Lynn Gruenberg, gazing out elaborate draperies onto the Tarrytown morn. Headphones located in the misty overcast, I sneaked a listen to the new Grateful Dead box, "So Many Roads". Tears leaked into my ears as I rode the crests and troughs of The Wheel's mighty turnings, spokes casting shadows and intersecting rays of Dark Stars' revolutions. Relentlessly onwards the heavens arcing, marking the steps through our self-made doorways...

We hit the road a bit late for Philly, that is Erica and myself, accompanied, as well by my perennial pal, Jesse Jarnow, riding high in E-rock's white Saturnmobile to the strains of the 10/28/99 SPAGAOPERA, courtesy of our would-be hosts for the next two nights, the Brotherly Love City's own, The Disco Biscuits. It was not a tough decision, choosing the Biscuits for New Year's Eve. Phish, though a clean second in the elections, would be too phar-off in Phlorida, and although I'm sure I could've cooked up some means of transport, I wanted to be in the Northeast, as near to NYC as possible without actually *being* there. I'd spent the last three NYE's with moe., and though a pleasant tradition, t'was time for an alteration of place. And besides, last Summer's Melstock basically sold me the pony as far as the Biscuits went...falling Helicopters? A tubular tarp-tent vaulting like a great white wing and air-mailing "Voices" and the tales of "Little Lai"? There was nary a question about it.

Headed straight for the venue, we rolled up on fantasies come true. The class-schnazz of one of my favorite Northeast spaces, the Theater of the Living Arts, was cooly breathtaking for the leap into Tomorrow. A swanky blood-velvet scrim embraced the stage, but all else was cyber-terminal freaky...a day-glow matrix hung taut and colorsplashed behind the stage, with the walls scaling sheer and dark in the black-light reversals. Bull's eyes of vibrant blue and pink penetrated inner areas elevated with dark butterflies arranged in twos, and a candyflip of Intellibeams (precision-supplied by righteous lighting guy, Matty Iarrobino) rounded out the sparse, Bacchanalian laboratory for the elaborate nocturnal genius imaginarium.

Techno DJs spun before the show and in-between sets both nights. Some are saying the "techno thing" is a "phase" or "craze"...but it's been with us all along, way back to being fifteen for me, and sneaking out to burn in the Limelight, sweating, grimy and hooting till the dawn. The marriage of those tangy explorations, bomb-drops and BPMs, human percussive programmers scripting rhythmic codes and ennumerations...like wishes falling from some forgotten childhood sky. The pioneers of the new collaborations (The Disco Biscuits, the New Deal, Fat Mama, Lake Trout and Sector 9, to finger a few) are architecting the music of my dreams; manual dexterity meets vibrant technology.

Much of the 12/30 Biscuits show remains a mystery to me, a dark obsidian orb ghosting its brighter, more obvious twin...I wandered the Space Womb in complete daze, mystified as to my whereabouts and stopping intermittently upon my wandering rounds to twirl, drop, and lift a foot to some hydraulic push of anti-lock bass boom and snarl of snare. Some levels were being set that first night, not sonically as much as thematically...a slow unfolding of musical metaphor and a honing of the edge...segue-fests of jaw-dropping calamity, wry injections of aging classical standards, readministered with focus and slickly subtle sarcasm, and an "anything goes" looseness to the vibe: the imperative was getting a groove on to set the standard for adventure and nothing but EDGE -- fierce, sometimes cool, often hot, and always poised to reset the limits -- in this "New Age."

12/31/99: The fire-crystal hot sister star and final hurrah of the 1999 New Year's run was definitely one workout worth resting up for. When you're leaning against the door of the New World, it's advised that you sit down outside for a bit before stepping in, lest you get dizzy or confused. Show ended at about 3:30AM, got to the hotel near 4:30AM, and stayed in bed all day, at the vague, dingy Econo Lodge in scenic industrial Cherry Hill, New Jersey (right over the border from PA and Philly's environs). Woke past dark. "We missed the last day of the Millennium!" scruffy heads muttered sardonically, scraping it together to order a pizza. The entire top tier of the motel was taken over by wobbly, light-sensitive Bisco freaks, tapping on each others' doors, chatting in sleeping bags and making a ruckus, talking smack and Phish, huffing beers and playing Asshole. Colorful shirts and shiny things were applied as time passed, and a few of us got a golden clue that we probably wouldn't blow up: CNN broadcast festive fireworks engulfing Tour Eiffel in sparky regalia; Polynesians danced with leafy skirts to greet the Y2K Sun; Greenwich, England raised Moet toasts to the Cracking New Millennium...all viewed on a regular hotel TV in South Jersey. Even the simple things managed to amaze.

The South Street section of Philly was teeming with bustle, although many stores were closed. To cover all the bases, I had it in my head to organize a special Friday dinner, one in the Jewish tradition, because it seemed like a good idea, Fridays being Shabbat Eve anyway. And what a day of rest it was going to be after 12 hours of straight no chaser Disco Biscuits (snicker)! But for the most part, the pizza was it, but was shared with the loose purpose of promulgating the species as best we could from South Jersey and the side of The Road. Later, one Last Quick Pre-Show Falaffel Supper was shared with my old buddy, Bill Stites (who happens to be looking quite a lot like Jesus lately, for what it's all worth), at a Middle Eastern joint boasting colorful depictions of the Holy Land. After stuffing ourselves with ground fava and baklava, we looked at the clock and realized, at 9:54PM, we were MAD late.

Skidding into the darkness, we'd missed a "Morph Dusseldorf," the band already onstage, churning triumphally through the final sections of "Hot Air Balloon". By the time I'd planted myself in mid-crowd, they'd moved into the spacious "Splattums," and the darkness teemed with the radiance of many bodies steaming in the night. The jam out of "Splattums" rose and writhed to an eventual rage, twisting backwards in on itself in a masterful loop to defy expectation, and innaugurate what goes by the name of an "Inverted Boop" (the tune "Little Betty Boop" jammed feverently into from elsewhere, then dissected from the middle, crawling outward from chorus to jam to verse to end). The reorganized "Boop" found its way back into the "Splattums" with grace and charge, and the inflationary first set concluded with bassist Marc Brownstein's thunderous and poignant "Wet" (beautifully sung by keys man, Aron Magner).

Much more alert for that night's show, I hopped around and observed everyone as they roiled with exuberance, remaining, however, in a kind of spare, dissonant and intently contemplative zone...nothing seemed a problem; the tone of the music was measured yet wild and shimmering; everything was passing before attuned eyes for examination, in a kind of fascinating ultraviolet stream. I enjoyed the contrast between the airtight techno sets, and the band re-taking the stage, their warm humanity soon melding into an oceanic fragmentation of moods, orchestration and motive as the second set mounted.

At about 11:40PM, they began with the old-school stompin' "Pilin' It High" (for effect), and then veered promptly into the bewildering seesaw through styles and states of "House Dog Party Favor." After playing with jazzy sneer through the first two verses and a chorus, whirling through what could be an Eastern European wedding waltz into classic Phish-borne videogamia, the band then broke from the song's early length of Chopin-esque interjection to its compact Calypso jam with ease, climbing with final expansive intent to a blazing decimetric countdown, sometimes known as the old "1...2...3...4...", but reversed for the occasion in this case, to count *backwards*, playing through, yelling the numbers, and solidly bringing the screaming house dawg-down, at a mere two seconds off Greenwich Mean Time: Midnight, Year 2000. From here, chaos ensued, with several of the band's good friends and perennial Bisco characters walking the stage to the band's ironic Rites of Passage medlely (with the old standards "Pomp and Circumstance," "The Wedding March," and "Hail to the Chief"), and also showering the squealing and embracing crowd with giant handfuls of celebratory cake.

An explosive "Happy New Year, Look Out Below" version of "Helicopters" roared into the crisp rift produced in the dark veneer of our strange new quadrant. Much like the first night, the flux was so thick that I can't even remember a lot of these sections, where the transitional breakaway was so ripe that where they were going, and where they had been could barely be detected, yielding up, instead, a massive stew of possible sonic avenues, whirling in a multileveled assembly. The gallant "Spaga" prepared ground for a gorgeous rise of "The Very Moon," which set into a "Voices Insane" that will be forever be well-noted for concluding the set which preceded some insanity indeed: 12/31/99, Set Three.

In another world entirely, of poisons recycled to nectar and catharsis drawn from lucid altered dreamstates, we all moved mystified through the darkness as a very intense-looking DJ X-FACTOR spun porous and elliptical drum & bass. I looked around, sweaty-eyed, I thought..."This is it...we're still here, we didn't blow up! Nothing stopped!" The hot breath of human confidence shored me up, and through spectral curtains of haughty luminesence, I, twenty-five feet high and rising, slurped on a lime Blow-Pop and bore witness to this bold new time, the vibe which is old and has seen, but waits to behold and to see, with eyes of glass, of colors unhindered by the seeming revelations of linear progression. Fittingly, at some point during my traversal of the landscape of Y2K under the roof of the TLA, Eric "Stinky" Bernstein and another of the band's roadies had added visual import to the stage, hanging a large screen from the overhang above the instruments, and also installing three TV monitors: one about halfway between Brownstein and guitarist Jon "The Barber" Gutwillig, one more for Magner and another stuck on a stealthy angle behind drummer Sam Altman's kit.

Slowly, as the DJ set wore on, other sounds began emerging from the stage, harmonic diversions outside mere beats, and more beats besides those of the turntables...Sammy and Magner had taken the stage, Sammy concocting e-beats and Magner providing angular retorts. Soon, X-FACTOR had left the stage entirely, with Brownstein ad Barber coming in under the screen, in a flat, quizzical dark, illuminated by very low beam, some strobes, and the eerie glow of the monitors facing the stage. Up my spine went a thrill of absorption, the screen feeding back in a thunderous realization...

"AKIRA."

Sharply etched clouds populated the skies over Neo Tokyo, as in my mind, New York lived on, perhaps through flames, as hackers wormed through holes in acres of vulnerable ice. My "Burning Chrome" fantasies taking flight, I started upwards through a minute fungal fog and mutely leaked, my eyes producing water as if faced with a high-strata wind, fusilage rattling hot through the atmosphere on entries and reentries into a jam feeding off Pure Energy, defined through visions of mankind's tiny toys, its small designs...liquid bursting forth through concrete and an Armageddon of cells, new thoughts being borne upon neurons and the light, grinningly non-complex grasp upon a papery grain which contains the cosmos...

...more flat panels of light, pastels, advertisements of the plans...the music sweeping and sharpening with the curves of the thickening plot, the room simmering in rapt apprehension...rage and commanding desire spread like syrup over creations and expectations, suffocating grasp tightening around arteries and floor tilting, shrapnel rain of buildings descending, running for life as one world is ending...

...another emerging from blue-black rubble, or a sharded pile of illusion, a disembodied voice, the storm endured to endure again, unbelieveable somersaults of rupturing, stilted bricks and aging conceptions deflected by force of inner will. To rise once more.

From the moment all members were onstage, to the eruption into the "Basis For A Day" ending nearly an hour and forty-five minutes later, The Disco Biscuits created a soundtrack for the classic 80's Japanese anime film, "AKIRA," using monitors facing inward to guide them through the visuals, as the audience watched along on a large screen above the stage. Recations in the TLA, as I made my way through the crowd, flummoxed, to land myself about mid-front, left of center, ranged from mutters of distress to confusion and disgust, but gurgled throughout with mostly very psyched and focused appreciation, a tight and elusive conjuring of a magical sonic template.

After creating some of the most incredible improvised music I'll probably ever hear, The Disco Biscuits returned to play one final fourth set, featuring a circumnavigation, a return to the heart of the South in "M.E.M.P.H.I.S." segueing into a pulse-quickening conclusion of the "House Dog" unfinished from Set Two, a rare and sweet "News From Nowhere," BUST-OUT with T. Monk's "Straight, No Chaser" (!), and the indomitable, endless battle of DiscussBiscuits lore, played through: "I-MAN" vs. "Little Shimmy in a Conga Line." Some say "Shimmy" won. I might agree, but it was an amicable surrendering...and finally, the encore to end it all, the rebel stylee once again, the one and only tropical reggae orgy of beats which mimics Beethoven's Famous Ninth, in orchestration and poise:

"NUGHUFFER."

...to end all. A collapse, like a sun on itself, a supernova darkstar meltdown. The band proffered mounds of post-Set-Three pizzas to the weary punters, who ate gratefully, and thus had the impetus to motivate into the dawn upon the last dissolving streams of the old, discarded year.

1 January, 2000: The Day The Earth Stood...Still!

Woke up dead. No, woke up still tired, also again very late, near dark. Have vague recollection of hearing a very encouraging '95 (?) Phish tape in the first minutes of being in the car, after shambling blinkingly into the gathering bright outside the TLA, hours before. Jesse and Erica drove me then departed for Tarrytown, and others followed, back to the Econo Lodge, which remained, dull and exultant on the roadside...the still-there Shangri La of Cherry Hill, NJ. Like some dadaist hilarity staged by His Purple Symbolity, the sun set over Cherry Hill on the first day past the last day of 1999...people ran everywhere but stood in place, some ran in circles, but our minds prepared to fight. And we won, and partied on...

...Allentown and environs, days and days, real country dark and high wooden walls, the smell of slate, and the Delaware River, very good beer and cold, muddling mists, a great, late Brothers Past set in a decked-out basement and generous lending of instruments to a jam which arose from a few months' noodling in NYC, myself on bass and excellent, prodigious imports from all up and down the roster of friends I already knew; who knew?

1/2/00...lights, beats, DATz, jacuzzi, mac and cheez, into the weekend, Sunday, more resting, unfurling, stammering into a new day, a new week, more and more roads unfolding. I left the never-ending rager with a halo of crumbled space junk spiralling my head, a sparkling souvenir appearing in another fungal refrain, spontaneously contravened. More "AKIRA" Set in the car back to New York, which rose more stony and laughingly formidable, fragile, spied exiting smogs and the mist to the East.

My apartment remained, everything in it's place, the plant thriving in my absence and vividly green, on the window sill overlooking the buzzing Brooklyn streets. More shows awaited the end of the week, a rain of three Y2K Wetlands gems and times well spent in aural pursuit. That Thursday, it was the very young Bassment, out of New York (and Philly, sort of) in the "Sweaty Lounge," busting beats with Weather Report jet streams. Then, there was a packed and amazing $5 Friday of Baltimore's super-dense techno-jazz contortionists, Lake Trout (also doing Saturdays this month at the Knitting Factory, with Schleigho) and vocal beat-box extravagantists, MB2000. The others to watch were playing in interlocking fat-jammed sets with Lake Trout, Toronto's main attraction, the NEW DEAL, played their first sets in the main space with lambent, elemental electronic drum & bass excursions, with DJ LOGIC sitting in on disks. Brothers Past supported in the Lounge, where, in the true spirit of "don't just sit there...play!", the NEW DEAL returned again the very next night, a swank formal dress Saturday show in farewell to their barely acquainted bottom-floor status.

...and now it's Tuesday. No job, no money, nothing but time on my side. The water's acting funny, and my PowerBook is lethargic. But today the sun came out and cast ninja stars of light on my cieling, as I sit on my floral sheets and crank out some slices of one mind's It-story. The wind gusts outside the windows, the sun moves again towards the dusk, and all's well in the world.