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innerspace #5 - Forgotten Cities
by Carol Wade - caw39@columbia.edu

I awoke that Monday to perform my job. With a job, I sometimes wonder how it's possible to get anything done, outside of sitting in front of my CLIO (that's Columbia Libraries Information Online, to you) terminal, miles from flight (of a particular variety). Don't get me wrong...I do a lot of flying at work, to locales a million miles from my imitation woodgrain workstation: places like Paris, Montparnasse in the mid-1920s; others, like Bloomsbury, just outside London around that same, beguile me back to the fertile juncture of the toddler years of the Twentieth Century. Artists, they were back then, /artistes/, dare I say...true to the name, painting one another and realizing one another and themselves, in every moment, exploring the contours of what they thought was reality. They read the new guys, Freud (and that other dude, Jung), trying to figure out why they all hung out together in the first place.

I made it through that day, in front of the black-green inaudibility of my catalog terminal, feeling a little lost. I wondered where I was going, and immediately remembered that a thousand things dangled in store, which suddenly became a million latent theories for the coming week.

"Some shows," I thought.

Yeah, some shows. Some work, some intense decathlon-esque challenges that piled themselves on top of one another in a glorious ziggurat of activity, and flourishes of barely-recognizable thought. With a little encouragement in all the right places, I was persuaded to creep out from under the perpetual funk of my atomic mind, and just have some damn good fun. I complied, and boy, was I ever glad.

Monday 28th December, 1998. Night.

Launching my perplexed semi-self out into the flat, cold, almost-midnight air, I boarded the #3 train to Manhattan. The day's work behind me, firmly planted in necessity and service to the hungry purposes of academe, I entered the near-new-day community of late evening travelers. These people, they fire up our bakeries and answer our phones, they make morning orders arrive on doorsteps and compose equity plans, late into the post-dusk dim. I sat back, to the train car's side, and rocked with the familiar motion of the metal thing that brings us big-city drones to and fro.

Soon enough, there was Canal Street. I emerged to have my cheeks pinched and gently whipped by the brutal and sudden gossip of Winter's wind-chill. A few blocks wended over the entrance to a tunnel, then over past the neon deli, and finally, I was in the quick warmth and musty, rhythmic enclosure of the Wetlands, once again. Familiarity bred ascent, in those moments, as I melted into the fray to the first few strains of the Ominous Seapods' final New York City gig featuring their soon-to-be-departed frontman, Max Verna.

Flashback: Spring 1993. I'm in the wood-stove heated Old City Hall in Oswego, New York. Imagine a cozy Upstate haunt of the most subversive kind, beer smattering the wood lats proudly; it's the venue that almost every New York jamband may boast having survived playing at *least* once (the "survival" being due to having bested cold, feet upon feet of snow, or vagrant, mocking hardcore punk toughs, who were, at the time, probably friends of mine). I recall myself being pretty sauced, and having the then-proprietor introduce the woolly collective of rockers who called themselves the Ominous Seapods. I remember digging the implied deviant undersea imagery of their name. I can draw back, even more readily, the thrill at seeing a little "Upstate band" make a houseful of eager listeners boogie down to really weird, ostentatiously funky and brainy grooves. I think it was somewhere very near to either coming from, or going to, a Phish show or two, around and about Binghamton, New York.

Flash forward: Winter 1998. I'm older now, and it's dark in the big City. There are a whole gaggle of softly-arrayed kids wiggling enthusiastically to Dana Monteith's fervent rhythm guitar crank, and subsequent near-overwhelmed pouty-lipped exhalation (as if to say, "This shit I'm playing is winding me so hard, I have to make like I'm running the Boston Marathon, or cooling off a bowl of way-hot chili!"), and the last stand of Max Verna's calm, Shakespearean yodeling and unapologetically zenith tweaking solos.

I squinted and suddenly became nostalgic on the dance floor. Sometimes, witnessing the growth of an improv band over a period of time, you forget to really take as precious everything they do. It's extremely easy, to get caught up in the feeling that you are the bands' judge and jury, somehow licensed to have a comment on what they do, how it sounds, and how (piquantly) it affects you. But it's not until times like Monday the 27th at the Wetlands, that I, personally, realize how much of seeing live music is about merely lending energetic support to the crazed ne'er-do-wells of jamband lore, who have chosen to take a revolutionary drop out of the "mainstream" to pursue radical goals (by today's societal standards).

Think of minstrels, the folks who toted lutes and mandolins and the like around knights and aristocrats of old. It's like that, except people in the bands that readers of this Web-rag are drawn to are playing music and risking their egocentric hides to audiences each night not out of heraldic obligation...but just because, largely, they almost cannot imagine something more poetic and orgasmic (not to mention daredevil and insane) to do. Flopping around through the hills and valleys, playing music to audiences both new and dedicated, day after day...

Max's face registered an odd mixture of calm and remorse (at least from where my nostalgic eyes were peering), but his guitar and fingers worked towards an unaffected and perseveringly characteristic blend of high-toned spiraling and piercing honesty. Typing those last words, I think to myself, "Honesty? What the hell do I mean by that?" I dunno. Max is leaving, and I'm all sad, but I guess he's got to go where the road takes him. And I suppose the road is much wider, sometimes, than it seems.

Tuesday 29th January, 1998. Morning.

Coming to in the trough of a giant tablespoon of a swaybacked, fold-out couch, in the teeming cleft between the East and West Villages, I stirred, and blinked. The early light of an overcast morning breathed in through the windows of a warm, art-filled and grandmotherly apartment. Languidly lolling and grinning beside me was fellow my fellow jambands.com columnar cohort, and random roadside rambler, Jesse Jarnow. No funny stuff, mind you...just an apartment full of heads, few beds, and enough warmth and familiarity to know the dude wouldn't do anything more heinous in the night than trying to keep me awake and giggling stupidly when all I wanted to do was crash.

Far-off, unknown (yet somehow familiar) faces blended with once-read words and names, and made themselves newly present. I felt, though it seemed abstruse, that Jesse's late grandmother looked kindly on us, appreciating our fervor for art, as a rotund and wise-eyed woman peered down from a Picasso on the wall. Members of the vast and maniacally varied cyber-populace of the moe. Mailing List garbled sleepily with gathered PhishPhiends, talking, grumbling, yawning, grinning, then whispering to spare the few still slumbering, moaning about the ins and outs of taping; old college stories met with new higher-education hopes, and the old school met the new...mostly, that means the moments which have passed, through lives, coagulated seamlessly with the excitement of reaching towards the almost womb-like future dark of another body-shuddering show. The result was a very satisfying "THUD".

I've found that, as a result of opening wide the possibilities of seeing and weaving my way always listening to the sonar-like echoes of time off of structure, everything becomes chock-full of art. Taking random and never-accessed buses home through Brooklyn in the misty late morning shaped up to be something out of some Lewis and Clark expedition. Peering around, with the taste of hours bridging the gap between then and another show, even the locales of home seemed foreign, something to reacquaint myself with. The unshaped persona of a place you've seen a million times re-emerges when you know that someone, somewhere, is gonna be experiencing a stage they've played before, but tearing it apart like they've never quite done before.

Wednesday 30th December, 1998. Evening.

Briefly throwing a glance back to Broadway, to watch the streets teem with the exponential rhythm of pre-New-Year's optimism, I clutched at a steaming, plastic-enclosed mishmash of vaguely greasy, deli salad-bar food, and burst into Jesse's grandma's place, promptly parking myself at the dining room table to feast...quickly. T-minus 10 minutes till departure for show. Having missed the taste of the very first night (due to studying frenetically for the Graduate Record Exam, or GRE, which) the second night pumped me up beyond belief, and the third night held big, very new, and very bizarre possibilities.

The previous night's sojourn took us through Night Two of the circus that is the New Year's Run of Phish at Madison Square Garden. Take an ingenious quartet of often indescribable musicians, give them a time and place to summon wandering admirers from all corners of the lower Forty-Eight (and occasionally beyond). Mix it vigorously with an ocean of varicolored fabrics and textures, buzzes and schemes, a glut of weary, native New York post-rush-hour stragglers, and the brutal, unifying hiss of early winter, and you have the Phish NYE Run at MSG. Getting inside, you are greeted with warm rewards...settling into a seat to watch the crowds teem like a beehive. If you somehow waited till the last minute, though, and a ticket was not somehow secured, your extra-hailing finger might be left behind, frostbitten and disengaged, amongst the tonnage of *neatly arrayed* refuse lining the sidewalks of Midtown Manhattan, the likes of phatty veggie burrito foil and NutriGrain Bar wrappers.

Thanks to the aforementioned nebulosity of near and far coming together, I did score a ticket, and was "stubbed down" (or illegally smuggled into better floor seats) by the goodly Jesse. To think that Phish could appease my quickly fraying sensibilities so much as to play the buoyant and funkily defiant "You Enjoy Myself", and the mythical mysterious, anthemic "Divided Sky" in the same show, and in such close proximity, left me trembling for Wednesday's offerings.

As I said, I took the GRE at 8:00 AM that day. I managed six hours of bass-thumping and dance-lingering sleep before rolling inertly from bed to the shower to the Brooklyn test center, where I sat, limp, yet good-humored, in spite of my ill-preparation. Columbia University had one great old hoop left for me to jump through before I could submit an application for Graduate Admission, but I figured since I am attempting to go for Buddhist Studies, I would aim as centrally and as relaxed as I could manage, coasting through on a current of moments with only the best intentions for improving humanity.

Which I did. The next thing I knew, though, I was scarfing deli food, and the next, I was trundling happily with our "crew" in the teeth-freezing chill holding a sign aloft over the head of an accordion player named Matt, who was offering free polka lessons for whoever's extra ticket. Finally, I was in some intestinally labyrinthine, fluorescent lighted lockdown, staring into the benignly wizened face of Ernie Anastasio, the Vice President of the Educational Testing Service (the company responsible for every Standardized Test of any reputable status in this country, including the GRE). He is also the father, ironically, of Trey Anastasio, whom some regard as the laid-back King of the New Age. I muttered forced platitudes to The Elder Anastasio about the test, and smiled helplessly, the afterimage of my horrendous scores (issued immediately after taking the Computer Based-Test) wafting behind my eyes.

"But who can unlearn all the facts that I've learned? / I sat in the chairs and my synapses burned / The torture of chalkdust collects on my tongue / Thoughts follow my vision and dance in the sun / All my vasoconstrictors, they come slowly undone / Can't this wait till I'm old / Can't I live while I'm young?"

Phish's "Chalkdust Torture" summed up a day's academic horror in a passionate tumble of release, dance and joy. Particularly atmospheric in my view, the third night's show seemed to reach out in all directions with tenticular frenzy. The musicians broke free of one another, intertwining and re-joining to meet each other after short trips out into the blackness of improvisational space. In moments, the faces of the band creased visibly to betray the quavering presence of an otherworldly vibe of exploration and impending metamorphosis, evinced further in the clever theatrical twist which spanned the nights: the chrysalis gradually becoming a butterfly.

Thursday 31st December, 1998. 1:00 AM.

Feeling ballsy, the Phish show let out, and elsewhere in the metropolis, there was the faint detection of seething vibrational activity. Following the sound of the rumble in the ground, we headed toward it like desert-found water.

The Disco Biscuits unrolling a sonic conundrum as we walked into the Wetlands. Mark Brownstein's relentlessly insistent and super-tight basslines threaded their way over and through the quick-stippled, deft drum sculpting of Sam Altman. A semi-aquatic veil covered the stage, as the otherworldly Biscuits frontman, John Gutwillig, peered eerily, and picked out ethereal tones, as the craziest part of the mix soared into the crowd of stunned onlookers. An intoxicating and serpentine spread of driving and delirious electronoise (created by keyboardist Aron Magner) cascaded, echoed and hung like smoke above the crowd, eventually receding under itself to, once again, make room for some more precise and time-removed guitar elucidation from Gutwillig.

At around five o'clock, the Biscuits had proven their point, bade everyone Happy New Year, and encouraged those interested to catch them in Philadelphia, where I would soon be headed, much later on in the same day.

New Year's Eve 1998. Before Midnight.

Thanks be to skinny long-haired guys in vans, who practically spring out of the ground from nowhere, to sell you amazingly satisfying vegan food, in the middle of Philly's desolate factory district after you've been traveling to Philly for the last four hours. Thanks be to the skills of generosity and patience of others, which gets you in the damn venue before you freeze your booty off (despite it's being full of incredible, hot vegan chili). The greatest thanks given to moe., who are still going strong, despite the backstage room at the Electric Factory looking like a stock shot from Three Men and a Baby. Or, rather, Three Men and Three Babies. Or Four Men, Three Babies, lots of wives and girlfriends, random well-wishers, four vintage tuxedoes, three leopard print and one covered entirely with silver sequins; one totally relaxed and on-point manager, weaving in and out of the mayhem; a box full of clementines, and a blue, plastic whale named "When In Doubt, Bruce!", stuffed full of candy.

The courage of a now truly old-school, do-it-yourself jamband, who are racing headfirst through a complex and fascinating period of transition, is well-noted, and truly excellent. The balls they possessed, to whip out a butt-load of triumphant, old moe.ldies from their quite extensive catalog was met with shivers of inexplicable glee from Jesse and I, but viewed with a mixture of confusion and suspicion from the largely green onlookers. They'll learn. Patience, attention, skill and care was given to hauling a rockin' good show at the crowd, and moe. cranked us all into the New Year with a staggeringly delicious version of Eric Clapton's "After Midnight". They then proceeded to giggle and goof their way into 1999 in fine form, reviving long-thought-dead tunes like the lavish, symphonic little morsel, "Strychnine Waltz" (as drummer, Vinnie Amico, twirled angelically across the stage, clad as the Baby New Year, cigar-puffin' and fairy-dust-tossin').

Friday, 1 January, 1999. After Midnight.

The skies will lavish blessings upon Michelle Waughtel, who appeared like a welcome specter, wearing a placid countenance and gazing stageward. When the band finished up the night with an intoxicating and gritty, electrifying cover of Frank Zappa's "San Ber'dino", the people sucked out of the Factory like the nitrous being sucked out of the balloons held by hundreds of crazy heads out huffing in the parking lot, in an orgiastic fury of New Year's debauchery.

Heading home on the train much later, and gazing out at the soft, cheerfully full, yellow moon hovering over the gathering night horizon, I realized that sometimes, it's essential to get back to yourself to find where you're going to lose yourself someday. Like a string of pearls, the cities of your inner being connect over vast plains of experience, which, in this case, are woven together by music. People, the foothills of a song's spine-tingling intro, the streets of silence between rounding a sudden corner into sonic serendipity...all these things and more rise from the forgotten cities of mind on the run to demolish the old and crave the new. But the benevolent graciousness of the love grown from creative offerings of the past lay new ground for the cities of the future. And the beat goes on.