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From The Touring Desk: The Goddamn Angels Piss on Fools Like Us
Running Amok at the Gathering of the Vibes

by Jesse Jarnow

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Thursday, June 17, 1999 -- Northport, New York

This is my fictional persona for the weekend: I will act like I know what is going on, like I understand the deep and total significance of everything that occurs. In accordance with this act, I may occasionally say things that also appear to have meaning, little cosmic chunklets that, when dissected, could actually apply to any predicament we might work ourselves into.

For example, if we were stuck in the middle of a swampy cornfield, sinking, in the pouring rain, I might beat upon my breast and declare to the heavens in a ringing stentorian voice "the goddamn angels piss on fools like us". This, of course, would be significant and meaningful because we would be sinking, as fate would have it, in a huge stalk-filled space while being covered in a steady shining stream of holy urine. It would be mysterious because I would create the illusion of looking in a mirror across the room and viewing in it - backwards and then translated, of course - the exact cards which fate was holding.

Of course, we could end up in the middle of a cornfield in the midst of a marathon moment of swift mind and time, one which completely envelops and fills. I could declare gleefully, "the goddamn angels piss on fools like us" -- an exultation, an encouragement for continual coverage from the friendly cherubim.

Friday, June 18, 1999 -- Northport, New York > Bridgeport, Connecticut

I hate horoscopes. The frickin' things suck. They're a space filler on the bottom of a page of comics, as far as I'm concerned. Nonetheless, I could not afford to ignore the advice presented to me by my horoscope as I sat in the Huntington train station reading the newspaper while waiting for the delayed arrival of my perpetual travel pal Carol Wade. The first sentence of the oracle offered to all those born within a month of me read "keep travel plans flexible". General astrological poop functions in the same way as the aforementioned mystical sayings: be vague enough and they can be interpreted to mean anything.

We had, give or take, roughly an hour before our ferry would be leaving from Port Jefferson, a town on the north shore of Long Island. The drive from my house to the ferry was estimated to be about 45 minutes -- and we were supposed to be at the ferry half an hour before departure. Whatever. At my house, I couldn't decide what music to bring... so I grabbed an entire cardboard box brimming with tapes and CDs, still not unpacked from school. We had some serious theoretical driving in our plans -- all of which could be (and has been in the past) described in one mother run-on sentence. But it won't be this time.

Saturday morning, we would wake up and see the Disco Biscuits play a one-hour set at the Gathering of the Vibes in Bridgeport, Connecticut. Following that, we would hop into my car and drive to the Sshh Festival in Cherrytree, Pennsylvania where we would see the Disco Biscuits play an "evening" set, beginning at midnight and stretching to the wee hours. The next morning, following a return to consciousness, we would drive back to Bridgeport for moe.'s evening set. There were a lot of miles involved, but the two of us were hell bent on doing it, both primed for the unpredictability of a long road trip. Music. Music was needed for the 260 mile ride across Pennsylvania, the soundtrack to a high-speed burn down I-80.

Flexibility. Flexibility was needed when we missed our ferry by a literal minute. We pulled into the parking lot of the dock at 5:44 and watched as the last car parked itself in the last spot on the ferry, the giant triangular nose of the boat easing its way into sailing position. With a sigh we resigned ourselves to missing the Slip's set. It was a hard acceptance to come to. The Slip has been one of my absolute favorite bands of late. Something about their improvisation oozes newness -- the idea of newness being one of my obsessions of late. The Slip slide between structure and formlessness and end up with something that is both ineffably light and darkly mysterious. That's a lot of words about a band we didn't even see.

The Slip were still playing as we approached Seaside Park, the beautiful spread on Long Island Sound where the Gathering was being held. We heard the band from the car as we sat in traffic, being occasionally taunted by our old friend 'beeb who, working at the Gathering, drove by us on a bike from time to time and flipped us off. Or maybe we flipped him off. Things like this aren't exactly clear -- nor overly important, for that matter. Familiar melodies grew louder, quieter, and muffled as the wind blew the sound alternatingly towards the car and towards the Sound. As we progressed in the line, we moved further from the stage area before the Slip finally faded from our hearing range altogether.

By the time we made into the concert grounds with our crap, the Slip were long since gone and Deep Banana Blackout was on stage funking with Michael Ray. A walk through the field was overload. We were weighed down with camping stuff - a tent, sleeping bags, etc. - we were looking for friends of mine, the band on stage was in a deep groove, a nice breeze was blowing off of the Sound... Anything that happened was not the product of one single thing but, rather, a multitude of inputs causing me to react in different ways.

The center of this entire coagulation is not music but, rather, experience -- a large umbrella that music falls under. Everything that happened to me at the Gathering set off emotional triggers in me in varying combinations. The music was a large part of this -- if only because the Gathering of the Vibes was organized around the music. Hell, music is the most tangible thing I was at the Gathering for in the first place. I, like many people, will tell you that I am interested in improvised music because I enjoy the excitement of hearing something that has never been played before. When I say that, what I really mean is that I enjoy experiencing something that I have never experienced before, something new. The idea of finding something new and unexpected is what is at the center. It's what drives many of the elements involved: improvised music, insane travel, and - yes - drug use. Surprises count for a lot.

In planning voyages we attempt to synthesize surprise. We can set rough frameworks - sometime we will leave point A, sometime we will get to point B, in the middle some shit will happen that, ideally, has never happened to us before - but that's about all. And, like the music - which all this silly travel stuff is just a metaphor for anyway, man - one shouldn't force it. Things will just happen. Ultimately, I guess it doesn't matter what you do. I certainly fretted enough over our weekend plans, driving to Pennsylvania and whatnot, and I still got the bejeezus surprised out of me.

It began following Deep Banana's set on Friday night, when we ran into several members of the Disco Biscuits. As it had happened, the band's van died, transmission went out, on the way to the Gathering -- in the middle of the Bronx, no less. They'd had it towed back to their home in Philadelphia. They hitched their equipment trailer to the back of a friend's Jeep and made it to Bridgeport. The problem was, now, getting their asses to Cherrytree for the Sshh Festival the next day. "Well," either Carol or I said, "we're going to Cherrytree". Gradually, a plan of action emerged into existence. The band would rent a U-Haul and hitch their equipment trailer to the back. There were only five people traveling, the four band members plus the ominscent soundman and all purpose-roadhog Jon Lesser. Three would go by U-Haul and two would occupy spots in my car.

We fell asleep to the sounds of a pounding drum circle which, as near as I can figure, didn't break up until near daylight. Both of us had trouble finding slumber. I giggled.

"What?" asked Carol.

"Nothing," I said. "Nothing at all." And I laughed stupidly, weakly.

"What is it?" she asked, getting a little pissed off.

"Nothing."

"Come on."

"Fine... I was just thinking that the goddamn angels piss on fools like us."

"What?"

"I told you... nothing."

Honestly, I said what I said just so I could say it -- have it on the table, on the official record of what went down over the weekend. And it didn't mean a thing -- nothing had happened to us yet. That, if you'd like, was precisely the point. There we were, sleeping (or not sleeping) uncomfortably on the ground in a tent that would turn in the morning into an E-Z bake oven, and practically nothing had happened to us so far that was anywhere close to new, close to exciting. In that, with all our heady preparations, the angels were pissing on us.

Saturday, June 19, 1999 -- Bridgeport, Connecticut

Drawn in my notebook, sometime on Saturday morning before the Big Wu went on, is a doodle of a pair of feet dangling over the back end of a large table. The feet belonged to Marc Brownstein, the bass player from the Disco Biscuits, the table belonged to the massage therapists who volunteered to work backstage. Next to the sketch is some writing: "what kind of rock and rollers have we become?" I'm not sure, exactly, if I knew what I meant by that at the time, though it kind of became clear over the course of the next day or so.

I will admit it: I was backstage for the bulk of my time in Bridgeport. I had access to free food, free soda, etc.. I did not have access to the massage therapists. And I did not officially have access to the meals that were prepared for the talent, though I managed to eat several of them anyway. They were good. The function of a backstage scene - of all the controls, tactics, scientific rigors, and band riders - is to create something predictable and comfortable. The theory behind this is to allow the performers to be as relaxed as possible once they hit the stage so as to "forget" themselves and open themselves up to the cosmos. That's the theory, anyway. I will once again compare this idea to the experimentation of the character of Eddie Jessup, played by William Hurt, in Ken Russell's film "Altered States". In an isolation tank, under strict scientific guidelines, Hurt's character regresses to the pure formlessness of human existence.

Does the same thing apply to audience members, to those listening to the music? Maybe so and maybe not. On one hand, all amounts of creature comforts can potentially help everybody involved focus on the music at hand. On the other, if one gets too comfortable, it is quite easy to forget about the music and only remember the pleasure of the other stuff that's going on, so much so that he wants the music to end so he can return to whatever he was doing before it started. The same risk is run with performers and the backstage scene as well, I think. In both situations - a comfortable show for audience and musicians - one puts an undue emphasis on the concert stage as a power spot (you can capitalize that shit if you'd like - Power Spot - and make it sound more important), the exact place where things break down into primal form. As usual, one runs a large risk putting all of his faith into one thing providing him with the new experiences of the weekend.

Nonetheless, that's what the music is about. At least, that's what the improvisational part of the music is about. It seeks power spots. In its own way, that's what most art seeks to do: to find a moment of purity that strikes deeply within an individual. It's that quest, I think, that leads many people into the so-called jam band scene. That and the drugs, but we'll get to that later. For me, personally, that's my motivation: to find something new. It's what pushed me to make completely ludicrous plans for the weekend. For one, the Disco Biscuits are one of the bands that manages, for me, to find some spot that I've never been to before and exploit the hell out of it. It's exciting. For another, an eight hour drive to East Jesus comes with a promise of adventure. Good combination.

Musically, the day began with a laid back set by Minnesota's The Big Wu. For most of the crowd, myself included, the Wu's set was about easing back into consciousness. The Wu were a good way to start the day. There's something familiar and comfortable about their groove, floating like a summer day: one knows inherently what a summer day feels like, and has experienced a million and a half of them in his lifetime, but all of that is irrelevant when one is actually in the middle of one of them. The Wu were like that. They weren't strikingly original, but a solid and well put together act regardless.

Seeing the Biscuits before a crowd that isn't primarily made up of Bisco freaks is an interesting proposition. They're... different. When the set started, I was a wee bit worried that they wouldn't capitalize on their originality. It's easy enough for the Biscuits to go camouflage, play their songs, and just sound like a damn good version of the jam band archetype. Opening their set with the Very Moon, a song from the band's rock opera "the Hot Air Balloon", the Biscuits began with some of their most normal music. The tune began lazily, a logical place to pick up where Wu left off. With a snap, though, it kicked into the verse -- a frenetic jazz groove with a taxing chord progression that few other bands would brave. Following that, a beat stop, and on into one of the band's techno-tinged jams. It was very easy to forget that it was only noon.

The jam made its way into Bernstein and Chasnoff, an older, simpler, Biscuits' tune. Never one of my favorite songs, Bernstein and Chasnoff seems to have developed something of a habit of producing gorgeous melodic excursions that sound a bit like a slowed down version of the short instrumental prelude to the Velvet Underground's Sweet Jane -- somewhere across between the soundtrack to a video game and the weird sound effects on the Steve Miller's Band's Space Cowboy. Completely killer. A cresting Above The Waves and a further peaking Magellan closed out the band's four song, one hour set.

In the spectrum of my memory, the Biscuits' set at the Gathering - triumphant as it was - takes up very little. Perhaps because so much more happened afterwards. More, I think, has to do with the fact that I thought of the set as an appetizer for what was to come later, at the Sshh Festival. What we were seeing at the Gathering was to be the first set, the Sshh was to be the second, and the drive the setbreak. The band could begin their statement at the Gathering, give us multiple hours to contemplate it, and complete it in Cherrytree. Things didn't work out exactly like that.

By the time we got backstage the trouble had already began. The U-Haul truck was just arriving and the band was loading out into their trailer. After getting everything moved away from the stage area so the next band could load in, it was discovered that the trailer, in fact, would not hitch to the U-Haul, no matter how hard anybody tried, pushed, or prodded. Everything was moved to the backstage exit/entrance, near where my car was parked. A crowd of Bisco kids was rounded up and, promptly, the trailer was emptied and the U-Haul filled. By the time everything was packed in it was nearly three o'clock. A decision had to be made. If the band left right away, then there was a chance they might be there by one (a.m., that is), enough to get set up and play for a hearty half an hour before they had to shut down.

And so, the Biscuits' set at Sshh was called off. After futile attempts to get in touch with people at or on their way to Sshh, Carol and I sat down on the hood of my car. What was left of the weekend? We had our story worked out: Bridgeport to Cherrytree and back. The story would be the trip and the trip would be the story. What was originally intended to be our starting point had suddenly become our destination. When we woke up in the morning, we fully believed we were still in preparation stages for the weekend -- little did we know we were in the midst of the events themselves. This was a tough realization to come to. There was to be no journey -- at least in the physical sense. We had to ask ourselves what we were left with. The answer: a bunch of hippie bands and the opportunity for serious drug consumption. Of course, that's always an option and taken only in extreme circumstances.

The story had suddenly evaporated, where had it gone? What was it that would make the weekend interesting? Was it already making it interesting and we were just completely oblivious to it? At that moment, it reverted back to the idea of controls. The unexpected is always compelling. Unfortunately, the unexpected - for me, anyway - was something of an elusive thing. Nothing against any of the bands that were performing, but the stage was not a power spot. Each was unique, but the sum total of all of the bands seemed to create a common, ambient noise -- a steady, unchanging background of funk rhythms and bluegrass licks. By my calculations, there had to be - somewhere on the festival grounds - something that was completely improbable... something that hadn't happened to me before.

Drugs. "My attorney has never been able to accept the notion - often espoused by reformed drug abusers and especially popular among those on probation - that you can get a lot higher without drugs than with them.... And neither have I, for that matter." - Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas, p. 63. Yes, of course. How obvious. Why? Well, we knew nothing -- only what it was like to be a certain kind of dead, a steady boring pulse of unerring metronome clicks. Drugs are a perfectly acceptable answer in some situations. Ultimately, though, they're too easy. You want something new? Wipe your slate clean.

Though I toyed with it briefly early on, I never really liked to cheat in video games. That is: buy the video game, enter in some super special secret code, and instantly be warped off to the final big boss man, the honky tonkin' dude with spikes whom, if killed, would cause the game to be "beaten" -- a final answer. It didn't seem right. Likewise, there were also codes that would turn everything around the game's character into coins or whatever denominational nuggets the game used. Boring, Sydney. Boring, boring. Drugs are like that to an extent. When one is high he believes that he has found the power spot. And he may well have. More likely, though, the drug has turned everything into power spots -- stone blocks to coins in "Super Mario Brothers".

Taking drugs and finding power spots is like taking drugs and writing, at first: one discovers that everything is a metaphor. Then, sober, that begins to happen too because one knows exactly what to look for. The goddamn angels piss on fools like us. But metaphors are not power spots and any old hack journalist writing for a somewhat reputable web site cannot discover the meaning of life embedded somewhere in the shallows of a sound wave emanating from a bouncy white-boy funk song with silly lyrics. It's easy enough to, on paper, turn anything into something symbolic, but to make something - in real time - turn from a symbol into something that scrapes rawly against one's skin... well, that's not a trick, I don't think.

No, as lesser folks might've done in defeat, we did not ingest an obscene amount of narcotics.

Sunday, June 20, 1999 -- Bridgeport, Connecticut

"Arthur looked. Much to his surprise, there was a velvet paisley-covered Chesterfield sofa in the field in front of them. He boggled intelligently at it. Shrewd questions sprang into his mind.

"'Why,' he said, 'is there a sofa in that field?'

"'I told you!' shouted Ford, leaping to his feet. 'Eddies in the space-time continuum!'

"'And this is his sofa, is it?' asked Arthur, struggling to his feet and, he hoped, though not very optimistically, to his senses.

"'Arthur!' shouted Ford at him, 'that sofa is there because of the space-time instability I've been trying to get your terminally softened brain to come to grips with. It's been washed up out of the continuum, it's space-time jetsam, it doesn't matter what it is, we've got to catch it, it's our only way out of here!" - Douglas Adams, Life, the Universe, and Everything, p. 325.

And it was. It was our only way out. Drastic measures for drastic times -- that's where eddies and couches came into play, at least at the Gathering of the Vibes. The first thing we did after waking up in the morning, as any fully accredited members of the press would've done in our place, was try to scam some breakfast backstage. There we informed that we shouldn't've even been getting meals at all and, ergo, we would not be receiving breakfast on this particular morning. Bummer.

Somewhere in the most ungodly and completely un-rock-and-roll hour between eight and nine we, with the help of our wonderful all purpose press passes, wandered onto the concert field, completely devoid of life other than workers scurrying like elves to ready the place for the day's events.

We'd seen it before, but it didn't call to us until then: a tent - sponsored by SoBe, a health drinking supporting the festival - in front of a row of vendors. Two sides of the tent were "walled" by sparkly turquoise diamond-shaped beaded curtains. Under the tent was a living room: two tapestry covered couches, arranged in an L-shape, with a thrift store table between them sitting on top of a rug. It was the perfect thing to be there. For one, there were two giant, soft, inviting couches - empty - glowing in front of us after spending our second night in a row sleeping in sleeping bags on the ground. We sunk into the furniture.

For another, it was an eddie -- completely improbable and totally perfect. Sitting on the couches and gazing out upon the grounds was a headfuck. Completely illogical -- an element of one scene transported wholly into another, Little Nemo flying through terrestrial dreamscapes in Slumberland atop... his bed?!? It was a surprise. And, like I keep saying, surprises count for a lot. Somewhere else in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series, the art of flying is described, approximately, as "falling to the ground... and missing". The secret to flying, then, is finding something to distract one while in the process of heading towards the ground. So we flew, more less. What a surprise.

Well, it was. At the time, I was too tired to think of it. At the time, I was too baffled realize I was in the midst of the cleanest moment of the weekend. At my most lucid, I think I just sat on one of the couches and scratched my dome, too relaxed to do much more thinking than that. All too soon, we got up. Some bands were gonna come on soon and I wanted to get far, far away from the site before that happened. That may be somewhat of an exaggeration, but as soon as the day's scheduled events started, things would be back on some sort of schedule, with precisely carried out visions. I have to, for what it's worth, give Ken Hayes and the Terrapin Tapes crew much credit for that: everything, near as I could tell, went down according to the master plan.

As the ambient noise again began to emerge from the speakers, I sought escape. Completely forgetting to take into account the fact that I'm not the most graceful person in the world, I decided to walk to the end of the jetty that extended out from the beach. I got about halfway out - a good several hundred feet from shore - and came to the conclusion that going any further would be risking great personal danger. I sat. The rock was uncomfortable and the only writing implement I had with me was a dull pencil, so I kinda just scuttered back and forth trying to arrange myself so that the edges of the surface weren't driving into my back.

From my spot on the jetty, I could see much of the concert grounds spread out. To the left was the stage area, two rows of vendors extending out, with some port-o-lets on the perimeter. Crowds flowed efficiently from the campground into the concert field. At every step of the way, employees checked to make sure that fans were wearing their green bracelets. Everything was calculated, it seemed. Maybe I've been thinking about it too much, but so much that happens these days seems to involve a mechanical run through the motions. When Garcia died, people needed to find a center -- not necessarily something unchanging, but something that was at least somewhat reliable. In the years - and, especially, summers - that followed, everything was new. It's hard to find a town without a jam band now or a county without a summer festival. Thus, things have ossified somewhat.

When the Dead were around, it was all a jam band could do to say "we don't sound anything like the Dead" when the local music critic described them as "heir to the Dead throne" or some such nonsense. With the Dead removed from the equation, the comparisons have begun to die off and, suddenly, people sound like the Dead again. To be fair, most bands don't sound like them in any specific terms. Rather, it might be more accurate to say that bands sound like each other. It's almost as if the jam band sound has become a source of reliability. If this all sounds exceedingly negative... well, it is. It's not a conscious thing on the part of the bands, it kinda just happens. Like it or not, jam band music is a definable style. It makes its roots in lots of genres, but one can easily pull out strands.

"Not only the origin of rock and roll, but also the short history of it can be seen as a series of hybridizations, the constantly changing styles and fads, as rock assimilates every conceivable musical style (folk, blues, soul, Indian, classical, psychedelic, ballad, country). [This is] not only a recent process, but one that goes back to the Drifters, Elvis Presley, Little Richard, Buddy Holly, and so on. Rock and roll's longevity is its ability to assimilate the energy and style of all these musical traditions. Rock and roll at once exists and doesn't exist; that is why the term 'rock and roll' is the best term we have, as it means nothing and thus everything -- and that is quite possibly the musical and mystical secret of the most overwhelming popular music the world has known." - Jann Wenner, The Rolling Stone Record Review, 1971, p. 15.

The above was written in 1971. It's not a hard conclusion to come to that everything runs in cycles. What was once stagnant is now exciting and what is now mind-blowing might some day be predictable. Infusion and confusion is where it's at... two turn tables and a microphone. And that's just where moe. ended up later that night.

They were the main attraction, for me, for that day. Over the years, I've seen a shload of moe.. They were something of an obsession for a while, and they still are to a large degree. I've seen them lots and they've surprised me lots. The past few times, I'd seen them though, questions of faith were called into my head. In other words, they didn't do it for me the way they had in the past. At these shows, the band was up on stage - tighter and more rocking than ever, I might add - sound was fluidly flowing through the speakers... and little was exciting me. Sure, there were flashes - Dr. Graffenburg > Four on New Year's Eve in Philadelphia, Four > Take Five > Four in Pontiac, and a scattered handful of raggedly lush harmonies from a make-due acoustic set in Brandywine - but they were increasingly rare.

There have been times when moe. has found a power spot, for me, and dug deeply for the duration of a set. Compression has set in, though, and it seems to be happening in a more concentrated space. The Four sequence from Pontiac, in particular, is probably - to this day - the best moe. I have ever heard or witnessed, better than all of this old crap that I so nostalgically whine for. However, it was just a moment. It was worth traveling for, but - in contrast with the rest of the set - it has still made me think long and hard about my relationship to moe.'s music.

When moe. took the stage at the Gathering, they did so with DJ Logic, a New York based DJ who has made his name - and mark - on the course of improvisational music with his work with Medeski, Martin, and Wood. In recent months, he has begun to expand outwards - playing with a host of other musicians including the newly formed band which he fronts, Project Logic, as well as Deep Banana Blackout - and proving that DJs do (or, rather, can), in fact, have a healthy place in jam rock outfits. Guitarist Al Schnier launched into Moth and the band was well on their way. Nearly as soon as the verses of the song had ended, the band was thrust into unfamiliar territory.

In addition to Logic, the band was playing with Nate Wilson -- the extremely proficient and talented keys-man of Percy Hill. With Logic and Wilson flanking them on either side of the stage, the band was clearly forced to interact in new ways. Soon, Wilson's organ and Schnier's feedback and delay loops were providing an ominous undertone for a dialogue between the rubbery leads of guitarist Chuck Garvey and the slithering samples of Logic. The three-man rhythm section of Vinnie Amico on drums, Jim Loughlin on percussion, and Rob Derhak on bass, seemed somewhat torn, unsure whether to move the percussion-like scratches of Logic or the traditional soundbed being unleashed by Wilson and Schnier. In the end, they occupied the middle ground. In doing so, they managed to define themselves as a third voice in the mix.

It was new. It excited me. That was pretty cool.

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Jesse Jarnow aspires someday to be a Lebowski Achiever. Until then, he's at home kickin' it Brandt-style.