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innerspace #10 - By Bread Alone: On The Disco Biscuits, and The Pursuit of Utopia Through Sound
by Carol Wade - caw39@columbia.edu1) Oh, What a Tangled Web We Weave...
It's June 12, 1997. I'm in the basement of the Wetlands, making my way past the couches and towards the bar, to scamper off upstairs to watch the oddball band with a boogie-comestible name. It was, if memory serves, Foxtrot Zulu, The Krewe, with Schleigho and The Gordon Stone Trio in the basement, and finally, The Disco Biscuits upstairs. I had just finished having a chat with the pleasant, penetrating banjo-plucker, Gordon Stone, and was muscling my way past a small group of kids gathered around a geeky, slouchingly charismatic, shelf-shouldered guy with a mushroomy mass of wavy brown hair. He looked at me, with an unforgettable cross between vague quasi-sneer and curious examination. He grinned. I looked back at him, and he handed me a bright yellow flyer. "The Disco Biscuits, some club, sometime soon, playing with ________, be there," etc. He said something, I don't remember exactly what. I think he may have introduced himself, saying he was Jon of the Biscuit band. I smiled, We stared at each other. Soon, realizing I couldn't think of anything to say, I continued quietly on my way. Pretty weird, I thought. Strangely alluring.
About an hour later, I stood before the stage, aghast. I had gone back to the basement for some mellow, banjo freak-grass, and when I'd re-emerged on the main floor, I did so to a hot breeze in the face. Jon "The Barber" Gutwillig, aforementioned well-haired lead guitarist for the Biscuits, entirely unshod and unsock'd, had already begun going about the business of tearing holes in the sound barrier. To his right, there swayed a smirky, energetic wiseacre, a wall of a guy, wavering around behind some bulbous white bass. The almost equally formidable-seeming drummer, dark and with arms like barge poles, delivered precise, though highly textured and jazzy percussives. And to Barber's left, a little serious-looking dude, locked in the same frenzied sway poked and cranked at a pile of keyboards. The music, to start, was fast. Driving. I got the immediate whiff of intense orchestration, of mechanical concentration. The suspense they generated was like a fog, sinister. Pungent. Dare I say...smoke machine.
The Barber careened back and forth on bare feet, making the his odd turquoise mutant Stratocaster emit the most bewildering, disjointed screeches and yelps, the whole while wearing a half-crazed rictus, brown hair a-twist. Marc "Brownie" Brownstein wore a limpid grin and blinked from lowered eyelids, fingers gearing the bass at a speed I found immediately enviable and horriflyingly agile. By the time I got to mid-stage, somewhere in the hidden catacombs of my sense receptors, I realized:
"These guys are way scary! Oooh, yeah, "Pygmy Twylyte"? Rad! They're totally insane! Anyone assy enough to try pulling off such a hectic cover and, like, just LEAP right back into the stream of things like this...MAN, they don't stop, they're like frickin' ROBOTS. These freaks are obviously a force to be reckoned with. But I've never liked a band so much, and wanted to run away screaming all at once! When's he gonna stop soloing? Look at his face! That's pretty awesome...he must be some insane, self-taught bedroom prodigy. But he never, ever stops! Ahhh! My gawsh, look at 'em go! The drummer (the indeed prickly, rock-solid Sam Altman) just lurking in the shadows, a human beat-machine in the dark. Ominous! Look at the way the keys dude (The Twisted Doctor, Aron Magner) gets that straight-lipped cord of boiling, static focus as the walls start melting from the vibration between the guitar and...they...just... keep...GOING...ahhhh, this is CRAZY! Wait...now it sounds like...techno!"
The next thing I knew...it was nearly 4:00AM.
2) "They Move Fast, They Tell Me: I Just Can't Believe That I Can Feel It"
It was coming up on 10:30 PM, late Fall, 1998. I'd just finally succeeded in wrestling the relentless little spitfire of a five year-old I was baby-sitting into bed. Now, it was just me, a stereo system, a copy of the Disco Biscuits' "Uncivilized Area". It had been a year and a few more instances of tolerating the band live, and they still pissed me off. The mere mention for their name made me think of aneurysms, sore knees and confusion. Not normally so violently opposed to anything, I had made a decisive decision to give them yet another chance. Was it the breakneck throttling between ragtime swing riffs, funky disco, yet "Prog Rock"-tinged breakdowns, severely phantasmal electro-trance vignettes and nerve-palpating solos? I should *like* all those things. The CD player tray slid shut. Bombast! Reverb! Fuzz! Squelch! All good things. The sky opened up. The stars in the heavens winked. Holy crap...I didn't hate this band. They simply, totally freaked me out.
I relaxed. By Track 3, I was somewhere miles away, my body a mere reaction to Earth's gravity, propped groggily on the couch. They were Sun Ra funk to Duran Duran disco-jazz, erupting together in a homespun explosion. A little like Yes, they waxed long and exquisitely fantastic, except the Biscuits carry a mace rather than the flower-adorned lute of Yes. The Biscuits, are spinning in the dizzy whisk of American, late-capitalist, electro-information frenzy, rather than dwelling on the spaced-out fringe and stilted hopes of the thwarted 70's wartime counterculture. Worse (better?) yet, the Biscuits' mace is an amazingly decked-out cybernetic weapon, equipped with a hydrogen-fueled propeller. On a dime's drop, the instrument seems able to destroy time, and within moments, start lifting, carrying anyone within range into the uncalculated realms of Otherspace.
3) "One Day You're All Locked Up, The Next Day You're Free..."
What happens, exactly, when one stumbles upon a band, struggles with it like a great-toothed beast, and finally comes to a slimy, yet ecstatic, reconciliation with all the music seems to kick up in one's insides? Well, you go out...and...you...umm....well, goddamnit, you go BUY something, don't you? It's sad, but in this day and age, something has to be *bought* for it all to begin, and yes, for it to all go any further. Someone's gotta buy that blank tape, someone's gotta purchase the ticket to the show to tape the show, which you will then listen to, driving in the shabby car you just bought for $200 mainly to get you to shows, whose fuel was in turn bought at a probably exorbitant per-gallon price (it's going fast, that petroleum, don't you know). In an ideal world, we might all do things like *weave* interpretive renditions of our favorite bands' songs, using hand-picked and berry-dyed jute fibers, presenting them to the bands after traveling three days by donkey caravan to see them again. But, needless to say...
Since the recent June 5th, 1999 jambands.com show at the Wetlands, not only has my faith in humankind been renewed utterly, but so too has the growing warmth of my inner Biscosity fired to a sharp, barbecue-ready sizzle. Saturday into Sunday, I spent mashing it up Brownie-side, until we left the club and peered into the sky, all a-blush with morning light. Monday the 7th, I subscribed to the Disco Biscuits Internet mailing list. Mailing lists are the practically free, yet time-greedy, method of getting really "hip" to the band of your choice, in today's techno-age. Not surprisingly, within hours, I found DiscussBiscuits populated by a rich troupe of incredibly hilarious characters, some bizarre old friends of the band, some newbies like me, and other old friends I already know from seeing shows and Internetting amidst intersecting musical arcs, in the past six years.
By Wednesday night, though, with nothing for my hungry ears to gnaw on, I was disintegrating. On the way home from Uptown at 11:30PM, the itch caused me to leap out of the train at Times Square, before transferring to the N train bound for Queens. What was I thinking? No time to get tapes, never enough time to get to the Wetlands, can't wait for freakin' mail order...oh no. Not..the flashing plastic neon death of the Virgin MegaSCAM (TM)?
However, the more I thought about checking to see if the huge, teeming, insane Virgin Megastore at the intersection of 43rd Street and Broadway (a.k.a. Times Freakin' Square, New York City) had a copy of a Disco Biscuits CD, the more hysterical I became. It seemed absurd that the trembling mandibles of impersonal commerce and advertising hooliganism would, that night, be holding at least one copy of "Uncivilized Area" (at an, of course, EXTREMELY UNCIVILIZED cost). I emerged into the streets to the wealth flashing, signs screaming, tourists touring, and the center of the human universe...well, doing what it does on a Wednesday night, I guess. Busting through the doors of the enormous super-commercial airplane hangar, I made a beeline to the D's, and held my breath. But lo and behold, I reached in, behind Dishwalla and Die Kruezen, peeled back the partitions, to reveal one crisp copy of "Uncivilized Area"...for the expected highway robbery sum of $16.95. There's a funny thing about New York, though. You build memories by way of unlikelihoods. Friendships are built solely on contrast, and thirteen years from now, I will still grin about the fact that I bought a Disco Biscuits album in Times Square at fifteen minutes till midnight. You just can't say that every day.
However, there was a second CD there. I wondered, "Two copies? Unbelievable!". For lack of a better place to put it (understandably so), behind the Biscuits CD was a copy of an album, that brought me, shockingly, ripping back to my childhood. When I was about eight years old, I was poring, as usual, through my father's 500+ vinyl collection. >From among the varied jazz, calypso, blues, classical, old-skool funk and R+B, I pulled a garish, eerie, psychedelically hectic album, adorned with images of some scantily clad dancing girls, and an unsettling picture of an effeminate man in a white pimp-suit and hat. "What's THIS?!", I gasped at my father. At that age, I was already surprisingly used to the licentious quality of groups like Parliament, and the heavy innuendo of songs like un-mysterious BT Express song "Do It (Till You're Satisfied)". My Dad, too, made no qualms about playing things like Johnny "Guitar" Watson's "A Real Mother For Ya" for my brother and I. Of course, now we're both musicians and artists, not stockbrokers...whoops.
I brought BOTH "Uncivilized Area" and Disco Tex's totally off-the-wall "disco" album, "Disco Tex & The Sex-o-Lettes" home that night. The Biscuits warranted low light, a lit, dime-store religious candle marked "La Virgen de Candelaria" (The Virgin of...Candles?), and a Corona with lime. Disco Tex just freaked me out as much as it ever has. It's about twenty songs, which all blend into one another imperceptibly, with the marked strangeness of having, dubbed in the background, a nearly continuous, fake arena audience soundtrack. The cheering never ends, as "Sir Monti Rock III", the so-called "Disco Tex", does his disco thang on tracks like "Hot Lava", "Boogie Flap", and the amazing "Jam Band", "Jam Band Reprise" and "Jam Band Reprise II". The album is totally obscure, and all I could find out about it is that it was produced in 1975 by a record company called Chelsea. It is not only way before its time, schizophrenic and futuristically self-indulgent, but the most incredible mockery of the arbitrary distinctions between rock 'n' roll authenticity and disco-boogie integrity. Sometimes chance is better than anything else.
4) How Much Is That Jam Band In the Window?
Okay. You buy the CD. The music flows through you as you inundate yourself with it, feeling every note, every beat, in as many places as you knew you had. You find out that songs like "Aceetobee" are the perfect speed for walking anywhere in Manhattan, "Vasillios" makes you feel like Hercules, and "M.E.M.P.H.I.S." reminds you of calling your brother from a payphone on the side of a road in Knoxville, TN, and saying, "Hey! Guess where I am! Knoxville!", while on moe. tour. The whole thing makes you feel like jumping in a car and feeling the wind in your face, saying a hearty "Sod off!" to job and life and boring old crap.
Life submerged in music. It's oh-so-good. But sometimes bad. Touring, taping, and living through a band doesn't *have* to be limiting. One could live off Swiss cheese slices for the rest of their lives, but they'd have to not expect that much of the cheese day after day. One could see shows for the rest of their lives, and be entirely happy. But this rarely happens. And it's the same for the bands. When we uncontrollably obsessed crazies start expecting the world of a band, they may feel the press of a thousand bodies against them as they sleep. Which *could* be GOOD. But one must realize that some portion of the process, as with everything, is doomed to extinction.
But there's something to be said for entropy, that old physical law that states everything in existence is always in a state of decreasing usefulness, headed towards total collapse. But what I'm realizing is that that breakdown doesn't have to be like the bombs obliterating humankind, like in Stanley Kubrick's "Dr. Strangelove (Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb)", but could be more like the jarring, cathartic chord at the end of the Beatles' "A Day in the Life"...the end beginning in a groove which circles on into eternity...
5) Road to Nowhere.
If the world was ever ready for Utopia to emerge, the time is now. People are taking creativity, using it to pry themselves out of stifling structures. They're taking their conception of what life's supposed to be on the road, dragging it through city after city, putting it to the test. Sure, Jerry and the Crew caused the ball to start rolling in modern times, but I have a feeling it's all coming down right now. Too much information, too much structure, not enough daring to sculpt and tailor-make our own worlds. I have faith that improvisational music will change the world, flip the page to last stage of this great world novel, and leave us hanging with the next book up to us. I've got my little stash of 9-to-5 cash, which I'll burn for fuel, first thing. I think the jute's about good and ripe, the berries are the brightest they're ever gonna be, and it's about time to call up Jesse and tell him to saddle the mules for the coming Gathering of the Vibes.
Somewhere in the South right now, The Disco Biscuits are leaning over in the hot Dixie sun, polishing the armor and blades of a fearsome flying weapon, a heliotrophic hammer designed for heading higher, without a single thought given to how high. Erin McKeon, the List Mistress and Biscatrix Supreme of the DiscussBiscuits Mailing List, wrote the following to me the day I subscribed, on the subject of the unknown, and where it can take us:
"That's what it's all about...it will hit you like an oncoming train, leaving you bewildered and confused a minute later. And that's the thing...everyone is having these same revelations, experiences...that's what keeps the momentum increasing, that's the essence of the Biscuits that nobody can quite put their finger on - and nobody quite *wants* to, you understand, because then somehow it wouldn't be the same - but everyone KNOWS."I think the Disco Biscuits' next album should be called "Headless Abandon".When it comes right down to it, what I have to say to all artists striking out into the unknown is this: why worry about the end when the beginning's always beginning again? I haven't yet followed the Biscuits to the ends of the Earth. I haven't danced with bare feet on moist grass under the blue of midnight, haven't twirled through throngs of shimmying Biscos with my dreadlocks propellering around my skull, haven't stared out the back window of a car, as cities fade and re-form into new ones up ahead in the windshield. In the nine hours between the Gathering of the Vibes and the Shhh Festival in PA (*both* of which the Biscuits will play on Saturday, June 20th), a giant intergalactic hedgehog could devour all of Earth, poking its snout out of a wormhole on the other side of time. Then we'd *all* be out of luck. It's simply too late to be worrying about what time it is. Even when I have done all those things, as long as The Disco Biscuits (and ALL artists) are still grateful to the thrust of creation, unafraid of stretching reality and taking musical risks...the energy will be as fresh as it is right now.
Barber says it best in "Aceetobee" when he growls, "Well everyone's talking 'bout what they know...when Tomorrow's where *I* want to go." What I say is we all hold hands together, now and in every moment, take a deep breath, and just keep leaping headfirst into the sun.
Carol A. Wade is a writer, musician and artist, but mostly an underpaid Library Clerk at Columbia University. She loves to wax long and silly about things many people wouldn't waste time thinking about. She calls out to you for YOUR impressions of the world. Send them to her, only with great enthusiasm, to caw39columbia.edu.
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