JamBands.Com - June 1999 - Memo From the Touring Desk: Slippery People In Special Cars

Memo From the Touring Desk: Slippery People In Special Cars
by Jesse Jarnow

June 2, 1999 - Theater Of The Living Arts, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
A searingly hot day, but they all were. Several train rides in modern, air conditioned cars kept things comfortable until I stepped into the late afternoon Philadelphia heat. The 14 block walk to the TLA did not sound inviting, so I buckled up, wussed out, and caught myself a cab -- proving once again my ignorance of Philadelphia... I hailed it going in the wrong direction. Moments later, I walked into the TLA as viperHouse was setting up on stage for their soundcheck. A small group of people milled in the back half of the room. One of them, a small nervous-appearing man, looked vaguely familiar. With a few days of beard growth and a ragged pair of blue Cons, I took him - correctly - to be JamBands.com editor and founder Dean Budnick, whom I was familiar with only through the tiny bio pic on the back cover of "the Phishing Manual" and an all-too-brief meeting at the first JamBands.com show, a two set throwdown affair hosted by the Disco Biscuits at the Wetlands in October.
Dean was everywhere while people prepared for the show. I stationed myself in the lobby of the place, an old converted movie theater, to set up and man the JamBands.com merch table. Dean bounced in between the lobby, the performance area, and countless other locales that I wasn't privy to. At one point, a familiar looking bass player, accompanied by a stately looking Southern gentleman decked out in a Hawaiian shirt arrived. I'd heard rumors of their presence, but it had escaped my mind. Oteil Burbridge and Butch Trucks of the Allman Brothers Band were in the hizzow. They, like Dean, would become completely and totally ubiquitous over the course of the next few days -- both onstage and off.
After setting up tee-shirt displays, I sat down behind the table... my first free moment in the venue since I had arrived there. I looked around. Doors would be open soon. When the doors opened, people would come in. When people came in, a band would play. When a band played, there would be music. Music. In the hullabaloo of getting stuff ready, it had honestly slipped my mind that all of this was actually gearing towards a show. I've said it before, and I'll say it many times again, but so much work goes into setting up an environment where musicians can help produce a transcendent experience. There is no better example of this, perhaps, than the ordeal of the Slip on this particular night.
Four bands were booked to play the TLA on that Wednesday night, in potential stage order: the Slip, the Recipe, Percy Hill, and viperHouse. By the time the doors had opened, the Slip still hadn't arrived. There'd been a phone call earlier, from the band, taken down by an employee of the club -- they were stuck somewhere in New York. Traffic or something. By the time doors opened, they were still nowhere in sight -- and they were supposed to be on stage and playing within a half an hour. The Recipe started when the Slip was supposed to on the theory that, when the Slip showed up, they could just be, uh, slid right into a future time slot. There seemed to be some initial resistance from TLA management -- but, for the moment, it was all theoretical. That would be conquered later, hopefully.
Shortly, another familiar bass player walked through the door -- Marc "Brownie" Brownstein from Philly's own the Disco Biscuits. He popped his head in the door to the stage area. He walked over to me, greeted me, and posed what was now the question of the night: "Yo, where the fuck is the Slip?" I told him. "Shit," he said, and scratched his dome. "Do you think they'll go on anytime soon?" I shrugged in reply. "I'll be back," he said.
Before he returned, though, the Slip arrived, wandering raggled, knackered, and generally confused through the front door of the TLA. The confused part wasn't unique to them. Nobody was quite sure what was to happen to their set that night. It should be noted that the Slip was the only band on the bill that I was familiar with. After witnessing a sparkling four hour performance at Oberlin a month earlier, seeing the band turn in an impressive early afternoon set at the All Good the week before, and listening to their excellent debut CD "From The Gecko" on the way to Philly, I was considerably amped for their set -- intending to have someone cover for me at the merch table while they played. The folks at the TLA did not share in my - and everybody else's - enthusiasm, it seemed. In the end though, despite some resistance from the theater manager the Slip played, courtesy of a mysterious phone call from Butch Trucks to the powers that be.
The Slip's set was wedged in between outings by Percy Hill and viperHouse. When the Providence-based trio finally took the stage, however, they were augmented by two additional musicians -- Oteil and Butch. In anticipation of what was coming, Percy Hill's merch dude graciously covered for me and I bolted into the venue proper, sliding into a spot in front of the stage next to Dean moments after the band launched into Wolof. The Slip and their music seemed perfectly tailored for the evening's - and the tour's, at least from my perspective - events. All three members of the band - Andrew Barr (drums and percussion), Brad Barr (guitar and vocals), and Marc Friedman (electric bass) - studied at the Berklee School of Music in Boston, steeping themselves in the technical and theoretical aspects of music. Yet, their songs, often with tightly constructed heads, often glide effortlessly into formlessness -- into a seething chaos that cannot be taught.
On this night, that was once again the case. The band, with Oteil and Butch keeping pace, swam through gloriously uncharted waters, a bubbling swamp -- occasionally surfacing as Marc returned to the Wolof bassline. Personally, as the (ultimately) 25-minute jam wound on, the head of the song began to symbolize something close to all of the bureaucratic bullshit that had to be dispensed with before the band could even get on stage. It brought me back to the idea of structure, of a scientific experiment. I thought of what happened to Eddie Jessup, William Hurt's character in the Ken Russell film "Altered States", which I had watched earlier in the week with my friend Matt -- in an isolation tank, under strict scientific guidelines, Hurt's character regressed to the pure formlessness of human existence. Under the hot lights of the TLA, on a stage littered with precisely plugged wires, carefully aligned microphones, and tweaked dials, the Slip regressed.
That night, sleeping under a table in an apartment somewhere in Philadelphia, I reconstituted.
June 3, 1999 -- Recher Theater, Towson, Maryland
I drifted slowly into consciousness the next morning, hearing fragments of the night before -- a few minutes of the Slip's set would fade up and then disappear, a little bit of viperHouse, then the same bit... sounding a little bit different. I had crashed out at the apartment of one of the folks from Live Archives -- a self-described group of expatriates from Rykodisc who had split off to found their own record company devoted to live releases. They had recorded the previous night's show on no less than four separate microphones -- plus a board feed, I think. They spent the morning comparing notes and tapes to see whose tapes sounded fuller, richer, livelier... better. It should be noted that the Live Archives crew was along for the ride, for the whole tour, taping all of the gigs in preparations for a JamBands.com compilation disc intended to be released later this summer. If anywhere near all of the best performances I witnessed during my four nights of tour make it onto the CD, it's gonna be one helluva disc.
After a morning of cruising the streets near the apartment, we crammed five into a car and headed down to Towson. Driving through the hip, collegiate-looking streets, we looked out for a club... or something. None of us had ever been to the Recher. It took a moment to register when we finally saw it, but finally came upon a large old-style theater marquee that read, in big friendly letters: "TONIGHT: the Disco Biscuits". Like many places around the country - including the TLA - the Recher began life as a movie theater. Inside the venue, one can turn around, look at the wall in the back of the room, and see the projection booth. The seats are, of course, gone now -- made way for ample dancing room. Still, walking through the front door, I almost expected to small popcorn as I entered the performance space. The venue did have a nice concession stand, though, from which I later purchased my tasty, albeit somewhat pricey, dinner. Seeing shows in buildings that are icons of a bygone era provides a host of interesting contrasts. It's a whole different kind of entertainment.
The bill that night, in order, was Jiggle the Handle, the Slip, Moon Boot Lover, Percy Hill, and the Disco Biscuits. Inside, and in the loading area just outside the side door to the theater, band members milled about socializing. Again, Dean, Butch, and Oteil seemed to be omniscient. Members of the Walther Productions crew wandered around, helping everything to run smoothly. Weeks earlier, at the All Good, the Disco Biscuits set was unfortunately canceled due to the collapse of onstage lighting rig. The Recher offered three dollars off at the door for anybody who presented an All Good ticket stub. I soon discovered that Walther Productions even had employees paid specifically to work the merch table. How nice for me! I got to wander around and enjoy the show.
When Jiggle the Handle took the stage, shortly after doors, the bulk of the people inside seemed to be members of various bands or their respective crews. Jiggle plowed through a tightly played 45-minute set. Most were afraid to cross the boundary into the area directly in front of the stage. As a result, the dance floor seemed to be a moat between the band and the crowd.
BEGIN INTERLUDE
An interlude: As I was writing the above section, I was interrupted by a phone call from fellow JamBands columnist Carol Wade, who wrote a similar tour journal for Dupree's Diamond News about the first incarnation of the Merry Danksters, whose debut tour was held exactly two years previous to the JamBands.com festivities. She sympathized with me. "Tour journals are impossible to edit. Everything that happened seems significant... to you, anyway. Like... like that squirrel you saw... it means something..."
"Yeah," I said. "Somehow the squirrel is symbolic of the whole tour..."
"...the squirrel shook his tail..."
"...and it was symbolic of Oteil shaking his rump on the stage."
END INTERLUDE
During the set break between Jiggle and the Slip, Jackie - a friend of mine from Oberlin - arrived at the Recher. She had driven up from Virginia for the show, hopping onto the tour for the next three nights. Another convert from the Slip show the previous month, we barely had time to greet each other before the Slip began. Tales of the previous night had circulated quickly and the crowd was quite eager to hear the band. Various members of the Disco Biscuits wandered around the stage area, taking the set in. As we watched, the Recher began to fill up. More and more folks were behind me each time I turned around. The Slip's set mixed material from "From The Gecko" with newer tunes -- all sounding like a stripped down version of "Bitches Brew"-era Miles Davis.
Next up was Moon Boot Lover, mainstays on the scene for as long as I can remember. I first witnessed the antics of MBL frontman Peter Prince nearly four years ago on a sultry summer night at - where else? - the Wetlands. "Man," I remember thinking at the time. "That dude is *wired*". I figured he was having a particularly hyper night -- coming out with a wig over his shiny shaved dome, later throwing a large teddy bear out to the crowd and declaring that it (the teddy bear) needed some lovin'. The next time I saw the band, two months later, Prince was still going hard -- raving maniacally into the microphone before, after, and during songs, all the while shredding funkily on his Fender.
Moon Boot seems to have a permanently rotating lineup. There are two key elements, though, to every incarnation of MBL that I have yet seen: a zapped to the tits Peter Prince coupled with a laid back band. If Peter Prince is the astronaut, threatening to break free of the small amount of gravity that the moon does have, then the band - usually including one-time Percy Hill bassist Jon Hawes - are the moon boots keeping him safely rooted. "Jimi Hendrix may be dead," marveled Biscuits' drummer Sam Altman watching Moon Boot, "but we've got Peter Prince."
At the end of the set, the band was joined by the ubiquitous Oteil and Percy Hill keyboardist Nate Wilson for an extended workout -- featuring a Prince talk-box solo and some of Oteil's trademark scatting. Wilson's organ provided for a nice variation on Moon Boot's power trio sound. Wilson's own band, Percy Hill, was up next. Minus what little of the band I'd heard of the band through the wall between the lobby and the stage area at the TLA the night before, this was the first time I'd seen or heard Percy Hill since a late May appearance at the Wetlands in 1997 -- coincidentally, that show was also the first time I saw the Biscuits, who opened.
In that time, Percy Hill has gone through some momentous lineup changes. While Moon Boot retained its basic sound during all of the member switching, Percy Hill switched from a tight Santana-sounding two-guitar/two-percussionist band to a tight white funk-sounding one-guitar/one-drummer band. For me, much of the band's appeal rested in the absolutely monstrously dexterous grooves they created. While the band was certainly plenty together and rehearsed, they didn't seem - to me, anyway - to channel a compelling energy.
All the way down to the All Good, two weeks previous, I'd been humming a distinctive riff. A chopping, hard-driving, pulsing riff. Helicopters. It was all I wanted to hear at All Good, and all I wanted to hear at the Recher. As the band's infamous tour kids situated themselves on the dance floor, the band quietly counted off and crashed into the Helicopters intro... and they were off. Look out below. The techno jam spiraled upwards and outwards, far away from the Helicopters theme into the textural and noxious gases of the stratosphere before finding itself in the middle of the screaming climax of Morph Dusseldorf. The crowd, predictably, erupted. After a perfunctory run through of Jon Gutwillig's Bazaar Escape from the band's rock opera the Hot Air Balloon, Oteil joined them on stage. It was an odd match, Oteil and the Biscuits -- and one that set off a plethora of thoughts that eventually got turned into my column for this issue.
The show ended with a return to the Helicopters theme. We left the Recher with it echoing in our heads as we drove four hours north to Long Island. We listened to Weird Al as we drove and smiled. Just after dawn, we drove through Brooklyn and Queens, the sun just beginning to shine on the Manhattan skyline. Everything around was illuminated just enough for us to make out details, but not so bright as to see the layer of dirt and grime caked over it all. After posting the Biscuits' setlist, I climbed into bed - my own bed - somewhere in the vicinity of nine in the morning.
June 4, 1999 -- Wetlands Preserve, New York City, New York
If the Recher and the TLA were new adventures for me, the Wetlands shows on June 4th and 5th were a return home. I'm from the New York area, though I've spent the better part of the last two years going to school in Ohio -- in other words, only getting to Wetlands shows when breaks allowed it. I consider it my home venue, if that means anything at all. The first night there on the JamBands.com tour was my first visit to the club since an Al and the TransAmericans show there in January, while I was still home for Christmas break. When going to a venue where I've never seen a show, there's always an element of danger -- I could get lost on the way there, I could discover that the place is strictly 21+ when I get there... a myriad of things could go wrong. There's a wonderful safety in Wetlands, for me. I get on the Long Island Railroad, take it to Penn Station, get on the 1/9 train downtown, take it to Canal Street, go upstairs, cross the subway bridge, walk a block... and I'm there, dude. Not counting the fact that the subway bridge was closed and we had to walk around, it was all that easy...
There are two kinds of nights at Wetlands: the kind where there is a comfortable crowd and plenty of dancing room and the kind where one couldn't move if he wanted to. The two nights at Wetlands saw a little bit of each. The first night saw the former. Both nights had about a gajillion bands on the bills, more than I could ever hope to take in. To get everybody's names on the table, the first night featured:
Living Daylights, Sector 9, Ulu, Foxtrot Zulu, Schleigho, Blind Man's Sun, Conehead Buddha, and - in the headlining slot - the Ominous Seapods.
Of those, the only sets that I managed to catch in their entirety were Sector 9, Blind Man's Sun, and the Ominous Seapods.
The only two things I knew about Blind Man's Sun before they took the stage was what I remembered from an interview that appeared in these virtual pages in January (see More is More) - basically, just the fact that they had two double studio CDs out - and the observation that waiting in the wings (or, more to the point, the floor of the bar) was a set of marimbas. As a huge fan of Ruth Underwood-era Mothers Of Invention, I'm a sucker for any band with melodic percussion. The band announced that they would "be doing something a little weird... even for [them]" -- a set of all covers. It was an interesting way to be exposed to a new band. Usually, when I see somebody live that I've never seen before, the only way for me to find my bearings is either through the one or two songs I might recognize from filler on a tape or through the covers they choose to play.
There were plenty of places to latch my brain onto during Blind Man's Sun set. The covers were a mix of 70s, 80s, and 90s music -- some stuff I recognized (the Humpty Dance, Smoke On The Water, others) and a lot of stuff I didn't. Because much of the material was familiar - even the stuff I didn't recognize at least sounded familiar - what interested me most in listening was the arrangements. The set was structured as one big melody. For me, the highlights were the transitions between each of the covers: intricately composed dialogues between marimba, guitars, and keyboards. Skillfully composed flights of fancy made way for more 80s music... an interesting contrast, to say the least.
In the basement, I sat on a couch in the back and absorbed Sector 9. As the first band on in the morning at the All Good, they were more than a little bit of place -- though still turned in a fine performance. At the Wetlands, they were more in their element. The band is one of several that I've yet heard making in-roads into the integration of techno into improvised music. They're a nice match with the Disco Biscuits. Many of their jams tended to be on the looped and/or ambient side of things. They worked well in the low-key, laid back atmosphere of the Wetlands basement. I danced for a little bit, but mostly sat on a couch in the back of the room and took it all in; writing a little bit, listening, chilling.
Upstairs, a little bit after midnight, was the return of the Ominous Seapods. Yes, they'd been around - at Wetlands, too - since the last time I saw them there a few days before New Year's... but there was something different here, something important. Max was gone. Max is gone. To be perfectly frank, guitarist/vocalist Max Verna was the reason I began to go to Seapods' shows in the first place. Their music was fun, their sense of humor delightedly obscene, their groove swanky... but it was Max who made them special. For me, anyway. When he announced he was leaving the band in November, I was scared. I caught a couple of shows where Max ceded the stage to future replacement Todd Pasternack. Both times, I yearned for Max to return.
Sooner or later, though, I'd have to see the band again. I couldn't stay away. When the band finally took the stage, I was pretty pumped. When they launched into Lighthouse, a new arrival from the fall tour, I was excited. Todd shined in the jam, helping bring it to a screaming peak. Jet Smooth Ride, the title track from the band's 1997 studio effort, did the same. Then the band started Blackberry Brandy, a bonafide Seapods classic - perhaps the bonafide Seapods classic - if ever there was one... and written by Max. Todd sang... and I missed Max.
The band moved full throttle through the song, though, and left little time to mourn. That is, until they got to what - until recently, I guess - was the quiet section: "the night ends at two and we fill out into the streets / We're all gathered there to watch the sparks in the sky / And across this town I find a place to lay my head / When I feel that cold wind blowing on my back I know I'm home again..." It was there that I first felt Max's absence. It was an emptiness I felt in the music whenever the band attempted something a little quieter than their usual full-tilt drive. Maybe this is something that can only come with time, can only come when the band and Todd grow with each other and grow more musically intimate... When the band built up again into the driving ending of Brandy and, later, Passengers en Route, the quietness was still missing -- even in the louder parts. Even in the most brutal of the 'pods attacks, there was always something graceful and delicate about them that seems all but gone now.
Butch Trucks turned in a lovely performance with the band, taking over for skinman Ted Marotta on the "Jesus Christ Superstar" song What's The Buzz driving the band into one of the only out jams of the night. When bassist Tom Pirozzi cued Trucks for the ending, Trucks looked confused. He raised his sticks in the air. "That's it?" he asked. Everybody laughed and off the 'pods went into Bong Hits and Porn... but that was it, at least far as new exploration went for the Seapods. Maybe some other time.
June 5, 1999 -- Wetlands Preserve, New York City, New York
A long, hot day in the city promised a barn burner that night. Before the show, Jackie and I went to meet Carol at the Bell Cafe -- a traditional pre-Wetlands meeting spot. When we arrived, there was a padlock on the door and a notice from the landlord. Bummer... and quite disconcerting.
Another huge bill was in the works for that night: Uncle Sammy, Lake Trout, the Miracle Orchestra, Juggling Suns, Jiggle the Handle, Moon Boot Lover, Percy Hill, and the Disco Biscuits. Quickly, the Wetlands filled the hell up. By the time Moon Boot Lover was on, the place was completely packed, or so it seemed. We waded downstairs in an effort to catch some of Lake Trout -- the other band whose set had been canceled at All Good. Getting to the basement was a challenge... and getting into the lounge (for me) proved impossible. I ended up camping on the couch in the hallway for the duration of Trout's set hearing snippets every now and again with nothing but positive reports coming from inside. I look forward to seeing them at Melstock and Camp Bisco.
Walking upstairs to stake a spot at the secret safety space on the floor for the Biscuits set, I caught the very tail end of Percy Hill -- walking in just before a hot rendition, with Oteil and Butch (of course), on the Allmans' classic In Memory Of Elizabeth Reed. Unlike his appearance with the Seapods, where Butch simply replaced the band's native drummer, here there were two drummers at work. The jam managed to catch the spark of both the Allmans and, I think, the Percy Hill I remembered from a few years ago. The music swelled in places as individual musicians darted around each other creating a fluid groove. Oteil soloed.
He did that a lot over the course of the four days of tour that I did. Oteil Burbridge is a wonderful bass player. I guess that's obvious. His musicianship is continually impressive from a purely technical standpoint. Over the numerous guest appearances I witnessed over the four days, though, his playing seemed to run a somewhat repetitive course: get the hang of the tune, play an accompanying chordal part in the upper registers, step up to the mic, scat for a little, and chill for the rest of the song. All of this is no little feat: his style of accompaniment is completely unique and original and has many possibilities to explore within it. It seems, sometimes, as a friend of mine so aptly put it that "Oteil's a guitar player trapped in a bass player's body... he doesn't remember that there's life below the twelfth fret". To Oteil's credit, it's easy for a bass player to get swallowed up when he's sitting in with a band who already have someone covering the low end. The two notable exceptions to this repetitiveness were with the Slip and the Biscuits for completely opposite reasons: with the Slip because be blended so well and with the Biscuits because he didn't fit at all... at least, the first time.
Yes, there were a shload of bands on the bill and, yes, I caught most of them... but I remember little of any of them for the simple reason that the Disco Biscuits played from 12:30 or so through to almost 5:00 in the morning with only a short set break somewhere in the middle. To call anything a highlight would be to devalue something else that was equally as good. In short, the Biscuits kicked ass. It hurt to dance and, later, it hurt to sit. For much of the show, the only thing I could do was stare in fear at the band. Nestled in the middle of he first set was a strong Above The Waves > Pygmy Twylyte > Above The Waves. Debuted in December as part of "the Hot Air Balloon", Waves (as well as much of the other material from the epic) proves that it is still possible to write songs with intricate composition and still have room for compelling improvisation. The interpolation of a Zappa number in the middle of Waves seems a nod to FZ, one of the first to place equal emphasis on the two. And yes, Oteil sat in -- on one of the Biscuits only slower numbers, the Brownie-penned News From Nowhere. Surprise. This time he fit, providing the Biscuits with a depth they sometimes lack in their quieter material.
The second set featured the two songs the Biscuits have debuted so far in 1999 -- the Magner-penned Spaga and Little Lai (which completed a version that was begun at the Recher). The crowd stayed packed in tight for the entire night, all the way through the end of encore. It's obvious that the Biscuits are just too damn big for Wetlands and it will soon be time to move on. Much of the second half of the evening seemed a tribute to days gone by. More than half of the songs featured (Bernstein and Chasnoff and the entire encore: Stone > Devil's Waltz, Aceetobee, Vassillios > Mr. Don) were already mainstays in Biscuits' setlists by late 1996. With the exception of Stone > Devil's Waltz each of the older songs has consistently stretched and pushed its own boundaries, showing a durability that most bands' older songs lack. With a nod to the past and future - and all their troops in order - the Biscuits are ready to conquer.
Epilogue: June 11, 1999 -- Northport, New York
Is there anything to be learned from these four shows? Yes, of course there is. Take the lesson of the squirrel into account. It's easy to make a lot out of anything... and it's just as easy to shut the fuck up and dance. Words are useless to describe music, but music is useless to describe words. Did I have a good time? Sure, when I wasn't thinking about it. Who promotes what? Does the music at the shows promote the words? Or do the words promote the music? Does the music mean anything if it's not described, somehow, in text? Do the words mean anything if they're not actualized in music? Is it an end...?

Jesse Jarnow is totally confused... by you.