On January 11, 2000, bassist Marc Brownstein left The Disco Biscuits. I didn't leave my bed for a day and a half. Something that had so recently filled me up with fresh energy, hope and inspiration had suddenly disappeared, and the New Year's smiles had suddenly vanished from the faces of a great many of my friends. Is music so important that it can make you feel empty and lost when its gone? Is the power of that mighty sonic force so compelling that it could seem to cause the world to grind to a halt? Think back to Woodstock. Remember Altamont. Imagine: The Disco Biscuits, in Philadelphia on the last day of the 20th Century. The Theater of the Living Arts in Philly was transformed into a teeming, electric day-glo womb, an airtight experiment in the conjuring of a magical future music.

The cessation of that vibrant and elemental flow has been the unfortunate preoccupation of many fans of The Disco Biscuits over the last two months. In the meantime, many of us kept ourselves busy, seeing other bands, which seemed to carry potential intact. Quite alarmingly like children of divorce, shattered Bisco fans clung to the sickest tapes of the glory days of the past two years, and resorted to the solace gained from the activities of extended musical family. The Biscuits themselves seethed in a distant silence; the hotcore of the community had gone supernova, a neutron-star-fleck of pressure expanding in a stunning explosion. To myself (and at least one other, namely Erica Lynn Gruenberg), the Oh-Oh had taken on a whole new cast: that of the dreaded WUH-OH. We all felt burned, burned utterly.

By mid-February, the natives were restless. Brownstein's Bisco departure laid to waste the minds of eager, feisty and super-loyal Biscuits fans everywhere. Especially hard-hit were the wildly fanatic, far-flung freaks that frequent the Internet community called DiscussBiscuits. People on the scene regarded the split with everything from curiosity to a sort of wry gladness. To some, The Disco Biscuits' mythos had come to symbolize something a l ittle more elusive and mysterious than your average happy-hippie jamband

I joined DiscussBiscuits in June 1999, after the exhilarating Jambands.com shows eariler that May, and the sprouting of a seed of frenzy planted back on December 30, 1998: the Biscuits' epic, second NYE post-Phish Wetlands show that year. At Melstock, the festival featuring the Biscuits and several other bands on a fan's parents' farmland, I met some of the people from the list. Like I had once before, with moe. and their 'rons, I connected through wires to hearts and minds (and opinions, doubtlessly). We met and mingled, fought and cheered. And then, we found one another on other lists, at other shows. Jesse (a friend for years), Tony O. (gave him his first moe. tape!), Erica, Benjy, Max, Trooper, the list goes on: tune-hungry show-biz kids in search of

Throughout the '99 Fall which followed, faces emerged from the computer screens; we toured, we partied, we kept in close contact; we moved through space in pursuit of a kind of wild innervision that The Disco Biscuits were pursuing. We thought it would last forever, we got caught up, schooled insiders and hapless virgins alike, all riding the rush all the way to the top. Even the band I was in at the time, was ceasing to satisfy, in light of what the Biscuits' craftsmanship, drive and synergy were doing to my mind. Also, I was not only the bass player, but an increasingly irate pawn, stuck with handling a lot of arid infrastructural conflicts and faulty lines of communication.

Mine was not a particularly improv-friendly outfit. A defining moment saw one of our two drummers stop a song in mid-rehearsal and say, "That's not how the song goes!" when I added some extra notes one measure. In those moments, the spontaneous joy of the music faded, and soon, on all fronts, I knew I wanted more: further exploration, greater chance, a bigger roomwith a kick-ass view of the world. I finally quit German Cars vs. American Homes in late October, the day after the Biscuits launched a rare performance of their lush, nine-song rock opera, The Hot Air Balloon, in Winston-Salem, SC. Bound up in my own daily struggles, I achieved a sort of borrowed invention by following The Disco Biscuits.

Thankfully, in the midst of the GcvAH split (being in a band is almost more intense than dating someone, as I see it), about the same time, a few New York area heads and myself launched The BiscoFreak's Local Jam Union 420. Simply, we wanted to use our own chops to emulate the Bisco spirit of jamming like we were in charge, hangin' out and getting to know each other, and hitting new sonic highs.

Back to January of the Oh-Oh, in the wake of the bad Brown news. Conflict in the clan exposed a stunning experiment in anthropology. DiscussBiscuiteers found themselves locked in useless struggle with the (somehow) opposing camp of a few kids on MOE.-L, the aforementioned moe. discussion list. The two lists, ironically, are unified in the cyber realm; both lists are on NetSpace, the Brown University-funded multi-use server. Reasonless crimes of the mind seemed suddenly to litter the once hilarious, energetic cyber-communities.

What was worse was the lingering sense of malaise, thakfully tempered somewhat, by frenzied, yet soothing tape/CD-R exchange of the last three months of the Nine-Nine, and other classic older shows. Altogether, though, the spite was brief, soon replaced by further intrigues. Discuss was just as soon littered with mind-meltingly comprehensive song polls, hot jam debates, as it was clogged with silly and oft-misconstrued, sarcastic e-frippery. We all reeled as folks wantonly dissed other bands, and pall of disjointed smirkiness hung in the air. But basically, people mostly seemed wounded and wary, lost in melancholia, with few clues to The Truth.

There were still fervent birthday shoutouts, eloquent elucidations and prosody, frequent parties and gatherings, and much, much love. Very early on, I organized a jam with Wetlands' talent-guru and Y2Samurai, Jake Szufnarowski. The premise was simple: with a bunch of kids, some instruments and some beer (oh, and Marc Brownstein, and his lovely sidekick, Deb) in attendance, we'd jam the night away.

Inspired soonafter, Brownstein announced the mounting of a new side-project band, featuring a few of the hottest up-and-coming groove scientists on the boards. On April 8th, 2000 at Wetlands Preserve the Brown One will celebrate his birthday on bass, with Dave from NY's ULU on drums; Max from Boston's Uncle Sammy will provide guitar, with DJ STITCH (Jake's old-skool pal, and secret weapon, obviously) cuttin' it up on the turntables. A later, exciting addition saw Jamie Shields, keyboard craftsman extraordinaire, of the super hot talk of Toronto, the NEW DEAL.

Precisely two weeks to the day after one era-thang ended, the man most likely to morph introduced "new original songs about hope, change and paradise," in the form of THE MAUI PROJECT. Needless to say, the kids were psyched, self included. DJ STITCH (aka Mike Magee, one of the world's nicest people ever) and Brown met at one of the jams a hoarde of Biscuits fans and myself had organized (see this month's Jambands.com for more on the Maui Project). For me, it was less about trying to jam with Brownstein, than it was just picking up the mood a little, and showing that, in the midst of chaos, some things still come out right.

But playing the music didn't hurt much, either.

Onward into February, though, mystery still prevailed, and everyone seemed mystified by the question"What would become of what we'd known as The Disco Biscuits?" Many wondered if the name should carry on without Marc, who was such an undeniable presence in a band of four young, weird, mindy musical supergeniuses. Some regarded it as near-heresy, to even mention certain songs' ever being played again without Brownstein behind the bass. Depressed as hell, I minced through the daily churn from the DiscussBiscuits bin, wondering myself what would become of that dear, glorious vibe, the memories, the songs revolving in my mind, words and broad, dreamlike sequences recalled from the Nine-Nine and the Fall.

Despite the strain, inside, I felt a kind of psychic web growing amidst the ruins of my hungry expectations and everyone's overarching feeling of crushed vibe. An ivy-like netting of foliage began to catch rays of possibility like Brownstein's Maui sunshine, a creative daring the likes I've barely witnessed in myself. What, though, was I trying to pull? Could I be a Biscuit? What would Brownstein think? What was there to do? I'd spoken to Marc about the split-up, heard close fans' assumptions, but most of what I heard was my heart moaning, and Biscuits songs trampling through my head. Brownstein's songs, Barber's songs, Magner's songs, Sammy's songs. Svengali. Shem Rah-Boo. The Very Moon. Morph Dusseldorf. Sam's fearsome rhythms surging forth from a lattice of Barber and Magner's melodies, and Marc's intricate, prolific basslines shuffling and booming beneath. Being a musician, I'd watched, admired and dreamed. What would become of that? The pain of it seemed all too great.

But by mid-February, the band had quietly announced auditions for a new bass player.

The first thing the kids decided to do on DiscussBiscuits, when it seemed as though the band had announced auditions, was create a fake bass player who seemed to be a shoe-in. Don't ask me why this was necessary. Chalk it up to imagination lost and siphoned out through lack of information, a reclamation of power despite great loss. "Todd" was a supposed Dominican dynamo with chops that rivaled, among others, Bela Fleck sideman, Vic Wooten. His checkered past (supporting a has-been Menudo-esque teeny bopper band) was revealed hours before "Todd" was revealed as nothing more than a hilariously brief mirage. The things that people will go to when they don't know the whole story: what precious little fans had heard about the particulars of the band conflict, blended with the amazing capacity of Biscuits fans, in my opinion, proved once again to really extend the limits of humor, truth, creativity and longing.

At some point amidst all the uproar, I sat quietly and thought to myself. No band, jobs all in an up-tosswhy not? Why couldn't I audition for The Disco Biscuits? Not to join, mind younot even to compete with whatever legions (real or invented) that were making the effort. I wanted to go merely to go. There were urges ensuing from all fronts. Perhaps I could get the whole story. Maybe, like a Latvian grandmother, I could somehow magically make things less painful for everyone, a mischievous matchmaker of sorts. Or maybe I'd just go down there and try to make myself feel better somehow. After all, I was just as smashed up inside about the new developments as anyone else, and music, as always, was the cure-all I had no choice but to consult at all times. Playing with the Biscuits, though an altogether ironic way of improving my mood, I thought, couldn't really hurt, and might be something for my own personal history books (right alongside jamming with Brownstein about a month earlier).

So, through a series of sidelong orchestrations and plans, I boarded a Peter Pan bus from NYC to Philly at Noon on February 19, 2000. I'd been stressing out all week, wondering, "What am I gonna do? What am I gonna play? Am I gonna f*ck it all up!? Does it matter?" After spending a few days learning a few songs to the best of my ability, and listening to tapes containing some of my favorite sicky Bisco jams, I decided to go full-on transcendental. In the last day, I did nothing but get myself in the right mental frame to simply appear at the kinda scary-lookin' house up on Hilltop Road, and do whatever it was I'd gone there to do. I meditated on non-duality. I thought of myself as a grain of sand on a beach of circumstance, no different from all the other particles of matter in the universe. Why not ride the rock star high? Well, I have to admit: it's just not really my style.

Eventually, I got picked up at the bus station. Jon Lesser, the band's hyperactive and multi-tasking sound engineer and road manager, picked me up in a 4WD roadster. A brief ride back to the house saw some small talk, and more of my silent "personality yoga," as I tried, now completely out of my element and on the way to mystery, to contain myself. We rolled into the driveway. The house, like any band abode, is complex, formidable, full of wires and gears, and strange aromas.

Time was not wasted. "So, whaddya wanna play?" said Jon, planted quickly behind his guitar, as the rest of the band, too, sat quietly behind their instruments in the second-floor practice room.

"Well," I stammered. This was it. Suddenly, it was like my whole understanding of myself took a step to the side, and something new took hold; a body of pure possibility. Here I was, standing around with near-idols, a bunch of really "legit" musicians, and the biggest buzz of the genre that I greatly admired in the last year. I both felt I was getting ready to emulate (sadly enough) one of my heroes, who'd gone his own way, but also forge some portion of my own wacky personal history, which I'd been ignoring in the midst of trying to stay 100% neutral. As I stared at the carpet, my mind a brief blank, I wished there were some way I could've high-fived The Disco Biscuits I'd known at that moment, for what they'd achieved, for how much love the four of them had given people over the past year. But one was missing, and I, as it happened, was the one standing in his place.

"Umm," I finally managed. I told them the songs I'd learned, some I felt okay enough to play. In the end, Barber decided, "Okay, how about Mindless Dribble > Mr. Don, then Aceetobee?" Stunned, I nodded, and said that sounded cool. So, it was that easy. A few words, some breath on the air, and suddenly, there's a monsoon of drums and keyboard washes around you, the guitar swirling and rising and dancing, and my own hands moving, miraculously, before I can think

and almost 40 minutes later, I was covered in the sweat of strain, the room was at least a few degrees warmer, and I was both grateful and horrified that it was over. In three songs, I managed to prove to myself, and The Disco Biscuits, that I could at least keep a beat, if not kinda, well, hold it down a bit. Something inside me wouldn't stop saying, "Yeahoh yeahoh yeah!" Something right behind that thing threatened to undermine my inner gyroscope at all timesI thought I was gonna pass out.

The interview section of the audition consisted of me giving a lot of vague answers to some pretty vague questions. At least, in the fog that ensued post-jam, they seemed vague to me. Scarcely able to formulate sentences, I tried to convey that I was neither starving to become a Biscuit, nor completely opposed by such an idea. It was, and is, the truth of the matter. Something so broad, so special, can only ride the waves of time to it's specified destination of perfection. Rather than ask myself, "Can this be? Will this be?", I wondered simply, "Now what?"

Later in the day, the Wonder Twins of hip NYC music, Jake and his talent-buying predecessor, Biscuits' manager, Chris Zahn, showed up on the scene. The audition over, the band went to do its thang, and the other two swept me away. We made like a bunch of Mission Impossible freaks, causing a ruckus over parts of suburban Pennsylvania, well into the night.

"Now what?" was really answered, though, two weeks later, as I scurried around my neighborhood running banal Saturday afternoon errands, like doing laundry. The night before, Jake and I hung around Wetlands and celebrated the news that the March 11th show had completely sold out. After hearing that they wanted to talk to me, I got in touch with The Disco Biscuits between the wash and dry cycles.

Lesser asked, "Would you like to play Mindless Dribble with us at Wetlands next weekend?"

Before I could even think, before fear could manage to prevail even slightly (thankfully), the words came tumbling out: "Yes, of course."

It was easy. Next, I'd run down to Philly on Friday, the day before the show, and run through the song once or twice more.

But it was hardI got the gig on the condition that I couldn't tell anyone. Not even the person I knew who'd most like to hear it, and the biggest fan of surprises I've ever met, Jake Szufnarowski, talent buyer of Wetlands himself.

Even harder was the lump in my stomach which weighed heavily. I wondered what everyone would think. Would I be seen as a traitor? Most of all, I wondered what Brownstein would think. Would he think I was stealing his sizeable thunder? Notoriously inclined to think about things that people in positions of amazing opportunity don't usually think about, I worried uselessly. But since I'd already said yes, there was not much I could do but, once again, attempt to rise to the occasion.

By Thursday night, Brownstein knew the score. I broke down in tears, and told him the news, as he gave me a ride to my house after another kinda useless night of slackin' around Wetlands. As it happens, Brownstein and Deb are my neighbors, living a few blocks away in Brooklyn. The moment he showed up in the doorway of the club's office that night, I knew I was doomed, and that my secret would be no more by the time the night was over.

Across the street from my monolithic apartment building, a glibly positive, honest and mostly non-contemptuous Brownstein wished me luck on my first REALLY big rockstar outing. From that moment on, I discovered that I'd done the most I could do, to build some kind of bridge (even a shaky one) over the shocking ruin that had been our expectations for The Disco Biscuits.

Would the remaining band members be angry with me for spilling the beans? By that point, I really wasn't sure that I cared. I could only think to honor the past, in hopes of paving a way for a brighter future. If it wasn't for what the four Biscuits past had wrought together, I wouldn't have ever met them, or felt accustomed to their fantastic vibe. I wouldn't even have been inspired to ingest their music so fully, that I could get a song virtually right after playing it with them for the first time. And then the second time. And the third

But keep in mind one important concept: expectations were the only things shattered on January 11, 2000. For The Disco Biscuits, the so-called "Lords of the Dark Scene," more of the same hyper-charged exploration was coming out of the misty conflicts which removed their bassist from the band. Maybe it's all hype, but one thing's for surethe energy of inner exploration which punctuated the Biscuits music has not died, and it will live on in the musicians who still embody that daring, in the months to come. For myself, the most I could do was perhaps not the best, the loudest, or even the most cocky, rocky or tactful. I felt, however, by the time the end of second set rolled around on 3/11/00, the one thing left to do was retreat to the sticker-encrusted back room of Wetlands, patiently tune my bass, and wait to take the stage.

http://members.home.net/jessemc/biscopics.html

What can I say? I had fun. I'm grateful. Will it happen again? I don't know. Would I like it to? Why not? I'm a pretty adventurous gal. I like surprises, challenges, sounds and the open road. I've seen the world because of music. As my pal Richard Gehr said to me, along with a tight hug and a big smile, "Hey, you're living the Gobi dream!". And he was righttrembling, I shambled offstage after playing about fifteen minutes of music with The Disco Biscuits, in my favorite place in the world, to about six hundred of my best friends acquaintances, and kind strangers. Now, I can only hope that, due in some small part to my efforts, the unparalleled goodness and neutral loving-kindness of music can keep reaching all whom it needs to. In some way. Despite conflict. Despite miscommunication. For the sake of us all.