From A Motel 6

Sea-Tac Motel 6
outlying Seattle, Washington

The Seven Feathers Casino wasn't much to our taste. It was a casino and all, with glimmering lights, blirping poker machines, and twittering slot junkies, but there was something fundamental missing. There was no overriding theme to the scene. There was no sense of desperate greed lurching about the floor. All things told, it felt empty in a way very foreign to Las Vegas. It almost seemed like a casino just for the sake of a casino. We half-heartedly sunk a buck or two into video machines - won a little, lost a little - and got some eats from a waitress who seemed utterly oblivious to the idea of vegetarianism.

Chaos was hard to come by, natural or otherwise. We briefly contemplated a romp in the otherwise closed pool, baby-stealing, and other such acts of disobedience, but instead just ended up in front of the casino, staring at the statue of a gigantic eagle swooping down from on high to snatch a salmon out of the water. The eagle's wings extended 40 feet into the ear, sleek and black, before fading into the night sky -- like Death descending on the Baron in Terry Gilliam's "Adventures of Baron Muncheausen".

The next afternoon found us heading briskly towards Portland, arriving in the early evening, and heading quickly off to Berbati's Pan to see an acoustic performance by M. Doughty, late of the soon-to-be-seminal Soul Coughing -- who broke up in a flurry of record company fuck-ups last April. Since then, Doughty has been touring sporadically, playing a smattering of Soul Coughing's minor hits as well as numbers of off "Skittish", his recently released solo album (recorded in 1996).

I should well be used to the idea that musicians are just normal people. And, for the most part, I am. Most of the bands that I go see hang out at the bar before the show and do all the other things that we mortals do. Yet, for some reason, Doughty still managed to get me all starry-eyed and tongue-twisted when he sat down at the table behind us and ordered dinner. I think part of it has to do with supply and demand. I'm familiar with the Disco Biscuits because I go to see them live. I know Doughty from listening to Soul Coughing's three albums incessantly.

He was always a disembodied voice on record, and never a warm body squirming uncomfortably inside his hip New York suit. Somehow, watching him, his music still managed to remain elusive. We sat in the front row, and I watched Doughty's hands. When he plays solo, almost all of the songs have the same chunky guitar rhythm. Still, eye didn't connect to sound. Doughty's hands fretted simple chords and a rhythm I've never quite been able to reproduce sprung forth from the guitar with a surprising crispness. His precisely ordered hour long set of self-described "small rock" highlighted the elegant structure of his material, delving deeply into lyrical themes of love and technology.

Bicoastal

Each city is its own dream life.
In each, the other the dream.
He is awake only on airplanes
He hurdles weeks
through the calendar
in each city,
longing for the other.

- M. Doughty

My friend and I sat in a small park overlooking Puget Sound in Seattle and stared at the skyline surrounding us. It looked like a perfectly laid out construct of SimCity, or Batman's Gotham, helicopters and airplanes flying over in a precisely measured intervals. Smoke billowed in lines out of tastefully arranged industrial complexes, white and virginal in their technological cleanliness, curves hugging the landscape gently -- a lover whose embrace can be escaped. The smoke segued seamlessly with the clouds, and steamers cut gently through the gray harbor.

From across the street, we noticed a bakery called Turkish Delight and immediately wished that we might be able to taste the confection of the same name; the candy the White Witch uses to lure Edmund with in C.S. Lewis's "the Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe". It was closed for the night. Pressing our faces up against the tinted door, we scanned the display cases. It was there. Or, at least, a spot for it was there. The food itself had been whisked away, crumbs lying on dirtied wax paper the only remnants.

As we walked past closed storefronts, clouds began to roll in. When we'd arrived in Seattle, it'd been almost 70 degrees and quite sunny. "So much for the drabness," I thought. Gradually, the sky grayed and the rain arrived.

The Crocodile Cafe was a moderately sized bar in a fairly bustling area of town. The record stores around the place revealed a very definite predilection towards punk and garage rock. My only knowledge of the Croc before tonight came from a Nirvana biography I read in 8th grade. In it, there was a picture of a smiling Kurt Cobain with a caption reading "jamming with Mudhoney at the Croc in Seattle, 1993" (or something like that). If it could make Cobain smile, I though, there must be something cool about the place.

The vibe at the show was weird -- like the Biscuits' music, almost indescribably so. There was nothing wrong, per se - security wasn't too bad, the place wasn't overpacked - people just seemed ill at ease, somewhere between tense and dazed. After the Santa Cruz show, everybody was jacked up with the power that comes after a monumental performance -- enough juice to keep someone driving to the next show, even if it's two days and two states away through wild territory. Somehow, though, the two days off had killed some momentum and people seemed more tired than they were before the break.

The gig began with an elegant (and surprising) rendition of Stone which one-beat segued into Liquid Lazer, the ending section to Pat and Dex. Both were played with an admirable tightness -- good, solid, white hippie jazz that harkened back to the Biscuits' mostly laconic studio debut, "Encephalous Crime". The Hot Air Balloon jam took a little bit to get going, but finally settled into a raging dance groove, before segueing into an inverted version of Little Betty Boop -- which was schizophrenic and lurching at best.

The second set had its moments, to be sure, but it certainly wasn't the lyrical masterpiece of Santa Cruz. The second House Dog jam rocked balls, as did parts of Bernstein and Chasnoff and the second jam in Run Like Hell. Other than that, though, it seemed that the band was searching for a groove, something to lock in with. In the encore, Aceetobee, they seemed to find it -- the same smooth non-electronica playing that characterized the Stone > Liquid Lazer combo. It was a nod back, a regression, in a way -- but gorgeous and perfect.

Jesse Jarnow can be reached at jesse.jarnow@oberlin.edu or by his homepage. Previous tour journals are located here.