The Berth

(NOTE: This was supposed be to posted yesterday morning, 10/20, but wasn't due to server problems.)

The berth of the Ambulance
Somewhere between Salt Lake City, Utah and Denver, Colorado

Strange omens on the high road to Denver: I woke up from an extended sleep in the rear berth of the Ambulance - the fully equipped rented minivan we've been riding in - and the first thing I saw after rubbing my eyes and putting on my glasses was a man riding down the street on a unicycle. "Mercy," I muttered. "...the fuck are we?" There was no one in the vehicle to answer my question. The stalwart driver had fled to the gas station for convenience and my other tourmate was clonked out in the shotgun.

I stumbled out of the car and sniffed the air tentatively. The sky was a clear blue, and the intersection looked like any other: a couple of gas stations and some shopping centers, some dirty road signs, and the streetlights dangling gently in the... what part of the day was it?... breeze. Utterly disconcerted somewhere between Portland and Denver is an interesting place to be. This mini-tour is without a center. Usually, show travel begins or ends near some semblance of home: an axis. There's nothing here but a point A and a point B and a thin line suspended between them.

I mentally backtracked to try to figure out where we were, but without the car clock on, we could well be anywhere. Looking up, my eyes automatically sealed from the sudden influx of light on the eyeball. The last time I'd been awake - fully awake, that is - was... well, I'm not sure where. Eastern Oregon, I think. We'd taken off moreless after the show for the big drive: Portland to Denver in the space of one day off. People had told us that we'd be in for anywhere between a 15 to 24 hour drive. Quite a span. Either way, we wanted to get an early start.

On the outskirts of Portland, as I was getting used to the acceleration of the car, testing the aerodynamics, how the car handled at an extremely high velocity, etc., I spotted flashing blue and red lights in the rearview mirror. "Bugger." An Officer Bevins of the Portland Police Department introduced himself, inquired pleasantly where we were going, asked me politely to slow down and let us on our way. Getting pulled over and not getting a ticket makes a man want to drive at very high speed with extremely loud music playing such that the bass rattles his eyebrows and the treble his teeth.

Stripped down to a core group of three, Eel curled up to sleep in the back while Laura gibbered at me. The momentum of the show kept us awake and blathering. After a lackluster Seattle show, the band rebounded in the perfect elegance of Portland's Crystal Ballroom. The spring-loaded dance floor and the gaudy paintings on the wall made for a grand setting. The evening began with a trio of songs from "the Hot Air Balloon" - Bazaar Escape into the Very Moon into the ending of the Hot Air Balloon that had begun the night before. After a broad version of Shelby Rose, the set closed with a sweeping Magellan.

The music was epic in the grandest sense of the word -- soaring majestic guitar lines slung from mountain to mountain, peak to peak, with the deft precision of a climber without a net. Or something. Again, metaphor fails and I'm left with something that could be used to describe any piece of half-decent improvisation and imagery that's been used so often that it's impact has long since dwindled.

Where the first set was grand in a classical sense, the second set provided monstrous dance grooves -- maybe the largest the band has yet played. This tour - and this set, in specific - drummer Sam Altman has made major strides in his kick-drum playing. At first glance, that may seem like a pretty pointless observation, but the force of his playing combined with interesting cyclical patterns has made for consistently interesting jams. Where the Santa Cruz show focused on long dubby excursions, Portland's second set all about drum-and-bass.

Another reason why it's easy to write about bad Biscuits' shows and hard as hell to write about good ones is because bad Biscuits' shows are schizophrenic. There's a flew in the whole. The Biscuits' tend to structure their shows as entire movements of music, rather than a collection of individual pieces. The songs are at the service of this greater structure, becoming unimportant enough that they can be dismantled and rearranged at will if it fits the form. On an unsuccessful night, the pieces make themselves apparent.

On a good night, though, one is left with the feeling that something just happened, though - like a drug experience - specifics can't be remembered and, when they can, they come back more like a dream than a mental recounting of what happened. The tendency then, when trying to describe them, is to do so in cartoonish terms that recounts an experience that would result in the same end, albeit with different means -- and then comparing the music to that means: "like a person waiting for a massage from a beautiful Swiss masseuse and instead getting throttled by a Sumo wrestler" (as an ex-roommate of mine once described the Biscuits in an attempt to insult them).

The second set was monstrous. The spring-loaded floor of the Ballroom bounced and swayed. When I did dance, it felt like I was flying. When I didn't, it felt almost like I was getting seasick. I discovered that if I bobbed my head along with the music while resting my legs, I could fool my brain into thinking that my whole body was in motion and, therefore, wouldn't get dizzy. The set featured the debut of a reworked version of Crystal Ball (premiered in the Triscuits days) as well as the first Pygmy Twylyte since Marc's return. Vassillios dipped deep into a dark Akira-like territory before building up into a dizzying Humuhumunukunukuapua'a that matched the epic peaks of the first set.

As the band came out for the encore, they noticed that two of the giant string-pattern backdrops that hang behind them had fallen during the set (apparently during Vassillios) coming about six inches from Altman's head and landing on crew member Eric Bernstein, who was sent to the hospital for stitches. The encore - an extended seguefest featuring I-Man > Widow In The Moon > I-Man > Pat and Dex > Devil's Waltz - was a bit tired-sounding, but still got the job done -- the Widow being the first bust-out of the tune since the Triscuits gigs, and the Dex > Waltz completing the other halves of the tune begun in Seattle. Soon, we were on the road.

The sun rose gradually. Everything in front of the car was an inky, unwavering black. Soon, a line began to distinguish itself. It took on more form, and soon a horizon was perceptible, though the areas above and below were still featureless. Gradually, the sky began to separate itself and clouds became visible. Sun crept around them in a wash of orange and pink. The roadside became visible and we were in the hills. I pulled over at a scenic overlook, handed the keys off, and crawled into the berth.

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