Analyze This

The Lobby, Airport Lodge and Suites
Reading, Pennsylvania

This morning, I woke up twitching, back spasming in time with the vibration of the room. Trains rushed by intermittently. I'm sure there was a pattern in the chaos, but nothing I was able to discern. The smell of Wetlands lingered on my hands and on my clothing, legs tight in a morning-after curl. My brain, however, didn't work. The night before, Lake Trout had played an incendiary two-hour set, culminating with a flute-driven reading of Black Sabbath's War Pigs that took the bulk of the highly frazzled crowd by surprise.

As I peeled myself vertically off the floor, fragments of the night hovered like bits of a lucid dream. Now, some 14 hours later, I sit in the deserted lobby of an invaded hotel in Reading, Pennsylvania. Occasionally, heads wander through, conversing chirpily with Julie the night manager, who seems greatly amused by this seemingly random influx of smiling faces. The television in the lobby is flickering blandly, jammed onto "Analyze This", as people stumble by, trying to patch together small stereos to keep music humming until sunrise, now only three hours away. Rock and roll. Rock and roll.

The opening night of the Disco Biscuits' year-end run began tonight at an old barn about 50 yards away from the lobby. The hotel has subsequently been taken over by the band, crew, and surrounding army. Assessments of the evening's performance have ranged from mellow head nods to frothing at the mouth pronouncements declaring it one of the best gigs ever. This, of course, is standard fare. The show itself was pretty darn tootin' good, though, there's no denying that.

The set opening Pygmy Twylyte > inverted Above The Waves > Dance Of The Sugar Plum Fairies was - in some ways - like few of the other jams of the night. It may have been the best, though that's a somewhat useless term. The music was reminiscent of the coiled and tumbling excursions the band headed out on in 1999, Aron Magner's keyboards and Jon Gutwillig's guitar entwined such that it was damn near impossible to tell them apart. As the jam wound down into the somewhat expected Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairies it spiraled through a number of distinct spaces. While Sam Altman has pretty much abandoned his e-drums, at least in the live setting, he has managed to elicit similarly other-wordly sounds by fleetfully attacking the sides of his drums. This approach drove many of the jams.

Most of the segues, though, were not as smooth. During the fall, a lot of jams wound down into nothingness and then back up into structure with segues. Tonight, though, most of the segues were smooth, though hugely abrupt -- a downshift followed by an acceleration. Done right, the impact can be huge. Done wrong, the impact is cheap. In the first set Svenghali exploded effectively into Hot Air Balloon. In the second set, though, the drop into Run Like Hell was cheap: the band suddenly started into a charge and, moments later, were in the thick of the intro. They didn't earn it. The first jam continued in this vain. The second jam, though, twisted neatly into the Shimmy ending and, eventually, into the tail of Hot Air Balloon -- which featured a nice harmonic jam at the beginning of the composed section.

 Also of note was the return of Haleakala Crater, a lilting Barber piece dormant since the end of fall tour '99. Though the song is entirely structured, with an improvisation tacked on it could serve as a more tranquil exploration of the same musical territory as Marc Brownstein's "Maui Project" songs (all of which were oddly absent last night, as were all of Brownstein's songs, for that matter). While the band still can't sing it, the song is absolutely beautiful.

Back in the room, people began deconstructing the show. The machine rolled into action, burning CDs, figuring out which tapes sounded the best... Julie watched on with great confusion, eventually changing "Analyze This" to the country music station and bucking up for the final stretch 'til dawn.

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