About A Train

Long Island Railroad
Heading towards Northport, New York

Strange how far a day can take somebody if he's willing to ride it. Me, I'm willin' to go far. What little daylight I saw was spent, save for an hour-long trip to Denny's, crouched behind a beat-up curtain in an over-populated hotel room. The room itself represented a slow and gentle build to life from about noon onwards. One by one, people in the beds rose and were replaced by others whose batteries had been a little extra charged the night before. Right up until showtime, there was always at least one person in some varying state of sleep. The penultimate effect was that things never got too out of hand.

The entire hotel had gone slightly mad with rock and roll fantasies of yore. Calling someone else a "rock star" can be a pretty high compliment these days, and people are doing their best to earn the title. Something about the Disco Biscuits seems to fuel these efforts, sometimes to detrimental effects, but mostly just to body-wracking wackiness. If Kesey and the Pranksters were writing and starring in their own movies (or simply the Movie, as it were), then Biscuits kids seem to be writing and starring in their own perpetual episode of Behind The Music. And, anyway, everybody was very polite to the hotel staff, who seemed pleased as punch that these weird looking people were being so friendly.

One room of tapers - known affectionately as Geek Central or, simply, the War Room - compared something like a half a dozen different tapes of the show from the night before, eventually sending the best source through a PC and down onto disc. CD burners were plugged in, DAT decks strung together, countless pizzas were ordered, and eventually copies of the show started trickling about the place. This was Camp Bisco for the winter-time -- people hanging out, moving casually from group of friends to group of friends over the course of the day until it was time for the show.

Back to the barn we went, filling the place up smoothly until showtime, just another locale to hang out in until, golly, the band was on stage launching into an absolutely mammoth version of the Overture, the opening number from Jon Gutwillig's "the Hot Air Balloon" rock opera. A thought that struck me during the show is that, on some levels it's pretty ridiculous to analyze the Disco Biscuits to death. But, on the other hand, they're a band that plays rock operas (and excerpts from) without a trace of irony. No, they aspire to high art and who in their right mind is going to deny them that pleasure?

On the other hand, there are times when the music defies extrapolation, and that's what makes all the analysis worth it... if that makes any sense at all. Hell's bells, why go to the trouble if there weren't moments where the band could somehow spin it such that there's no trouble at all? A moment like that occurred in the pause between the Overture and Once The Fiddler Paid. The two are the first two songs from the "the Hot Air Balloon" -- and though they don't segue into each other, the ending of the Overture compliments the beginning of Fiddler so well that it creates something of a higher order. It's not accidental.

The improvisation over the course of the first two nights was a good beginning for the run -- the opening statements in some master culmination of the year (or the fall tour, to be more precise) which will likely come to its penultimate conclusion in Worcester with some sort of metaphorical neon arrow aimed directly at the heart of the next step; the conclusion of one theorem leading to the foundation on which the next will be based. Musically, the shows contained a dab of each primary color in the band's recent sonic palette - twistingly psychedelic lyrical improvisations, haunting deep-thump explorations, and cresting affirmations - without ever sounding jumbled... most of the time.

The night was marked by a handful of debuts. In the first set, coming out the classically driven House Dog Party Favor, was a trial run-through of the second movement of Beethoven's 9th symphony. Not played with enough conviction to be pretentious, the band improvised somewhat tentatively and hesitantly on classical subjects, which have been mostly absent - though not without influence - since the disappearance of the Thieving Magpie at the end of last year.

Triumph and Home - a pair of tunes which premiered at Marc's Maui Project show in April - made their first Biscuits appearances, paired together in the second set, coming off as mostly effective before sliding into the end of the Beethoven piece. Both have the potential to act as slightly more elegant counterparts to another pair of Marc songs debuted by the Biscuits this fall: Floodlights and Home Again, respectively.

Of particular note at the show were lighting designer Matt Iarrobino's contributions. Introducing a couple of new lighting ideas into his own rotation - namely a series of cubes manipulated into M.C. Escher-like contortions, and a sequence of expanding and shrinking spotlights - Matty's work, at times, became almost lyrical in a way that matched the best of the band's jamming. In particular, his work during the second set opening pair of Grass Is Green and Crickets was quite spectacular. Both jams featured mellifluous almost narrative-like deviations, with as much range as some of the brighter moments of the "Akira" set from last New Year's.

After the show, heads slipped back into the cold. Some bolted right back to the hotel. We headed for New York. Outside, the sky is eerily tranquil and extraordinarily clear. One can see golden smoke billowing out of the LILCO smokestacks, framed against the sunrise, several miles off in the distance. Is this the calm before the storm? At this point, I don't give a shit. I'm going to sleep.

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