Huntington Townhouse Blues

83 Highland Avenue
Northport, New York

In autumn of 1992, I was a fledgling politico, wide-eyed and excited to the idea of the electoral process. My grandfather took me to a Democratic fundraiser headlined by Al Gore at the Huntington Townhouse, an all-purpose event center designed around some perverse attempt at style that came off more tacky than could be possibly imagined. Midway through Gore's speech, without a warning, a group of men playing bagpipes burst into the room. It was never clear whether or not they knew they were entering a room with a Democratic fundraiser going on.

In any case, they marched towards the front of the room, playing their bagpipes. Gore, not missing a beat, began clapping along and leading the crowd. Secret service agents scrambled to figure out whether these Scottish men could possibly be a team of trained assassins. About halfway to the front of the room, they abruptly turned and exited from whence they came. It was probably the wrong room. The Huntington Townhouse is like that: all sorts of rooms with different events going on in each.

The Vanderbilt - in Plainview, New York - where the Disco Biscuits began a two night stand last night, is not entirely unlike that. The mutant child of Radio City Music Hall-style classy deco and Long Island tastelessness, the music and band seemed almost lost in the room, unable to find a psychic foothold in the plastic castle. There was just something off about the character of the place. It felt like the nightclub room in baroque social center for weddings, brisses, fundraisers, proms, high school reunions, and any other gathering with an eye for ritual formality.

Part of the trouble, I think, is that there was an abnormally large amount of ambient lighting in the room -- Christmas lights strung along the front of the balcony and such. It was like the band had a hard time getting the room to surrender to the music which was, for the most part, pretty tight. The Morph Dusseldorf opener was respectable, though not ground-breaking. A melodic Very Moon with a still relatively new jam inserted in the first section of the song led into a nice reading of Hope which, in turn, built into a cresting, crashing jam which landed the band in the second verse of M.E.M.P.H.I.S..

As the band thundered into the vocals, the crowd went appropriately beserker. If nothing else has become obvious over the course of the past three shows, it's that the Disco Biscuits have an absurdly dedicated fanbase, much larger than I might've anticipated coming into the run, cheering entries into songs the band introduced earlier in the fall. After the second verse, the band twisted gently and went into the introduction to the song. At first, I had a hard time grasping the necessity of an inverted M.E.M.P.H.I.S. -- why bother, the song's structure is pretty much exactly the same in the beginning as it is in the end.

When the band moved into the jam, though, I realized the point: the first jam. Just as different composed sections in songs can have specific characters, so can jams that lie in certain parts of tunes. For example, the first jam in M.E.M.P.H.I.S., or the second jam in I-Man, played in the middle of the second set. For example, in the latter case, the first jam built in an almost predictable fashion - rock-style - while the second jam was built on some almost analog textures that felt like they should've been laid down on a Fender Rhodes keyboard.

The second set began with an almost perfect Aceetobee -- again, not ground-breaking, but still pretty wonderful. After a bit, the jam settled into the intro to Aron Magner's Spaga. The band's reading of the song was note-perfect. Magner's vocals were - while laced with ostentatious vibrato fit just exactly for the Vanderbilt (or the Huntington Townhouse, for that matter) and cheesy as hell - were actually surprisingly in tune... a harbinger of what was to come as JamBands.com writer and webmistress Erica Lynn Gruenberg joined the band on vocals for the Spaga ending, Home Again (Erica Lynn is a Plainview native), and I-Man. Gruenberg's vocals added a touch o' Long Island class to the arrangements, though in places they drowned out the lead vocalist. And she was real shiny.

More, though, I think she shamed Magner into singing tastefully during the Wet encore. Normally given to Liberace-like stylings, Magner seemed almost subdued during this version, almost afraid to show off. It was a nice twist after such an Long Island-style show.

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