The Chemical Warfare Brigade

83 Highland Avenue
Northport, New York

Snow.

It's some shit.

It started an hour or so before dawn, as the party at my house was winding down. Outside, everything was covered in a light blanket which - if such a thing is possible - gave the impression that it was merely a base for another few inches. The unplowed street resembled a blank canvas. By morning - which is to say by mid-afternoon, when we woke up - the accumulation was greater, turning objects into indistinct shapes. Inside, we assessed the situation and decided the Biscuits should just stay one more night at the Vanderbilt. It wasn't to happen.

All afternoon, plows kept my street clear, unfortunately piling the snow high on the cars parked along the side. A little before sunset, we set out to clear the cars off. Cleaning them felt like chipping away at a great block of stone to reveal a piece of sculpture existing innately within it. "I envision a... MUSTANG!" I cried. And, lo, there was a white Mustang (rented, mind you), replete with spoiler and other fancy gadgetry, waiting under the snow. The pit team pushed it out and the first group was off.

Walking through the door of the Vanderbilt, we were handed programs. "PLAYBALL" they read at the top. Below was an illustration with a title above: "THE CHEMICAL WARFARE BRIGADE". It was finally happening. It was bound to: the premiere of the Disco Biscuits' second rock opera: Marc Brownstein's "the Chemical Warfare Brigade", played by the side-project Electron over the summer at the Trocadero in Philadelphia in slightly rougher form. The program recounted the story and provided character sketches.

When the band opened with Story Of The World, it was obvious that the rock opera would come in the second set, which imbued the first set with a weird sense of expectation. The Story and the Bazaar Escape that followed were both quite good, though I was hoping for a jam in the Bazaar like the recent Trocadero version from Thanksgiving weekend. Basis For A Day is usually a good gauge of where the band is at. This stand-alone version - a rarity in itself - was no exception, swirling effervescently like gently tumbling snow, into a gorgeous jam.

After the setbreak, with little fanfare, the band launched into Plan B, the opening number of "the Chemical Warfare Brigade". And they were off. In their two rock operas - the CWB along with Jon Gutwillig's "Hot Air Balloon" (premiered on New Year's Eve 1998) - the Disco Biscuits have hit on a form for the narrative musical that seems almost perfect, combining elements in most functional way.

From the musical, they take the idea of catchy melodies that forward a story. From opera they take the grandiose scale (as well as the narrative concept). Most importantly, though, the whole thing is shot through with improvisation, which fills in the colors of the story. There is something disingenious about the kind of story-telling that takes place in typical Broadway fare: the structure and staging are so rigid that the story is robbed of any natural flow it might have, leaving it to exist only in one form.

The improvisation allows the band to give each song its own emotional quality. One run through of a suite can theoretically be bright and happy while the next can be dark and evil. In theory, anyway. Most importantly, though, some of the pomposity of calling something a "rock opera" disappears with the improvisation. Good improvisation is transparently unconscious on the part of the musicians. As such, it's awfully hard to bullshit one's way through a form that, in theory, is channeled directly from the human spirit. Where Broadway actors and actresses are paid to emulate moods, improvisation can deliver those moods directly to the brains of the audience.

In a similar way, the idea of structuring a rock opera in the form of a set of Disco Biscuits' music is somewhat forced. A good set - though usually pretty planned out, so far as song selections go - has a spontaneous feel to it, some kind of inherently unstated structure that speaks for itself; an abstract story. For the most part, then, the "Chemical Warfare Brigade" set seemed to lack the purposeful emotional drive that a lot of Biscuits' excursions do. What the set lost in flow it gained in a unified coherence.

The structure of "the Chemical Warfare Brigade" naturally lends itself to segues, though the band only executed one (Floodlights > Shelby Rose). Taking place mostly as a flashback in the head of Dr. Edwin von Stadt as he is chased through the woods, a stream of songs mirroring the thought pattern of the Doctor might be cool in a future rendition.

The songs were executed quite nimbly. With "the Hot Air Balloon", most of the songs were debuted over the several month period before the launch. In the case of "the Chemical Warfare Brigade", half of the songs have been in the band's repertoire since summer 1999 (Plan B, Little Lai, Chemical Warfare Brigade, and Three Wishes) while most of the others were allowed to gestate peacefully over the course of the fall tour. Only one - the Ladies Were the Rest of the Night - was debuted at the show. All of this lent a certain maturity to the improvisations.

And all of this on December 30th, the day before New Year's Eve. Expectations run high for tomorrow night's show. After the "Hot Air Balloon" debut in 1998 and the infamous "Akira" score in 1999, people have high hopes. In a way, this was only bolstered by tonight's rendition of "the Chemical Warfare Brigade". After all, if the band debuted a new rock opera on the 30th, what could they possibly have in store for Worcester?

We'll know soon enough.

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