A Celebration Of Specialness

Apartment 2-L
Brooklyn, New York

"Gosh, I love this song," Tommy gushed as the staccato rhythms of Found A Job ricocheted through the car. "This whole album even. I think this might be my favorite Heads album." Tommy and I go through favorite Talking Heads albums like... well, like some metaphor that involves a high degree of frequency.

We were playing a variation on Songs That Rock, a kind of Albums That Rock situation: we had a vast slab of time on our hands during the drive from Ohio to New York. We skilled albums like statements on a broad and evolutionary mix tape: one triggered the next and the atmosphere triggered all. Beginning with "More Songs About Buildings and Food", we made our way through Soul Coughing, Mojave 3, Tricky, and others before we crossed the George Washington Bridge into Manhattan.

Suddenly, Beck seemed appropriate -- "One Foot In The Grave", in specific. Beck has always dealt with urban decay well, and as we drove down the Henry Hudson Parkway towards Canal Street, it fit perfectly. The sun was setting over New Jersey, the clouds a strange chemical tint. Around us, layers of renewal and deterioration gave the surroundings an organic form. New York has its own look, dated and modern at the same time. No matter what happens to the city, it can never be quite modernized for the jagged layers of history that jut through. Just before the turn onto Canal, we passed a row of fairly recent looking buildings with an old, tiny house jammed in the middle.

My fear of driving in the city evaporated as I piloted the car down Canal Street. Tommy and I rolled down the windows and inhaled the soft smell of peanuts on a Friday night in what may or may not be the happeningist place on Earth. We shot through, skirting the edges of Chinatown, and over into Brooklyn, where we stationed the car and moved with all quickness to the Brooklyn Academy of Music. We grabbed food to go from a falafel stand and headed into the lobby, where we rendezvoused with friends. Our ticketless companion was miraculously rewarded with an extra thanks to a ticket machine functioning with a higher sense of cosmic justice.

The event was a rare screening of "True Stories" - former Talking Heads leader David Byrne's 1986 film - followed by a question and answer session with Byrne himself. As I fumbled with my backpack on the way into the theater, trying to inconspicuously shove my chicken kabob into a hidden pouch, I nearly ran over film critic Roger Ebert who - apparently - was hosting the event. As the lights went down in the theater, I slipped my food out and wrapped it in a pita, suddenly feeling very cultured to be in Brooklyn, eating a greasy approximation of Middle Eastern, and watching "True Stories" -- the subject of a paper written in a babbling haze for a literary theory class last semester.

The film is a sketch of the fictional Virgil, Texas, celebrating their sesquicentennial. Guided by Byrne's anonymous narrator, we glimpse into the lives of a dozen or so characters that work for VariCorp, an early player in the silicon revolution. It's interesting to note that the setting could be the set-up for a serious look into the effect of a changing industry on a populous, though the way Byrne tells the story is extremely low stakes. People's lives continue on with absolutely minimal drama, stuck in routines that neither seem boring nor ridiculous. Byrne does it with such an affectionate irony that one almost longs for Texas.

The civic leaders declared their sesquicentennial a "celebration of specialness". And it is, to a degree. The film's laid back tone sets the stage for explorations of industrial beauty - giant pre-fabricated warehouses proving the success of modern architect's function-over-form programs, blue skies of boundlessly complex depths, freeway loops as the "cathedrals of our time", and other things - as well as a series of characters as striking as the hardened landscape. Low stakes beauty was, and is, the key.

After the film, Byrne wandered down to the stage, dressed in a weird approximation of a military uniform -- a camouflage dress suit. His now gray hair, cropped and spiked, sat above his slightly melted face, no longer as naturally expressionless as it was in the original film. As Ebert questioned him, leading the witness to some degree, Byrne shifted hyperactively in his seat, tossing the wireless microphone from hand to hand, head twisting and eyes darting around the room. Occasionally stumbling on words and revising mid-sentence, Byrne discussed the immediate impact of the film, and quite little about its creative origin.

Hopping into a cab, I sped through the Brooklyn night, cutting across the Manhattan Bridge into the belly of the city and, briefly, back onto Canal Street. As I rode, I wrote in my notebook, city lights around me illuminating the interior of the taxi as if it were day time. I stayed well within the lines of the page as shadows from flickering marquees and neon signs danced around the pen tip. I found myself in front of Roseland Ballroom, a handful of people huddled in front. I waded into the swarming mass of setbreak and stripped down to a tee-shirt in the oppressive crush. Stopping by the front corner of the soundboard, I caught up with a friend until the Trey Anastasio Band took the stage for their second set.

Opening with what I assume was a cover tune from the '50s, the music was - as with "True Stories" - decidedly low stakes. It may be the comparison of an uninformed hack journalist, but the music did key into the same mellow spirit as the Jerry Garcia Band (or, at the very least, what I get out of the latter, never having seen them). The songs, utterly straight-forward, were a celebration of specialness in that they weren't special at all but, rather, imbued with something occasionally extraordinary as the pressures of serious transcendence were put aside.

With the exception of a brief appearance of the Missionary Sisters' Don't You Wanna Go in setlists circa 1995, and an occasional AC/DC Bag ("let's get this show on the road..."), Phish has never really been about verbally riling up the crowd, either as show openers or midway through. There are no band-led cheers and the music is generally only self-referential in oblique ways. With the Trey Band, though, that rule was left behind continuously, with covers like Bob Marley's Mellow Mood ("I'll play your favorite song..."), Bob Dylan's Rainy Day Women #12 and 35, and others.

I missed the first set, so I didn't get to hear too many of the new material (hopefully, they'll be played in Cleveland), but what I heard excites me greatly. A new complexity is creeping back into Anastasio's music, informed by the pleasures of the pop song. Of the two songs I heard that had to have been originals (there was a reggae tune in the set that I was unsure of), both took ideas honed in the previous year to a slightly more evolved place. An acoustic instrumental, possibly titled Waves, seemed like a bluesy extension of the finger-picked Josie Wales, several interlocking melodies finger-picked and turning in and out of each other.

The other style grew out of the kind of songs refined on the first Trey solo tour -- namely the batch of arena-funk that ended up as a primary vein on "Farmhouse" (such as Gotta Jibboo, First Tube, Sand, and others). The use of the horns added greatly to this, particularly during the Sand jam in the second set. As a musician, bassist Tony Markellis can hold down a fuck of a groove -- often playing lines that repeat with little variation through a jam. On the power trio tour of spring 1999, this left Anastasio as the only melodic instrument in the mix. Though he colored his playing with a variety of looping pedals and keyboard sounds, the effect was still somewhat monophonic.

The horns added a middle ground between Markellis and Anastasio, playing synchronized melodic parts that, by virtue of their synchronicity, became rhythmic. Over the course of the 20+ minute Sand jam, the horn section (comprised of Giant Country Horns veteran Dave "the Truth" Grippo on saxophone, Jennifer Hartswick on trumpet, and Andy Moroz on trombone) played a series of fills and chords. I wasn't close enough to the stage to see how they were working together, but it was well possible that they were using hand gestures to signal specific parts.

Following Waves, Trey called one Page McConnell to the stage, the first appearance of two members of Phish together since the hiatus began in October. Page played Trey's keyboard. During First Tube, he added blurping textures that, I imagine, were exactly the type of thing Trey was trying to do with his keyboard all along. The band grooved so effortlessly that the build to the song's peak was subtle and understated in a way Phish's renditions never were. First Tube belongs to the Trey Band.

The encore, also with McConnell, began with a new instrumental. The song was clearly in the same vein as First Tube, though stepped a notch in rhythmic complexity. Though the song was probably in 4/4 (I didn't count it out), weird accents gave the song a sense of jerky fluidity. McConnell switched the keyboard to use a kitschy sounding organ tone for a solo which would've been impressive on a real Hammond. Following a burning run-through of Billy Preston's Circles - another Trey Band-originated tune that never quite made it in the Phish repertoire - the band took their bows and we filtered out into the street.

Across the street from Roseland is the formerly ultra-hip Max's Kansas City, home of the Velvet Underground's last stand during the summer of 1970. I walked past it, towards the subway, singing Heroin and got a strange look from a man in leather pants about to enter the bar.

And down to the Wetlands for a night-cap with Rana. Holed up in the lounge, Rana played rock and roll, straight-up, with absolutely no apologies. With pooched lips and vaguely ironic smiles, the band blazed through three sets. The music is as pure as one can get -- none of those miserable deviations into bluegrass, world beat, or classical that bands execute when they suddenly decide they are embarrassed to be rock musicians. Guitarist Mr. Metzger effortlessly tossed off some of the most exciting guitar solos that I've heard in a long time in a world where the solo is decidedly unhip. Rana are, quite simply, great.

As I sat in the hall towards the end of the band's first set, talking to a friend, I started tapping along with a familiar rhythm. I figured it was a generic rock rhythm and kept on with the conversation. Pretty soon, though, I started singing words along with the rhythm. "Judy's in the bedroom, inventing situations..." No. It couldn't be. I scrambled back into the lounge. Sure enough, Rana was playing Found A Job, off of "More Songs About Buildings and Food" -- a perfectly circular cap to a long day. I drained my Euro-Flaco and went back to darkest Brooklyn, where I slumped onto a love seat three quarters my size, legs bent at the knees and dangling over the edge as I spun into sleep.

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