9/24/25
This writing at the moment inspired by a relisten of the Brian Eno/John Cale album, “Wrong Way Up,” which also incidentally has some of the awesomest album art of all time. Not a no skip album for me, but some good ones.
The first song goes:
“I am the wheel / I am the turning / and I will lay my love around you.”
“I am the will / I am the burning / and I will lay my love around you.”
With strings!! Music is so awesome.
I have been lucky to see some really awesome live music this year. Live music, I always manage to forget and then remember and then forget and then remember, is one of the great joys of being alive on earth. To me. There’s nothing that makes me feel closer to humanity and to whatever God is than music played loud out loud by people. Even if they are not that good at it it is awesome, but it is especially lucky when it is good.
Some noteworthy shows so far:
Pinback: I love this band. I already loved this band but seeing them live was especially awesome because they’re so freaking good at it, their music is hard to play but they make it look easy, why are they singing such complex melodies and harmonies? Rob Crow is weird as hell obviously and I regretted not seeing his solo show earlier in the year. Hopefully he’ll come back. I don’t remember if it was me or Isaiah who said it originally, but we agreed that they were somehow.. soulful? (As compared, unfortunately, to J. Mascis who, when I saw Dinosaur Jr., couldn’t even be bothered to screw up his eyes when he did that wail. I think he should have to twist his face up a little bit to make a sound like that, and the fact that he didn’t made it all seem a little false.) Anyway, Pinback was one of the best shows I have ever seen.
WITCH: Is a Zamrock band that got big in the 70s after the Zambian revolution. Zamrock is basically psych rock with African rhythms and influences and it is so awesome. WITCH was a random ticket buy and was easily one of the best shows I’ve ever seen. The frontman, Emanuel “Jagari” Chanda, was incredibly charming, eating fruit on stage the whole time, pulling grapes out of his pockets, throwing them into the air and catching them in his mouth, peeling and eating half a banana at a time. I read later that his stage name, “Jagari,” is either because people compared him to Mick Jagger, or because he was obsessed with Mick Jagger, depending on what you read, but either way it shows. This is one of the only shows I’ve seen where stage presence feels like a relevant thing to mention, mostly because this man had a presence that was palpable, almost mystical, almost like a religious leader.
It’s crazy because WITCH got big in the 70s when most of their members were in, I think, their mid-late teens, and then pretty soon after the economy crashed and Zambia was hit particularly hard by the AIDs epidemic and it basically ceased to be a place where you could have a successful rock band, so they mostly disappeared. Their record was re-released randomly in the states in 2012 and that’s when they started touring internationally, almost 30 years later. Also, I am a bad instrument hearer so I didn’t notice until Isaiah said something, but once I noticed the guitar player was without a doubt the best I’ve ever seen in real life (this means relatively little from me, but more coming from Isaiah, who said it too. And I’m NOT just saying it cuz he is).
Pedro the Lion: It was a Grandaddy show technically, but we were there to see Pedro the Lion. We stayed for half-ish of Grandaddy and they were very good (I never realized that they are essentially The Flaming Lips?), but we were there to see Pedro the Lion!! This show was not what I expected it to be, mostly because I had mostly listened to two very old albums and he is still writing and releasing music. Usually I’m sort of a brat about this kind of thing and can’t really get into a show if they’re not playing anything I know very well (this happened earlier this year with Gillian Welch, to my dismay), but in this case I was a good sport, due mostly to the fact that holy shit that guy can sing. You always hope a guy who sings can sing, but sometimes they kind of can’t, or they can but kind of just ok, or the version on the album was the best take by a lot, etc. But not so with David Bazan!! He has a powerful, clear voice.
The albums of his I know best are It’s Hard to Find a Friend and Control which are, in so many words, emotionally sick–that’s what I love about them–so that’s sort of what I was expecting from the set. But I had forgotten that the new stuff isn’t like that at all, and maybe they were also doing something more upbeat to cater to the Grandaddy crowd, I don’t know. But either way, I was expecting to leave feeling like I had been punched in the gut and it was actually quite a bit more friendly feeling. Not chipper exactly, but the neurotic-depressive alt rock version of that, maybe. Bazan was weird on stage in a way that I liked, especially when he started to make a joke that he stopped himself from making by saying, “my unconscious will thank me for not saying this later,” almost said it anyway, and was only stopped by his bandmate slowly shaking his head at him.
(OMG I’m still listening to this Eno/Cale album and this song, “The River,” sounds like the precursor to every bad Devendra Banhart indie you’ve ever heard. Mistake!!) (As a disclaimer, I will sometimes be a shithead on this blog about my taste in things. It is fine if you disagree, and I’m not here to hurt any feelings, but I have a lot of opinions that are somewhat abrasive and I cannot apologize for it. Not on my blog. If you want to make yourself feel better by noticing a grammatical error or just thinking my writing is bad that’s totally fine too, I encourage it! Just don’t raise your taste related issues with me. Or do. Maybe I’d like to talk or think about them.)
We went on a ticket buying spree a few weeks ago (in which some of these shows were included) because there were a bunch of shows I wanted to see and we know we won’t go unless we’ve already bought the tickets, so coming up Isaiah and I are seeing Autechre, Sean Nicholas Savage, Drop Nineteens & Ee (this is a weirdly stacked bill, bunch of other bands I can’t remember, I’m scared I bought a ticket to a festival or something but it wasn’t that expensive and I haven’t looked into it), and Cap’n Jazz & Rainier Maria. Will report again later if any of these are worth reporting on.
Anyway, music is awesome, that’s the general point. Go see more live music if you like it. I’m suddenly remembering my friends Ellie and Dan talking about how they don’t like to see music live, their backs hurt while standing, Dan saying “what–I want to see them play the songs I like differently than the way I like them?”