On Saturday, I jump in immediately for you. I’ve got a lot to cover and not a lot of patience to think it through before I write.
Perry Ferrell was the singer for the band Jane’s Addiction. He also invented this amalgamation of musical weirdness in the first place some 15 odd years ago. Needless to say I had a bit of a high opinion of the man. He introduced the Wolfmother as a band that “is the way rock was, the way rock is, the way rock always will be.” They proved well enough musically: Pushed hard, loud, simple, lyrics that only failed to make sense if you thought about them, and (the height of impressiveness) a bassist who could swing his guitar to the back and bash the keyboard at a moment’s notice. Nothing as smooth as multitasking.
The real shock I realized as I was watching them was that they’re 20. They still are 20 as you’re reading this. They might have been 20 when I saw them at Lollapalooza. Why does that matter? What does that mean? I thought about not being old enough to get a hotel room, buy a beer, or rent a car, but still having 3,000 complete strangers to do your bidding. I thought about what Farrell said about Wolfmother being the way rock was, is, and always will be. I realized that I was looking at either stone-cold geniuses in 5 years, or strung out coke addicts foaming acid from their mouths after the brain-paralyzing drug flood to their cortex on the cold floor of an Oklahoma whorehouse. I realized I was on the cusp of a new beginning. These boys had the greatest opportunity to travel to the edge and back, make all the bad decisions of a rock star, and we would be there to see if they came out from it all. We might laugh if they end up a pants-shitter on an MTV nostalgia, another corpse from the media holocaust. Maybe. But I always feel worse when someone fails at being a god. I always hope no matter how bad things get a human being can still come back and save themselves. How close to the line would these minors tread, and would they pull back just before the fall, or be lost along with everything they learned to share with us, in the last dark plummet for The Search?
Next, on to tits and funk. Objective journalist. Fuck off.
The show was Gnarls Barkley. And by show, it is a show, put on to the best of the talents of everyone involved. I had heard that in a show elsewhere in Chicago not two nights prior, the entire band had dressed up as restaurant chefs and passed out hamburgers for the entire front row. The rumor I heard was that every live performance had a different theme, with the band entire dressed in different outfits every time. Apparently today was Anyone For Tennis. White uniforms, sweat bands and rackets.
What you need to know about Gnarls Barkley is that it’s comprised of a pair of musical composers who already have a well-built personal artistic record on their own. Cee-Lo Green has the most beautiful voice I’ve ever heard in rap music, and Danger Mouse is some kind of solid genius who does what geniuses are usually known for: brining two disparate things together in such a way that you could never believe anyone hadn’t already done it before. Look for his Grey Album (Beatle’s White Album music with Jay-Z’s Black Album rapping) or Demon Days by the Gorillaz for an idea what the hell I’m talking about. The important part is the part that it has to do with me: In the history of art, there are rare occurrences of a purity raising out of the actual act of creating art around it. What I mean, is that for any artist to maintain their sanity, they sometimes makes something for the exact reason that they don’t have to follow any rules for it. The act of literally working past the point of sanity to master your craft leads to such a massive left-field run that this mental exercise for the very point of pointlessness ends up being amazing beyond anything humans have ever heard or seen before. FLCL, Don Quixote, Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas, and more classical music than you can guess all fall into this category. This is the shine that falls on Gnarls Barkley. It’s the stupidest, goofiest crap you can see, and if you can think of something weirder, they’d take you up on that suggestion. The music is not like anything I can think of. Not in its mastery. Just in pure for-better-or-worse originality. And it had the taste of a one-off album. If this doesn’t last forever, that would be the best part, mostly because I know I had seen it. It was also the first concert I’d ever seen women flash the stage on request. But the crime was that once the band played their radio hit, 2/3rds of the crowd dispersed, even with 20 minutes of the show left. Full frontal nudity is no crime compared to the hanging-right felony of leaving a show early because you have shitty musical tastes. Your presence fouls the air. Don’t come to My Shows.
We decided the best plan for Sunday would be to leave the grounds now, since we had an epic quest on our hands for tomorrow, and we wanted to leave nothing to risk the chance that we would miss anything. The day after this would be the ultimate test. Endurance would have to be reserved. Plus, my neck felt like is was about to detach due the 15 hours in the past two days that I had been head-banging at top speed with somewhere around 9 pounds of sweated-wet hair on my head at all times. Tomorrow would be The Arena. We needed proper sustenance.
We retreated to the Lower Depths of the Main Street of Chicago and found Billy Goat’s Hamburger Pit. The most famous burgers in the world, living in the dankest possible Metropolitan Shit Corner one could fit food. We discussed the Next Day, and random thoughts we’d had in the past two days, which mostly entailed quiet heckling with ourselves to the bands that had a tendency to keep getting in our way while we waited for the real Gente con Talento. I tried to convince Bishara to request “Summer of ‘69” from Ryan Adams, but he wouldn’t take the offer. Anyone who does likewise should know that the man will have you ejected from his shows for requesting the tune, since the writer of that little nugget is Bryan Adams, a silly Canuck who Silent-B doesn’t realize is actually just as bad as he is, and so should be so honored to be asked to cover a song of one of the early progenitors of terrible white 90’s music. I have visions of Jack Johnson and Dave Mathews battling on epic proportions against the Adamses and John Cougar-Mellencamp-Forest Rabbit-Drive Thru. An elimination of beasts with sinews and guitar strings in the full moon spilling blood that would magically spring acres of corn miles high to feed the world—THAT is how white they are.
We talked about our collective let down in our peers, how the larger compendium of audience are fucking tourists with nothing more than a passing interest in what they’ve all spent $300 on. Things like that make me feel better about single-handedly going into $6,000 credit card debt in a year and a half. At least I understood how important it all was, and my days would never be the same as the tomorrow that followed them. I even blew another $140 that I didn’t have at the Virgin Megastore across the street for CDs and books. And in a typical form, I also saw another writer for a local Chicago newspaper at the My Morning Jacket show. I looked over her shoulder and saw notes about people with frisbees, footballs, and babies. She stayed at MMJ for all of five minutes. The Killing of the scene was the fact that she was able to get even closer than I was. IN FRONT of the steel barricade, because I was just a lowly fan, but this woman was apparently respectable enough to have the front view, since management knew she wouldn’t be willing to put her life on the line for the sake of hoping she can force a heart-attack to kill her at just the right climax of a solo like I do. “Don’t make a scene, now. Jesus is watching.”
The Point of our trip would be performing tomorrow. The real reason we paid this money and drove this distance. Bishara and I both knew we had actually been sitting through 2 days of opening bands. Imagine a band that you would go on a hunger strike for three days and then burn a forest down with a flame-thrower for shits and giggles. A strange image, but the only way I can begin to explain how much we love this band. Anything someone can enjoy on such a large mental quirk as being a faithfully starving pyromaniac.
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