I was hoping rock and roll could save me last night.
I was not let down.
When my head is exhausting me and my heart is full, I drag my ass to a show and it's like being baptized. If the music has enough movement, I'm carried away, out of my brain that spins in its manic little circles. I'm drawn out. The volume quiets me.
Last week I planned on going to see Longwave play at TT the Bear's. While talking to a friend who was planning on going to see a different band that night, we discovered that they were playing the same venue. The band he was going to see was opening up for the band I was going to see. So we went to see them both.
Longwave had an awful lot of pomp and circumstance for four kids playing to a small crowd at a scrappy venue. The lead singer thought he was Peter Murphy with a red afro, but after hitting his head on the ceiling while attempting to leap meolodramatically off the drum kit, he wished he had an ounce of Murphy's cool. Following 20 minutes of violently generated feedback, the guitar player broke a few strings, unstrapped, and beat the vintage Vox stack with his gorgeous Les Paul for absolutely no good reason. Then he ran away. The rest of the band exited the stage petulantly after their half hour set, stepping past the overturned amps and abandoned instruments.
I wasn't the least bit disappointed that they sucked unapologetically because the band that played before them, the Damnwells, are now my Absolute Favorite Band.
This week.
The whole damn bunch of them goes on my Must Make Him Breakfast list, which, come to think of it, is growing quite long.
They played early at TT's and it was the night with the snow. I mean, we do get a decent amount of snow here, but it was like three feet and still coming down. Either because of the snow or the fact that everyone else knew Longwave sucked, there was only a few dozen people in the club when we got there. But the Damnwells came on, and rocked every single one of us from the first song. By halfway through their set the place was filling up, and the energy was palpable.
The Damnwells play well-crafted, catchy rock and roll with big guitars. Loud crunchy stuff, and the vocals are delicious. Alex Dezen plays around with some subtlely strange intonation that makes me smile. They use unusual tunings, and there are lots of capos involved. Strings all over the place. I was highly impressed and brought home a CD for a little happiness-to-go. Commence obsessive listening, in my traditional style.
So I have a new shower song. This one is stuck, let me tell you. It's called "Sleepsinging". Like any good shower song, it begins playing in my head upon waking and continues until I find myself singing it distractedly while doing mundane tasks at work. I've listened to the CD three thousand times since Thursday, and I can't get enough of it. I want to eat it. They even have a great band logo. It's a yield sign with a heart on it. Like, "Careful -- love!"
The Damnwells played again last night at the Lizard Lounge, and of course, I had to go. They're from Brooklyn, so who knows when I'll get to see them again.
I was not in a good mood last night. In fact, it was one of the nights when I'm begging to be saved inside the music, through the drawing out and cleansing that only a live show offers me. It's the one time during my day that I don't have to swim in the bullshit in my brain that drives me insane. I can let go and float. This is why I go see so many freakin bands.
Sometimes, like last night, I wish I could make noise that big, and really throttle it out on a guitar with three other people, bang bang bang and explode at the mic, and not just come home to stroke these petty words and fumble about with adjectives. It's the difference between attacking emotions with a jackhammer or prying them apart with tweezers. Catharsis comes slowly with sentences. It's overwhelming and all at once with music. Song is visceral. Writing is cognitive. Although it's always the first place I turn, some nights words offer me no release.
The opener was Dawn Landes, who also played at TT's, although I didn't have a chance to listen then. Last night I was captivated by her. My mind state plays such an important part in how I experience a band, a show… I went last night to be saved, like I said. I wandered into that club feeling broken and torn open, begging for some sign of hope. And this girl -- tiny, pixielike -- takes the mic with the voice of a silver studded dove, delicate and resilient, innocent but bruised. I immediately knew she wasn't going to be one of the whiney girlie singersongerwriters that have glutted the Cambridge market. She was different.
Her sound was haunting, ethereal, discordant. The guitar was so sparse; if you didn't listen carefully, you'd miss the jangling rhythms. I realized instantly that the music was bigger in her head; we weren't getting to hear the whole song. There was a symphony going on in that mind of hers, and we were privy only to a few finger-plucked bass notes. I was enchanted. These were love songs, but not of the painfully overdone somebody done me wrong variety. They felt like poking a dead thing with a stick, wanting to examine its horror but not touch it with your own hands. She was secure in her pain. Her music said, look, I'm fragile, I'm about to break, and you can watch if you want, but I'm okay. I've done this before. I may explode, but I can clean up my own mess. And there was so much strength and beauty in that.
Either I identified with her, or I'm projecting. Maybe a little of both.
The Damnwells came out and I was already prepped and practically sobbing. I had instant smiles of gratitude for them. Smiles in the thanks for kicking my ass I need it tonight way. I was grateful to be feeling someone else's pain for a change. They are passionate, without pretension or irony. I want to climb inside their music and run around. At the end of the first song, the lead singer snapped something and apologized afterward. "We're a rock and roll band, so shit breaks all the fucking time." I think that's when I realized I wanted to make him breakfast.
A good show will always give me perspective. By taking me out of my head, I can look down at what's going on. Everything becomes right-sized. I'm reminded of this song an ex of mine put on a mix tape -- a techno song, and the sample in the beginning said, "There's the story about the bug that lived in the Oriental carpet. He had no idea how beautiful the carpet was. He just roamed around inside, never looking any higher, unaware of the beautiful colors and designs, unaware that there was a perfect pattern to everything. The reason we're here tonight is to get you up and above, above your bug's eye view. " A good show does that for me.
Maybe it's because sometimes I get in the present moment too deeply, get too absorbed in whatever problem du jour I'm picking at and dissecting, and I become unable to see movement. And in a song, there can be so much movement. Especially a break up song. Because before breaking up, there was a whole love affair, and it was intense enough to write a song about it ending. And apparently he's still breathing. It reminds me that people move on. We survive.
I was distraught enough last night to forget my camera, which is a bad sign. I wish I had pictures. I wish you could see them filling that stage with bare intensity. I wish you could see that half the band could stand on each other's shoulders and still not see eye-to-eye with me at six feet tall. I wish you could see what got me above that rug last night.
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