Lightning Struck Itself

While three long-promised final chapters languish in inspirational purgatory, this seemed an opportune time to regurgitate my Flickr account and do a bit of attic-cleaning.  Both to make room for the new - even with the Pool Parties and Siren TBA, recently announced schedules for this year's free shows at Summerstage, Celebrate Brooklyn, and River to River have some strong offerings (Deerhoof doing Rite of Spring!  Philip Glass doing Powaqqatsi!) - and because I had a couple choice Zap Mama pics I couldn't reasonably squeeze into the V. Weekend weekend thing.

Last summer I only got to a fraction of what I wanted to see, took my camera to a fraction of that.  Like, three shows.  In no order whatsoever:

Zap Mama (myspace), Summerstage, 8/12/07.  I'd thought this was an a cappella group.  But whatever they once might have been, ZM is now Marie Daulne's show.  And I remember the show, but not the music.

Daulne reminded me of the domineering mother in Jodorowsky's Santa Sangre.  She came out wearing a sort of military band jacket over what could have been a wedding dress.  Presence is poised, theatrical... but she was even scarier when she tried to drop her guard and went leaping about.  Stiff, rehearsed routines - there was a boys v. girls thing, a song where Daulne and her back up singers took turns seducing selected audience members - alternated with round robin jams, neither took hold for me.

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Mary Weiss (myspace), Atlantic Antic, 9/30/07.

She didn't do "Leader of the Pack!"

It would have been the coolest way to close out the summer if I hadn't had a 103-degree fever.  But I wasn't going to miss the first New York performance of the lead Shangri-La in (according to her) twenty years.

Her nineteen-song set focused on her new Norton record, Dangerous Game... which is fine, but not what everyone wanted to hear.  The melodrama she wore as a teen might not fit as comfortably in middle-age, but the crowd craved the opportunity to suspend disbelief.  The six ‘Las tunes included were all great.  It's cool to know my favorite is also hers ("Out in the Streets").  "Walkin' in the Sand" was magic, just magic.  (Also included:  "Easier to Cry," "Heaven Only Knows," "Train from Kansas City," and the original L-U-V song, "Give Him a Great Big Kiss.")  But - even if it seems silly or predictable, even if your sister might have been the original singer - you gotta drag out the big hit at the end when you've been away that long.

Weiss will be doing it outside again at the Seaport on July 18th.  Play "Leader of the Pack!"

Without Magnetic Field, will the Antic have a compelling music stage this year?

(more pics)

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Superchunk (myspace), McCarren Park Pool, 6/24/07.

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Les Savy Fav (myspace), Citysol, 7/15/07.

So that's how you upstage Tim Harrington.

The "clean energy-powered festival" Citysol hosted a day-long Brooklyn Vegan-curated line-up in Stuyvesant Cove Park, home base of show-runners Solar One.  The park's under the highway on the east side, just south of 23rd Street, and it's not a bad space.  You're right on the water and the simple staging encouraged an intimacy the forbidding concrete amphitheater further down the East River doesn't.  It was a gorgeous day and the info- part of the ‘tainment was so nonaggressive that the whole thing felt like a comfortable, casual gathering of friends featuring decent-to-awesome bands.

Les Savy Fav is one of our very best live acts.  Harrington tears every set into something applicable and inappropriate and joyous.  This fest, he decided, was an opportunity to preach ill-informed ecobabble.  Some alternative energy suggestions:  Grow smaller dinosaurs that will fit right in your gas tank, make electricity by emptying water coolers into live sockets, mine footcandles from the heavens.  "When there's no light left in the moon, we're gonna go to Mars!"  Make sure what you're wearing is organic:  "This jacket is made of dreams, and my pants are made of inertia, and my shoes are made from nuclear stuff."

"I'm not a physical scientist.  I'm a physical philosopher," he explained.

He also took time to invent a new drink, the "My Little Pony"(one part bubbles, two parts Jameson's).  And mounted a parked vehicle so that, for half a song that Saturday night, there was a half-naked screaming crazy man on top of a van under the FDR.

And for the record, Les Savy Fav bassist/Frenchkiss Records owner Syd Butler only strapped daughter (Lila? Lily?  None of our business, really..) on for a single song, and won a ten dollar bet with guitarist Seth Jabour by doing so.

(More pics.)

Also there:  AllDayBuffet, Battering Room, Brooklyn Vegan, Etsy Garden, I Read Something the Other Day, Liam the Human Being, Mr. Mammoth, My Big Mouth Strikes Again, Product Shop NYC, Purely Recreational

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O'Death (myspace), Citysol, 7/15/07.

When I saw these guys outside again during CMJ - After the Jump hosted them at The Yard, a perfect way to detox from a week of packed-room shows - I realized just how much walls and ceilings are a part of what would seem to be a natural back-porch band.  The unamplified group howls and David Rogers-Berry's drums need surfaces off which to echo.  Here it was better, because the stage had a back; at The Yard everything seemed to drift out over the Gowanus.

Of course it helps when you howl back, and I was too busy doing so to get the stunning O'Death pics I thought I should have.  (Lori Baily's Flickr set has some nice ones, though.  Mine are here.)

They'll be headlining the Music Hall of Williamsburg on May 9^th (tix).  Other tour dates at their myspace.  See them!  Looking forward to the new record.

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Bernard Lakes (myspace), Citysol, 7/15/07. 

I liked ...Are the Dark Horse.  But it's more of a winter record, and this was too nice a day for winter record stuff.  (more pics)

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Land of Talk (myspace), Citysol, 7/15/07.

Not a fan, but this was the best I'd heard them.  I think it's because the lead singer was a bit tipsy.  Every other time I've seen them she's been either stiff or otherwise uncomfortable.  (more pics)

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Tom Verlaine, Summerstage, 06/16/07.

This was billed as a Television concert, but Verlaine announced that "the band's guitarist" was in the hospital with pneumonia (Jimmy Rip filled in).  Thankfully it looks like Richard Lloyd is up and about again, so there's always hope, but for now I'll just have to settle for having seen each half of Television play "Marquee Moon" separately.

Its fluttery riff was the first thing I'd heard the previous fall when I got into CBGBs on that club's last night.  Lloyd had joined Patti Smith's band during a history-heavy set (which ultimately proved to be a warm-up for a covers album, but whatever).  There, and at a Southpaw performance where he traded licks with Cheetah Chrome as Peter Laughner's permanent replacement in the occasionally reconstituted Rocket from the Tombs, Lloyd struck me as someone who knew exactly where he should put his fingers. 

Verlaine, on the other hand, always seemed to be thinking.  Of things he could try to make happen, of how maybe this was a good time to try x, how maybe y hadn't worked out the way he'd hoped.  Thinking.

It would have been an honor to watch them playing together.

As it was, some drunken ninny near me decided "Marquee Moon" was the perfect time to strike up a conversation.  Ugh.  But he shut up for the show's real highlight, the band's first single.

Television - Little Johnny Jewel (Live in Portland 7-2-78)(mp3)

The idea of a ten-minute punk anthem is counter-intuitive.  Sometimes rules are good, sometimes they aren't.

The first time I lived in this city I didn't get to as many shows as I should have.  Some of that's because most of my time was consumed by school and work and moviegoing (which felt like it was part of school, then, too); some of that's because when I wasn't worried about being underage I was busy getting drunk; some of that's because my musical tastes were still too reliant on radio-friendly arena rock.  It's been nice, this time through, to grab at some secondhand history.  It's too easy to look down your nose at acts who've done great things at some time before this past Tuesday and toss around p'shaws about waning vitality or (ugh) relevance.  Shinynewhotnow! obsession's probably a reaction against don't-make-‘em-like-they-usedta conservatism, or a legit wariness re: nostalgia-fed cash-ins, but it's more desperate than the saddest old-rocker self-celebration.  By asserting that THISmomentourmoment is important at the expense of all others is to reinforce disposability.  Because moments pass.

Television's been assured of its place in the new indie canon, so I needn't get defensive... until that canon turns over again, right?  I was, like, four years old when Verlaine and Hell walked into CBGBs.  I would have totally gotten carded!  But humor me if I think of shows like these not as making a tourist stop at ye olde scene, taking a couple snaps, buying the shirt, but as observing the giant fat throughline of NYC culture.  As active elder-respect, not idle worship.

And yeah, the picture's not really in focus but I just wanted to be able to say all that.

tags: mary weiss  television  zap mama  les savy fav  odeath  

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