These earnest sons and daughters with crisp-cuff jeans above their pale ale workshoes are crafting their lives upon grass-fed hopefulness. These kid-faced mid-life professionals secretly loathe the ironies of middle-class rewards, but hang the vinyl above their beds. Finding solace in the soft-faced muppets, they pray with all their secular might for a truth found within the cracked guitar tonks of Mangum’s photomatic broken-youth parables. They hope their live viewing of his near-pantomime performance will free them from the irritation of their destabilized generation.

In Jeff they see an available ideal, the soft hero. They find their salve through an album and a half of decade old songs, sung by a man quiet enough to allow intrigue in his bio. Maybe if they sing along, especially when he asks, they’ll scrape the genius from his air. In an era where the value of nearly everything is churningly reinvented, the decay of these songs is painfully obvious. Two years ago the audience would be standing, singing at the top of their lungs. At this event, we all sat in theatre chairs and half-sung self-consciously. Next time we’ll put him in a glass case and kiss the surface.

The songs are good. I wish Jeff the best, but wish even more that he’d write new songs. Still, more importantly, the songs he sang last Thursday night are songs that dance upon the string theory within our cells. They mingle with neutrinos that are older than stars and gape at our bones from amidst the eldest vibrations. My grandkids will like these songs. Eons ago there were apes who would find magic in these songs.

Over the piles of time, songs have formed-up within cultures, combined like chemistry, and followed the math of notes and time. Uniform audiences warmly gawk at the modest majesty of a lonesome figure. Sitting, surrounded by sound-making tools that only they can play in a special way.

Like the slow salt-loaded waves on the moonless sea, these songs have seen their crest. They’ll soon be stacked within the basement boxes of polaroid portraits, cheap plastic school trophies, and mom’s love letters to a man who wasn’t her husband.

Growing up outside of New York City I was enamored with the old-school lower east side musician-artist-poets who scraped by through odd jobs, wits, and selling everything they owned. Every chance I had I’d scramble downtown (or to Hells Kitchen), to seek them out, to soak up their vibe, and to learn there were many more paths in life than the straight and narrow one.

Bourdain is one of these folks all grown up, and not only did he survive, he’s thriving. I don’t think he’s an anomaly, he made an effort and chose a good turn in the road. There are bunches of these old-school NYC underground peeps, doing their thing, sticking it to the man, and flying under the radar. Their turns have been less fortunate, but no less enthralling or insightful.

Bourdain mentioned in his live performance at the Chicago Theatre this past Saturday that his success was both a mix of luck (for which he is extremely grateful) and determination (he worked hard to publish the book that opened the door to all else), but his plan is mostly accidental. He knows his current situation is magical, and he’s milking it for all its worth; without pretense, and with ample glee.

During the show Bourdain told a great deal of behind the scenes stories that were funny and expectedly harsh of his fellow TV foodies, but there were a few aspects that struck me solid. What set with me the most was his yearn to share his own experiences with the hope to influence the greater good. It’s micro-buddhism in a way, maybe a distant cousin. Here’s a person that walked a path, made a decision to alter the path, and from the alteration found a new appreciation for the people of the world AND a need to share that appreciation so that we too can learn to do so as well. That’s profound. He’s my hero.

Here are a few pearls I gleaned from his show:

Keeping It Real
Always on the mind of the underground folk, the pain in life is finding the balance between passion and success. Nobody from the underground wants to be a sellout. But what does that mean? Should we all look to the Dischord house as the beacon of truth? Bourdain seems to have had this internal twist and awoke with a new objectivity. “Was smoking crack keeping it real? Was selling books on the street for dope keeping it real?” He’s doing the best he can to keep a good thing rolling, and within it he’s found a concerted balance between his personal goals for the show and finding the angles to help pay to reach them. “Yes, we have product integration, you’ve all seen that, that’s how we can keep making the show…but I also have total creative freedom.”

Subvert McDonald’s
Discussing his role as a father to a 3 year old Bourdain suggests there is no beating the ubiquity of McDonald’s through rationalization. He cynically suggest we wean our children from Ronald’s grasp by injecting fear into the experience. To speak of Ronald is hushed tones just within earshot of our children as an evil character who kidnaps children. To take an old and grime-laden scrubby, dip it in chocolate, wrap it in a McDonalds’ wrapper, and leave it on the counter for our kids to find. “That’ll stop their craving.” Though he’s being incite-ful, he’s not wrong. If parents are going to fight to keep their kids away from fast food they need to find clever ways to counter the fast-food impulses that weed their way into the minds of babes.

Steps For Peace
Bourdain ran through a list of behaviors he wishes more Americans followed when traveling abroad. He carefully noted that before he was hired to do his first show he barely traveled at all. That at the start of his travel career he looked at the catalog-type tourists with disdain, and that now he wishes to rescue them from the bull-horn tour-guide, to set them free into the hearts of cities where tourists fear to tread. Here’s his list:
– Be grateful. Having an American passport is a gift, our ability to travel is extremely fortunate.
– Be polite. We are representatives of our country when we travel, show your best face.
– Dress appropriately. When visiting holy sites, make sure you dress accordingly, no bikinis.
– Show a little respect. Don’t demean the citizens of the country you are visiting, they’re more like you than you think.
– Get the customs right. Learn what’s appropriate and do it.
– Accept meat and liquor from strangers. Be open to meeting people, don’t shut yourself off from the culture. The best experiences will happen through the graciousness of people.
– The Grandma rule: accept the food and no matter what, eat the meal and tell the host that the food was delicious.

And finally, not a wisdom, but a great presentation technique…

Turn On The Lights, Open The Floor
At the end of his monologue, Bourdain turned on the house lights and opened the floor to questions. He spent the last 20 minutes of his stage time fielding and answering questions from all over the theatre. Some were about Zamir, others about favorite foods and places for the best street food. My favorite was when someone asked how often he become sick from eating all the new foods. He honestly answered, “About 75% of the time I’m a little sick, but not always sure if its the food or because of my alcohol intake. If anything I spend a little more time on the [toilet]…but nothing ventured, nothing gained.”

Thanks Anthony for keeping it real.

“What about Canada, It’s paradise with pines and ice…they never lock the doors at night, and kiss those wars goodbye,” Doug Martsch of Built to Spill sings at us from within the blue specked lights of the Vogue stage. His grey beard is a surprise to me. I reach to my own face, feel the late stubble, and wonder if mine would look the same. The band, like many from the dawn of the alt-rock-revolution, has become a mirror, a satellite, and a reminder for all things once angrily new and now matured into unexpected forms. Since when is Built to Spill a “jam band?” Who are these kids making bootlegs like we’re at a Dead show? Wait! Did the band just play a Dead song? Doug nods to the band mid-song, slight-smiles over his shoulder as if to say, “see, told you so, kids like the Dead.”

Doug doesn’t really sing at us, he breathes us all in, ingests the era, our ilk, and prisms it into worded ribbons that flow from the hole in his head. His weary preacher face, his inside eyes, seek past us and into the parallel histories the books don’t tell. The answers are not for alt-rockers alone, though it cuts my heart a little to think Built to Spill and the String Cheese Incident might have fans in common. This is my band! It’s my music! When did it become anybody’s music? Why shouldn’t it be? Isn’t that what the alt-rock revolution wanted?

“You were wrong when you said everything’s gonna be alright…You were right when you said it’s a hard rain’s gonna fall…”

Doug hunches on his wire-hanger shoulders, his head bobbles up, his chin trying to escape from his neck. He could be shouting up at a parent, a teacher, any authority. He clamps his eyes shut, tilts his bare-balding head on an slick angle as if the observatory within his brain has identified a new star just slightly to the left. He sucks the air in but sends the words out. His mouth a black spot beneath his beard, his voice a strained crackle, a collected Tarzan of skinny geeks who use their smarts to outwit the dumb demons.

“I wanna see it when you find out what comets, stars, and moons are all about. I wanna see their faces turn to backs of heads and slowly get smaller. I wanna see it now.”

Don’t kick sand in my face. I’ll press this pedal and noise you the fuck back to where you belong, on a cereal box, behind shrink wrap, on a bathroom wall. See, I have a band now. See, look at the audience, it’s everybody, not just the alt-rocker mafia, it’s your children. They don’t listen to you, they listen to me and I’m going to tell them the truth about the fucked up world you’ve left for them.

“I can’t be your apologist very long. I’m surprised that you’d want to carry that on. Count your blemishes. They’re all gone. You can’t. Putting them back on I can’t see your response. Like they’re waiting for your guard to fall. So they can see it all and you’re so occupied with what other persons are occupied with and vice versa…

And you’ve become…what you thought was dumb.”

The Pixies owe us nothing. The elder siblings of our alt-rock post-punk revolution, we look to them, yearning for the brilliance of the late-80s surge of misfits, outcasts, and town criers who led us away from stadium rock and tight pants and towards the emotional sleeves of wheat paste, second-hand duds, and endless cigarette monologues. Their mix of mind-opening lyrics and whine-high instrumentation was the minstrel music, the bang anthems, for a few generations of college-smarty-pants who sought a less than hardcore way to be edgier than the mainstream lives they would soon live themselves.

The Pixies performance threw us cake and we passively mashed it on our faces. We, the angst riddled pilgrims of anti-rock, lost causes, and the corporate plundering of all things cool, we bent over and forgave the band in order to get our sentimental fixes. The snake will eat its tail. The Pixies should eat themselves, blow smoke, and release short documentaries that highlight Kim Deal’s genius, because she’s more genuine than all the name changes Frank Black can muster. I don’t care anymore that he’s a master song craftsman. He drags the band down to a desperate level of agacant and ennuyeux. There, I said it. But I don’t totally blame them. I blame us all for conjuring them out of middle-life to bloat-belly pantomime sentimental catch-phrase-tunes that have become the validation of Gen X excuses and the lullabies for the Gen Y complaints.

I was like nearly everyone else in the crowd, counting songs, flipping through my fingers to pin-down the dates of when and where I was when I heard this one, or that one. How I could stamp my passport of alt-rock cred on the loose connections of how I knew them first, before my friends, before you posers. The glee of so many in the audience who shimmied here and there couldn’t trump the slouch-slacked de-enthusiasm of the gray-shorn former punks who kept within themselves as best they could, hiding their colors, playing the role, and mending their own failures as a rock-star franchisees through the fabricated bliss of rehashed old songs.

The band could care less. Frank looked out at us and saw dollar signs through the haze. Truth hurts, but we deserve it. Kim tried her outbound hardest to break free, spicing the event with the gems that make live performance addictive, but even she seemed fearful to add too much time to the playlist. Nobody wants to piss off Frank. We’ve all learned that.

But wait, since when are the Pixies the Grateful Dead playing to an audience of set list fanatics, who, for the most part besides the pockets of psyched pogo-ers and overdrunk party-queens doing the swin, slouched passively letting the songs wash over them. Sure we all did our alt-rock due diligence of head bops, shoulder slides, and smile-glances at our friends, lipping the lyrics to our favorite parts, pointing to ourselves to say “this one is mine.” Since when are we all so boring? Was it Chicago? Will NYC put them to the challenge? Will the Boston show be insane?

I sought the energy of the night, not from the band, but from the eked enthusiasm of my audience-mates. The band was dormant (well, not David Loverling, or Kim Deal, let’s say Frank was the pantomime). Either way, the crowd now owns the Pixies songbook, we’ve ingested it, it tattoos our soul. But we were not all together now, singing along together within the songs. We sing the songs alone, in bubbles of our own memories, ignoring the liveness of this live-moment. The band was a spectacle, an act, a recital. They were the zoned-out TVs that we couch-surf amidst. We sit cross-legged in comfy clothes with fuzzy slippers saying, “that’s my song, I was here when I heard it.” “That one is my song, I remember where I was.” Wait. Let me text my friends.

Frank Black is a businessman. He should have found a different path to a paycheck than the Doolittle tour. Seemingly bored from playing long-old tracks his conceit and cynicism was hard to tamp down. I do not understand why Kim and the rest of them put up with Frank, maybe they can’t refuse the paycheck either. Maybe that’s all the Pixies ever really were, a great songwriting record recording team, maybe my expectations are unruly.

Screw that, I hate feeling taken advantage of and I hate feeling manipulated. I admit it, I relinquished myself to this Pixies tour to finger-plug the gaps in my de-punked life. To hold the foundation of the who I think I am in place long enough for the next greatest hits or reunion tour to hit the streets. Frank, you deserve my money, but you’re not getting anymore, at least not until you decide to do a tour of Surfa Rosa, play another unexpected third encore of more of my favorite songs (which was the only part of your performance you seemed really jazzed about), and I’ll shill out another paycheck-worth of tickets just to watch you defeat us. In the meantime, I’ll download the ringtones.

Concert Review: The Breeders, The Vogue, Indianapolis (August 6, 2009)

Kim Deal can see the world in a cold clarity that would make most mad; a ramble pile, a mess, a happenstance, and thrives amidst the foibles by generating her own upward forward lift thrust. Bulldozing through the trials there’s no BS, no plastic pleasantries, and in the rude truth of her songs (and to those who witness her life) both a love-lust attraction and a crazy fearful retreat. In the best cases the stars have aligned to make it right, shining the lights of opportunity and survival down upon her path. Her brilliance turns the wacky disaster of life into a haphazard recipe shoved right through the funnel. She churns it out of the Victrola as love letter songs for all who will listen.

Kim and Kelley Deal together are mirror statues to the road less traveled. Planted near the gates of the post-punk pantheon, they block the route with their glittering eyes, joyous appetites, and saltworn rat-a-tat-tat. Seeing them onstage is a family reunion, a non-holiday with those 2nd cousins you love but don’t see enough. Together you scurry to the basement, away from the boredom adults seem to make (but whose cigarettes you’ve stolen), and tell dirty jokes on the ping-pong table.

Don’t fuck with the Deal sisters! But as Kelley says, “…one of the things I explain to people when they’re playing is that they have to put more fuck in it.” Sisters with their particular energy light bonfires by breathing. Kim and Kelley banter on stage without pretense or care. I didn’t want their show to end. I want to preserve each glance, to press them in a butterfly book of mid-90’s alt-a-rama, keep them in a music box that when opened launches a gigglefit of screwball looks followed by a heavy metal that pounds the box from the shelf. I want to be their roadie, who sat at stage left for most of the show, half fan, half crew, bobbing his head to his favorites, then pertly tuning a guitar when Kim handed one to him. The glee Kim and Kelley exude is amplified by their ability to tap into the resonating tones that sell a million records. How is it possible? These two?

Kim’s seasoned alto voice rises feathered above the heartbeat churn of guitar driven overdrive. Sometimes Kelley joins to harmonize, a ritual. Two figures squinting their eyes above the altarfire, pounding the skins to appease the demons, we root them on. They’ve got us, tranced, we rock along the dancefloor in alt-rock familiarities of pogos and headbops. Sometimes a couple will spin-off, a time machine, and pair-up to sock-hop, while over there, near the bar, another couple will breakdance.

Their set-list mixed a range of songs from their entire songbook, with the crowd most revved when they heard the hits. At first hearing the crowd applaud the hit-song, you cringe, you don’t want to think of this band as a one-hit wonder, and you don’t want the band to think that you think of them as a one-hit-wonder, but Kim says it best, “That used to be a popular stance for indie-rockers to take. If somebody actually liked one of their songs, then they would hate the song. I was never like that.” Thank goodness for Kim Deal. As the show went on her gaze moved greater skyward, seeking the warmth of the toplights. She’s my flower, unsoured though toiled. Only the brightest flowers dip so deep, then spring back up and smile at the sun.

The pure joy emoted by the Breeders, mixed with their syrupy lag-time lyrics and thump thump of bodysoul beats, causes a relinquishing, a possession. We succumb to their elixir of agelessness, frailty, and funk. We try to squeeze all the magic potion from their presence. Being with them for that little while we too can escape, live in their smiles, and exorcise ourselves from the humdrum gravity of the rules we’ve chosen to live by.

PJ Harvey, John Parish & Band, June 11th, Vogue Theater, Indianapolis

The pre-roll of blues music, meant to set a tone, could’ve been the foreboding instruct, a tell, of the bare-essential instrumentation of the PJ Harvey/John Parish set and band. In larger venues the sound system is the big brother, putting the band on its shoulders, carrying them. At the Vogue, a smaller venue, the squeaks and chirps of guitar straps and foot pedals became part of the mix. I’ve rarely been that close in sight and sound to musical performers I revere. There’s always been a distancer formula in play, the more you love a band, the farther you seem to be away from them.

When the band took the stage, they took notice of less-than-sold-out crowd. I’ve seen hundreds, maybe thousands of bands, in all cases those first looks out into the lights, the first engagement, you see the re-estimation of the performers, sliding the scales between their excitement, their professionalism, what they expect to do and what the crowd might give them back. PJ, with her intoxicating and sly smirk/smile gazed up, glazed over, and the band began their set with “Black Hearted Love,” the single from their new record. The choice pointed to a band “on tour,” they have records to sell and might have considered this smaller market unfamiliar with their history, reminding them of who they are by playing the pop single. John chose a spot, up in the balcony, slightly to his 1 o’clock, to squint towards as if stretching to greet an old friend while tweaking a pained internal wound, to both seek the ghost and devise it.

The crowd was eclectic, and from the floor looked like more people hid in the wings or back or up in the balcony than came forward to address the band (except for one drugged couple near the stage making out throughout the set, or the teetering drunk few who yelled at each other about nonsense throughout the quiet songs). I wondered whether PJ had become a novelty, an icon for the alt scene, drawing this audience to the show for the spectacle rather than for the music. Towards the end of the set a young man, intent on filming a whole song on his blackberry stepped in front of most everyone, held his hands up high to capture the scene. His distance from the reality of the moment, and everyone else, stung me as a symptom of our reality-show era. One of the zealous security guards (who were bent on locking down this very passive crowd) asked him to stop and he retreated back to the safety of the dark corners.

PJ and John made modest notes of the small ruckuses either by slowly closing their eyelids, tilting their heads slightly down or away, or seeking their own clarity by gazing within the spotlights. Few people danced though all were very appreciative with their applause. Some fans created t-shirts for PJ, delivering them to her towards the end of the set. There was less gratitude for John, though standing next to the smoldering dollishly-suggestive affliction that is PJ Harvey is a tough partner to hold up to. The sounds of John Parish, the half-broken wood-saw rhythm-boom of his guitar tone, wash over you, pushes you back a bit, but doesn’t mean to intrude. He’s the cool brother, the distant uncle, the nice chap who is so understated you can’t tell if he’s having a good time or miserably resigned. I can’t get over the combination and his pairing with PJ. You expect them to explode under their intensity. You want to be their best friends, want to take care of them, cook them dinner. As a musician I want to play in their band, to play with them, to make songs with them.

By the third song PJ decided she needed to drive the show. The band was next going to Chicago and a probable room of intense faithful, and could’ve mailed in this performance, but she didn’t. Glancing at her band-mates, her dancing became more animated, inviting the crowd to join her through her forward motion steps. The band took notice and picked it up. More people entered the dance floor, and although the crowd seemed more intimidated than open hearted, the energy of the room tilted favorably. The rest of the show breezed by, I remember snap-shot candids of PJ’s expressions, John’s hands, the drummer’s bob, and the old-world muteness of Eric Drew Feldman and Giovanni Ferrario. The band closed out the performance with a couple of John’s songs, a grateful touch, a tip of the hat.

Looking back at last night, I feel that show was more of a conversion ceremony, a renewal of vows, than recital. A reminder that personal dissonant songs are celebrations as well as anti-dotes, invigorating as well as thought-provoking, and that the greatest lesson the blues can teach us is that the reward for sharing your soul’s depth is much greater than the bitter malaise of keeping it all to yourself.