I have never been to a show as tall as the one Jane’s Addiction played last Thursday night.

Because my brother works at La Cita, I was one of the very few, and the very very lucky, to get into their show. He pulled me in through the back gate, where, as if the band wasn’t going to be enough, I was plied with beer and shots. It was strange, at first, actually, surreal even. I’ve been to La Cita so many times–I’m the one who introduced Joe to the bar–but I had never seen it empty the way it was when I first arrived.  

We ended up outside, sitting and drinking at the patio bar. It would be a few hours before Jane’s played. My brother introduced me to a growing swell of coworkers, friends, and acquaintances. He had drinks with each of them–so, of course, he had more drinks than I did.

I bring this up because, well, because my brother gets sentimental when he has a lot in him. A lot of his bravado strips away, and talking–really talking–becomes important to him. When Jane’s set time came close, and I was finally able to tear out of the conversation and get back to the main room–well, I found it as full then as it had been empty earlier.

I cursed a little. Mostly under my breath, mostly. But not because I was mad at my brother for talking– no, it was because I knew I had a camera, and I was afraid that no one else might. And that would mean that the responsibility of documenting this awesome, amazing, epic, historic show would be entirely on me–and I had already screwed it up by sitting too long in the patio, and not staking out a spot front and center.  As I slid in near the soundboard, to the left of the stage, the only place I could go, I kicked myself for my stupidity. Between the pillars and the speaker stands and the racks and equipment I could see a quarter of the stage–and I knew that it wouldn’t be the quarter Jane’s would be facing. My joy about seeing the band was turning into some kind of self-loathing.

This was just artistic vanity. It disappeared. It disappeared because, suddenly, Dave, Eric, Stephen, and Perry emerged onto the stage. Dave started strumming and everything just… melted away.

This is where I come back to the tall thing. When I was a kid, on one of many trips visiting Universal Studios, our tour guide pointed out to us that the houses, barns, businesses, and saloons of the backlot’s Western sets were built at 6/7th scale. Making the doors shorter turned actors into Archetypes: long legged, thin, hard men, as tall as the prairie sky. And there, in La Cita, with its low ceilings and strung lights, watching Jane’s Addiction, I was a child again, thinking of Western heros. Perry, in particular, seemed like some joyous titan, almost having to crouch to fit in the room, but doing it so he could reach down to us and share his fire.

After a few minutes, and a few snapshots, I realized two things: One, that everybody in the audience had snuck in a camera. And two, that because of where I was standing, I could barely hear Perry’s voice. The decision was easy for me. I didn’t come for pictures, I came for the music. I slunk away, and headed to dancefloor. From there I could see even less than before–Jane’s Addiction had brought out fans almost as tall as the bandmembers themselves. People were scrunched up between speaker stacks and hanging off banisters. All I had were peeks of faces between supermodel shoulders, but–and this is why I moved–I could hear every note and every word. Forgetting the camera, letting the circumstances slide away, I let the sound of the band wash over me, and I found again what I had almost, in my vanity, lost.

I came for the music. And I heard it.

Handful of show pics on my Flickr.

Obtain this record

Arcade Fire
Neon Bible
Merge Records
Released: March 6, 2007

Doom hangs over the new Arcade Fire album. A nameless dread, omnipresent and consuming, from the oceans and the skies, by infernal means and by human hands. A lack of control —over our world, our countries, our destiny, even our individual lives —and a fearful impotence that comes from knowing it preoccupy the songs of Neon Bible. The components from the band’s previous album, Funeral, have been reassembled here into a more claustrophobic work. The result has fewer dance grooves than its predecessor, but stands, along with Max Brooks’ book World War Z, as one of the most acute figurations of our times.

The desire to know the future is the desire for control. It is no wonder, then, that divination and prophecy play such a central part in the record, beginning with the first track, Black Mirror. Storm clouds hover over a building guitar. An implacable, moonless, darkened ocean takes on the aspect of that titular ancient scrying device. Out of the water bubbles a primeval chorus (“Their names are never spoken / The curse is never broken”). In a terrifying invocation of forces that Disney could only joke about, lead singer Win Butler wants to know “Mirror, mirror on the wall / Show me where the bombs will fall.” It’s a brilliant, layered line, simultaneously summing up our collective desire and reminding us that our will to know, like the Queen’s, is ultimately vain.

As the song fades out, the sound of storm clouds seems to change, briefly, into static, as if to point out that a dying television screen, too, looks a lot like a black mirror, reflecting back to us the truths we want to hear. The accumulated popular media of the last century has crowded out more eldritch ideas of our ancestors. In 1937, the Mirror was still a restrained demon, the tool of an evil Queen that would murder to appease her conceit. By the time Shrek was made, it had metamorphosed into a catty fashion consultant. This confluence of images, of an ancient, deeper force, with our diluted, mediated conception of them, powers the album’s quiet title track, Neon Bible. The real Bible may be under there, somewhere, buried under our electronic perceptions of it, but it’s hard to discern, and what we find may not be what we want (“A vial of hope and a vial of pain / In the light they both looked the same”). In the absence of that effort, we have the Good Book filtered through televangelist sound bites and Hollywood action sequences: a plot device instead of Providence. We may not have read John, but that doesn’t mean we don’t have a Gospel. The words we have received are uniformly hopeless. “Not much chance for survival / If the Neon Bible is true.”

Tension builds throughout the record. Windowsill is a kind of American Woman done right: a bitter lament from our closest neighbor (Arcade Fire is Canadian) that they’ve been drawn into America’s existential crisis (“Don’t wanna fight in a holy war / Don’t want the salesmen knocking at my door / I don’t wanna live in America no more”), while acknowledging that the problems and struggle will inevitably also become their own. The confusion between Media and Revelation becomes explicit on Antichrist Television Blues, where a “Good Christian man,” pushing his daughter harder and harder as a religious singer, suddenly comes to wonder whether he has become the opposite of his intention. Similar is the soldier spoken of in Intervention. Over the expansive sweep of pipe organs is told an ambiguous story, a man crusading while everything he fights for disintegrates. The implication is clear: as nations and as people we have become powerless to do good in the world, our desire corrupted by our own, semi-conscious, conflicting motivations and the unresolved problems we have at home. If we do break free, momentarily, then like the family in Black Wave-Bad Vibrations we will be swallowed again by the deep, dark things we forgot during our moment in the sun.

If this were Funeral, the tension would break suddenly into glowing reverie. But the band seems deliberately to have decided against this, forgoing the illusory end of No Cars Go in favor of the more meditative My Body is a Cage. The pipe organs return prominently on Cage. It is part mantra, part prayer. The body of the title is more than just one man’s flesh and bones. It is the time we live in, the entire preexisting structure of the world we have come to inhabit. “My body is a cage that keeps me / From dancing with the one I love,” Butler repeats over and over, “but my mind holds the key.”

“My body is a cage,” he says. “But my mind holds the key.”

“My body is a cage.” Marching drums appear with the organs.

“My body is a cage,” he screams, cut off by the crescendoing organ.

And then, finally, a plea. To forces outside merely human agency. Not a demand, as in Black Mirror, but a crying appeal.

“Set my spirit free. Set my body free.”

There will be no quick fix, no easy answer, no simple solution to our struggles. That idea is another mediated projection, a story arc we placed over the lives of our forebears. There is only hard thought and a long, hard fight for us, just as for them. And at the end, if we are lucky, a true answer to our prayers.

Originally published in LAist

The Pipettes are great. They get up on stage in vaguely matching outfits, doing their homemade choreography, singing these fun, cheeky songs about boys and being a girl.

They are the anti-Winehouse. I love bands like the Shirelles, the Ronettes, the Supremes. Amy Winehouse has the voice of 60′s girl group star, but everything else about her is the inversion of those groups. Her tats, her trashy talk, her used up, discarded look. Lying, canceling shows to hit the bar. And her songs—her hit is about refusing to go to rehab.

But the glamour, grace, fun, sweetness of those groups still exists one night at the Troubadour. In a better universe, in a better England, the Pipettes would be the stars, and Amy Winehouse would be getting what she deserved.

Mah, but let’s not turn everything political. I loved the Pipettes. Their clap along songs are infectious and their glow is overwhelming. They have that radiant smile of the girl from X-Ray Spex, and they put that smile on your face, too. Yay Pipettes!

When your ticket to the Greek Theatre says the show starts at 7:00pm, they aren’t lying like all those jackleg indoor venues. The Greek Theatre isn’t trying to fake you out, draw you in so they can increase their bar sales. The Greek Theatre doesn’t survive apocalyptic forest fires so that you can stand around drinking overpriced imported beers and admiring each others’ hundred dollar haircuts. The Greek Theatre is here to host music.

So you walk in on Electrelane’s last song, which makes you more despondent, you feel even more alone, and use your last few dollars to purchase a Large Domestic Beer. You find your seat, between two groups of strangers. A few moments later, the lights darken. You stand up, and decide to down your beer Right Now.

Arcade Fire is exactly the kind of beautiful music that crushes your soul. The pipe organ builds and builds, and your tears build along with it, until you can’t tell the taste of salt from the sound of the guitars, and the wetness on your cheeks feels like a trumpet, and your emotions crash out in a wave, just like the music on stage. The band comes back for encore, and they play that song, and your tears flood the amphitheater. They drown the audience and sweep everyone down the hill into the city and deposit them on their beds. And you’re caught in the deluge, too, straight down Vermont, a little turn on Wilshire, and before you know it, you’re there, next to the Ambassador Hotel, on your own futon, curled up, wet, collapsed. The tears pull back into your body, the flood recedes, the city dries, and the next morning everything looks shiny and washed and new again. It’s beautiful and clear in Los Angeles, again.

Next time you won’t be late for the show.

Saw Albert Hammond Jr. last night at the House of Blues on Sunset. I saw him back in March at the El Rey. The show was great, again. He and the band seemed more confident than last time. The crowd cheered and cheered; Albert joked he might move back, we were so nice. He yelled “Dodgers 88!” and “Orel Hershiser!” to the befuddlement of his NYC bandmates. Albert grew up in West LA. This is back in prehistoric times, long before the Strokes.

After the show, driving a meandering route home, I ran into a blocked intersection. 6th and La Brea. A hydrant had burst somehow, and fire crews were there trying to restrain the artificial geyser.

A heart bursts, exploding in a torrent 50 feet high over the city streets, amazing and beautiful, illuminated in revolving lights, white, powerful, but also ephemeral. Quickly gone, remembered only in the grainy snapshots of passerby and a moldering activity log buried in some firehouse basement.

Not to be confused with the band Of Montreal, which I have heard some people, somewhere, might enjoy.

This was a showcase of three Quebecois bands at the Roxy, back on April 3rd. I am remiss for not writing about it earlier.

I am remiss because it was amazing. When I won the tickets from Goldenvoice, I thought it might, perhaps, be a reasonable evening of amusing entertainment. Instead it was mind blowing, starting with this band, Patrick Watson:

This band was beautiful and intense. And they were making some lovely weird noise. The guitarist, here, started playing his guitar with a balloon, creating these haunting, mournful, strange sounds that strike you like a shimmering ghost.

Oh, what a lovely camera phone photo this was back in 2007

But the highlight of the band’s performance was the ending, when the band put down their plugged in instruments and mics, and came down to serenade our sparse crowd with their song Man Under the Sea. The drummer had this toy drum kit he could carry with one hand; he hopped down from the stage and into the middle of the audience. The guitarist grabbed an acoustic, and Patrick Watson cupped his hands over his mouth and sang to us acapella. The three of them walked through the crowd, performing the song, never missing a beat or a note; it was mindblowingly beautiful, and the focused intensity of it still amazes me right now. I could have taken pics or video with my fancy new phone. I thought about it briefly; even as they begun, I thought, this should be documented. But I didn’t want to. It was too much for any form of mediation. You can’t receive communion through a television set. You need to see them do it—if it can ever be repeated—with your own eyes, and listen with your own ears.

Patrick Watson left the stage with our hearts.

Ten minutes later, these guys came and kicked us in the balls.

Les Breastfeeders. Yes, Les Breastfeeders. Think early Hives, but with French Canadian lyrics. The guitarist there on the left rocked in total Billy Zoom style: plant two feet and fucking wail. My pictures can’t do him justice. Cocky, charismatic lead singer front and center, no slouch on the axe himself.

Second singer, female, infectiously fun on Funny Funiculaire, the song which got me to the show in the first place.

I’d expected this poppy fun Francophone band, and what I got was a full frontal rock and roll assault. Totally awesome.

But is this not enough for you? This band even has a dancer:

Dude looks totally like Napoleon from the Bill and Ted movies. Dude dances like a maniac, never lets up for a minute, shaking a tambourine or maracas or his woolly chest, pouring everything he has into every song. Dude must have been sired by Iggy Pop.

Meanwhile, the band is plowing through the set list written on paper plates. Paper plates, you know, because they can’t stop rocking like granite boulders long enough to scrounge up some paper.

Totally amazing. Totally amazing. One night, swinging through both ends of the emotional spectrum. These bands are living, breathing arguments for secession. They’re certainly blowing away anything coming from their Vancouver counterparts.

These bands are far away and gone now, and who knows when they’ll return? But I am alive, and I was there at M is for Montreal.

Your guitar.
It sounds so sweet and clear.

But you’re not really there.
It’s just the radio.

BTW, saw Sonic Youth tonight at the Wiltern. Performed a lot of stuff from the new album, including Rapture, which has really captured me. During the encore, they played Teenage Riot. It was gooood.

This band opened. They were also gooood.

Here’s a hilarious White Blood Cells-era interview of Jack White by a five year old kid named Lucas.

Lucas loves the White Stripes and really pays attention to those lyrics he hears, which leads to some incisive questions like “If there is no true love…how did you fall in love with a girl?”

Jack’s answers are honest and playful. They remind me why I like the Stripes so much. And I think I laughed for about a half hour at the incessant probing of Jimmy’s exploding powers.

It’s hard to do a Beatles cover well. Partly this is because of the band’s iconic (and exceedingly familiar) presence; but perhaps it’s also partly because they themselves performed and recorded so many amazing cover versions. The Beatles were, before anything else, unparalleled synthesists of Rock and Roll history. They knew precisely how differences in tempo, aggression, or vulnerability could change and renew old, familiar songs; and because of this knowledge they rarely, if ever, made mistakes with their own material.

Fiona Apple’s (new to me) version of Across the Universe is, then, one of those rare exceptions—the great Beatles cover. It might be even more: superior to the recordings on both the original and stripped versions of Let It Be. Lennon wrote Across the Universe during the disintegration of his first marriage; but the song’s feeling was buried, to a certain extent, under the novelty of the Beatles’ short-lived infatuation with Transcendental Meditation—hence the “Jai Guru Deva Om” mantra chorus line. By slowing the song down, altering the instrumentation, and simply enunciating differently that chorus, Apple brings out the emotional resonance of the original composition. And this is bolstered by the compelling accompanying music video, with its thorough destruction of an idealized past:

The removal of her headphones two thirds through the song, without any change of demeanor, is tacit evidence that she recognizes the riot ocurring around around her, but chooses to ignore it. Headphones are one of the quintessential modern symbols of disconnection—ubiquitous Walkmen and iPods block out the presence of the wider world. But Apple is not isolating herself by wearing her pair; she is asserting the primacy and eternality of her interior world over the thoughtless and ephemeral actions taking place around her. Again, the sudden removal of her own headphones reinforces this, as does the song’s refrain. Apple (who alone among the video’s characters is dressed in modern clothes) reaches back visually across time and space—yes, across the universe—to find something pure and beautiful, and to pull it, not precisely to the present, but into her (and our) everpresent. It is just as she did musically, with her selection and recording of the song. This continual renewal—and renewability—of an object of beauty is the source of meaningful, lasting art. It is also, incidentally, the mark of a great cover. That the object being renewed may have also once been thoroughly destroyed—that doesn’t matter at all.