The Barryfest Chronicles

As the final notes of “The Curtain With” vanished into the cool Vermont air on August 15, 2004, I was exhausted, dehydrated and completely heatered-out (Coventry was the culmination of many things, not least of which being the most nicotine drenched six months of my life).  But more than all of that, I was confused.  A month-long hallucinogen binge and five straight days without a good night’s sleep didn’t do much in the way of helping me process the monumental events unfolding around me, but even if I was perfectly straight as Phish was supposedly drawing their career to a close, I doubt I would been any more clear-headed as I made my way back to the damp campsite I had called home for the weekend.

I was at a loss.  Even after following them around for the entire summer and amassing a gratuitously large collection of live recordings from their first 25 years, I only had a few years of legitimate fandom under my belt, making me a relative novice in the whole Phish game.  Plus, I got into the band during college – when free time was a renewable resource, substance abuse had no appreciable consequences, and the world was an altogether simpler place – and to be honest, I was already wondering about Phish’s long term standing in my life now that I was tentatively inching my way into the real world.

So suffice it to say, I didn’t know my dick from my balls as I headed to the Manchester, NH airport covered to mid-calf in caked-on mud and probably smelling like an ashtray that just ran a marathon. Then without ever really digesting what was going on and/or coming to a conclusion about how it all made me feel, I moved on with my life.  And the longer I went without queuing up a show, the easier it become to explain away my reverent devotion as something as innocuous as youthful indiscretion or as insignificant as a fluke.

I really did a number on myself in the fours years since Coventry, considering news that the band was getting back together could barely get a rise out of me.  I put in for the ticket lottery like the rest of the citizens of the world, but I did it with the caveat that if my number failed to come up, I would strongly consider letting the dream die completely.  That’s right, friends.  I was willing to let a random pre-sale drawing cast the deciding ballot on whether or not I was going to allow myself to enjoy the musical styling of Phish in the future.

And I’m embarrassed to say it, but I almost had myself feeling relieved that I got passed over.  I mean, imagine how impractical and inconvenient it would be to travel around the country catching as much of the summer tour as possible now that I have a job and other adult responsibilities.  And I haven’t earnestly listened to the band in ages, so maybe I don’t even like their music anymore.  And shit, after taking so much time off, who knows if they will even be as good as they once were.  Fuck it, right?  Maybe it is best that I leave Phish on the trash-heap of passing fancies that I go through life claiming to have outgrown.

This, of course, begs the question: When did I become such a fucking ninny?  It only took one listen to this past weekend’s reunion shows to realize I have been pulling the wool over my own eyes and I’ll be goddamned if I let the bullshit charade go on any longer.  Of all the reasons I could conjure for why I was done with Phish, not a single one of them even approaches “good.”  It may have taken me a while, but I’ve finally got it figured out…  just in time for the summer tour.

The first thing I do on the morning after a particularly eventful evening is sit down at my desk, hit the space bar to snap my computer out of hibernation and take a look at what is on the screen.  I find the remnants of any drunken, pre-pass out computer noodling a good place to start when you a trying to piece together a night that may have evaded your short term memory.  Here is what I awoke to today:

Firefox, four tabs open: George Starostin’s page on The Band; YouTube video of Bob Dylan performing “When I Paint My Masterpiece” on the 1976 Hard Rain tour; Gmail “Sent Folder” showing I dropped a line to almost everyone I know with a  link to the aforementioned YouTube video (with time stamps beginning around 5:15 AM and stretching to about half past 6); and of course this here WordPress dashboard editor filled with illegible sentence fragments about substance abuse and B-Sides.

iTunes: Playlist featuring three copies of Cahoots set to repeat.

My night began at the Hornets/Clippers game and made its way to Grits and F&M’s, so I could probably tender a few guesses about my state of mind by the time I made it home, but I will never know for sure what prompted a marathon exhibition and examination of one of the most under-appreciated albums of the last 50 years.  Suffice it to say, though, that I am eternally grateful.  Cahoots is fucking awesome.

In almost every review of this album, especially contemporary reviews that have the benefit of hindsight and historical context, there is at least one remark about the irony of the choice of Cahoots for the title.  “Cahoots” implies a sort of mischievously cunning partnership, yet by the time this album was recorded, the whole outfit was practically hulking up for a full-out cage match over “Chest Fever” royalties.  And as far as I can tell, this discord seems to be the only contributing factor to the round rejection of this album, which many peg as The Band’s weakest offering.

So if you feel the need to set the record up for a disappointing self-fulfilling prophecy, it will surely comply.  If you want to call Cahoots 45 minutes of uninspired, formulaic, overwrought attempts at recapturing the majestic glory of Music From Big Pink and it’s eponymous follow up, you will have plenty of mainstream media confederates to back you up.  Anyone with a working set of ear holes can recognize that this is no Music From Big Pink.

But I think the very fact that the performances on this record were clearly phoned in by almost everyone involved (I say “almost everyone” because, to this day, I refuse to say nary a negative word about the venerable Levon Helms) makes the finished product all the more impressive.  Tales of the epic dissension among the ranks of The Band are a dime a dozen, but I am always skeptical about how much hyperbole goes into any Behind The Music-type tale about a group of talented musicians struggling with their own limitation in the harsh face of stardom.

However, the presence of “When I Paint My Masterpiece” on this album – a song penned by Bob Dylan but bequeathed to The Band for it’s first appearance on a commercially available studio recording – makes me think that, in this particular case, not only were the rumors about Robbie Robertson’s greed and megalomania true, but the situation may have been more dire than anyone thought.  I can’t help but wonder if Bob Dylan’s motivation for passing along that gem was in any way similar to that of David Bowie when he offered “All The Young Dudes” to Mott The Hoople around the same time.

See, Bowie was a huge fan of Mott and heard through the grapevine that the group was on the verge of throwing in the towel.  To convince them to stay together, Bowie dropped off the lyrics and music for “All The Young Dudes,” a unmatched masterpiece of proto-glam beauty, and let the boys of Mott The Hoople knock it out of the park.

Was Dylan’s offering of “When I Paint My Masterpiece” – a song as perfectly composed as “All The Young Dudes” and just as likely to be a hit for the original artist if he choose to keep it for himself – a last ditch effort to create some goodwill among the members of a band that was at the end of it’s rope?

Say what you will about whether or not Cahoots represents the best The Band could offer at the point in time in which it was made (I am sure we can all agree it was probably was not), but if you try to tell me that “Volcano” would have been out of place on The Band or that “Shootout in Chinatown” wouldn’t have blended right in to Stage Fright I will tell you that you are an idiot.  Hell, if you threw an unexpected, soulful breakdown in between the second and third verses of “Where Do We Go From Here,” that shit would be a dead ringer for any number of tracks on Music From Big Pink.  And don’t even get me started on the piano coda of “Smoke Signal.”

So let’s put any ideas that this album is at all subpar to bed right now.  That being said, I get it.  I sucks when you get the feeling that someone is dogging it – whether it be Richard Manuel coming up flat on a chorus or Manny Ramierez breaking into a home run trot on what turns out to just be a long double – but if The Band can crank out something like Cahoots when they obviously don’t have their head in the game and are possibly on the verge of extinction, it should disappoint you only because it is clear they are capable of so much better, not because what you are listening to still happens to be pretty fucking good.

Dear Kanye,

I spent Saturday night at my first holiday party of the season, so I unfortunately was not able to watch the original airing of the most recent Saturday Night Live, in which you were featured as the evening’s musical guest.  No worry, though, as I have been DVRing that shit since I first equipped my audio/visual set up with DVR technology almost two and a half years ago in my apartment back in Minneapolis.

I’ve always been a huge SNL apologist, keeping faith in the show even through the doldrums of the turn of the century with all it’s Jimmy Fallon-tainted misery.  Even then, when the majority of each broadcast featured Horatio Sanz in a variety of ill-fitting get-ups trying in vain not to break character and laugh while delivering terribly written lines, I found it amusing enough to keep watching whenever the mood struck and my schedule cooperated. Read the rest of this entry »

There we were, taking the gritty-as-shit alternate route to Louis Armstrong Airport – forgoing the interstate, with its road construction and rush hour induced bottleneck circa the Causeway Blvd. exit, in favor of the scenic drive through the blocks of shotgun houses and tire shops in Hollygrove and then past the endless row of seedy motels on Airline Highway – when I had my second favorable encounter with the nefarious group of “musicians” know as Coldplay.

The first time I listened to this band with a smile on my face was over three years ago in East Troy, Wisconsin.  A variety of factors, not one of which even remotely having to do with the band itself, led me to purchase a ticket to see England’s softest rockers at Alpine Valley Music Theater during the waning days of the summer before my senior year of college.  And through another set of circumstances, again completely unrelated to the group of hacks crooning sweet nothings into the cool August air, I was breaking out into fits of hysterical ecstasy towards the end of the first set. Read the rest of this entry »

When you’re drunkenly balls deep in a plate of cheese fries at F&M’s on a Thursday night, it is easy to forget that there is a lot more to Louisiana than New Orleans.  This is the “Sportsman’s Paradise” for chrissakes, and I’ve been down here for almost a year and have not actually done anything even remotely “sporting.”

To remedy this, I spent the weekend at Fountainebleau State Park with a crew of brave souls willing to endure some good old fashioned outdoor living in what could easily be the coldest weather any of us will see all year.  Yeah, the winters are pretty mild in southeast Louisiana; but the fact that the mercury doesn’t dip too far below 40 degrees over a 12 month span doesn’t make those 40 degree gusts any toastier when they are whipping across your campsite.

But the trip was a blast, and when I wasn’t gathering firewood, complaining about non-Kosher hot dogs, smoking Natural American Spirits, slugging persey bottles of Charles Shaw, pounding packets of BC, dancing on top of a picnic table to Rilo Kiley, tossing hard-boiled eggs into Lake Pontchartrain, or freezing my dick off after passing out in a tent with no pillow or sleeping bag, I engaged in my new favorite pastime: hypothesizing about whether or not Chinese Democracy is going to be any good. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve been a pretty big Girl Talk fan since this girl I knew in Minneapolis pulled a copy of Night Ripper out of her purse at a dinner party and handed it to me.  She claimed that her discovery of Girl Talk about 6 months prior to our encounter had changed her life, and as such she always carried around a few burned copies of his latest CD just in case she sensed an opening during a conversation that she could use as a springboard to spread the Gospel According to Greg Gillis.  She was something of a Girl Talk missionary, you could say.

On Friday night I caught his show at the House of Blues in the French Quarter.  It was great.  Much like at a Rebirth Brass Band show, words (and even pictures, really) do no justice, so here is some footage:

Even though I like to think of myself as a wise music connoisseur with eclectic taste, I have been pretty closed minded about “new music” for the better part of my adult life.  With the exception of Wilco, Lil’ Wayne, and Prince, I only regularly listened to music that was made before I was born.  I wouldn’t call it a rule, it was just an ethos that was pretty effective at keeping my CD collection and iPod full of rocking tuneskis for all these years.

It stands to figure that the music that was created for the 50,000 years before I existed deserves more attention than what has been put on wax since the year of our lord 1984.  I mean, even a great band like Talking Heads hit their creative peak by 1983 with Speaking in Tongues, so I figured the arbitrary, unofficial policy that governed my music consumption was firm but fair.

Sure, I was a big Sublime fan in middle school, went through a solid rap phase in high school and painstakingly assembled playlists filled with one hit wonders from the 80s and 90s during college; but even during these flights of fancy, when I was looking for a new fix, I thought I would be better served by digging into T.Rex’s canon than by picking up the new Snow Patrol album. Read the rest of this entry »

September is half in the bag and the heat and humidity down here are still turning my brain to mush on a daily basis.  I’ve been told that there is an end in sight, but I sure as shit haven’t caught a glimpse of it.  I will never act like I am going to miss the Chicago winters – the way they arrive out of nowhere with bone-chilling cold and don’t let up until the torrential rains of spring blow through – but I do feel another dose of seasonal affective disorder creeping into my UV-damaged, sweat-soaked psyche.

I think New Orleans is slowly making me insane.  Thankfully, this is not the type of “insane” that is caused by a bad breakup and then fueled with a steady diet of prescription pills and whippets.  No, no, no.  The “insane” I am feeling now is a good thing; maybe the best of things.  It is a liberating and enlightening psychosis that makes the Charles Shaw taste sweeter and the drunken heaters seem more satisfying.

Unlike up north, where even in the dog days of summer a pleasant cool breeze tips you off that day is turning into night and, eventually, that summer is fading into fall, the shitbird weather down here is in dire need of a desk calendar and a fucking Flick-Flack. Read the rest of this entry »

On Saturday, September 6 at approximately 10:45 pm local time I made it back to New Orleans after a week-long odyssey that took me to Meridian, Birmingham, Richmond, Tenafly, New York City and Chapel Hill before I finally returned to the Crescent City.  I would call it a “tour de force,” but during my travels – and the 45 hours I spent in a car over the last week – I became convinced that the term “tour de force” is thrown around way too liberally these days.

I am not quite sure what led me to this conclusion, but when you are on your second 5 Hour Energy shot of the evening and considering whether or not an America’s Best Value Inn right off I-85 in Virginia is far enough away the from the meth country of greater Appalachia to safely rest for three and a half hours without worrying about someone breaking into your car and stealing your checkbook, external hard drive and passport, fact-checking your own internal monologue is not high on your list of priorities.

I think it is best that the term “tour de force” only be used to describe one of two phenomenon:

1. A road trip that spans multiple countries, not just multiple cities
2. A colossal rock epic the likes of Derek and the Dominos’ “Layla,” Electric Light Orchestra’s “Living Thing,” the B-Side of Abbey Road or Spacehog’s “In The Meantime.”

But anyways. I set a new personal record by doing four loads of laundry today, I will be returning to work tomorrow, and it appears that this “Ike” character will be twisting into Texas by the end of the week (of course, he hasn’t gotten a taste of angel dust yet), so I hope that I will not be checking the “Riding the storm out” category in any blog posts in the near future.  And I also hope that the next time I am racking my brain for a new category name, I don’t go with an obvious allusion to a terrible REO Speedwagon song.

All in all, my first evacuation experience was – dare I say – almost entirely positive.  Sure, I was freaking the fuck out for the first 48 hours, and I had to purchase six tanks of premium gasoline at this summer’s outrageous prices, and I ate nothing but fast food for what seemed like an eternity; but this last week has been pretty fun and exciting.  I’m more well-traveled by exactly five US states, I gained a new appreciation for the beauty of major cities in Alabama and I got to see at least six of my favorite people while in New York.

But most importantly, I got caught up on over a month of neglected podcasts while on the road.  In addition to listening to the latest editions of This American Life, Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me, and The B.S. Report with Bill Simmons, I finally got a chance to dip into the five episodes of The Best Show on WFMU with Tom Scharpling I downloaded after seeing it name-dropped in Vulture a few weeks ago.

It is awesome.  I could easily (and very possibly may) devote an entire post to the genius of Tom Scharpling.  Until then, let me say this: without The Best Show, I do not think any of what went on over the last week would have been possible.

Dear Scott Van Pelt,

I only became a regular listener to sports radio since I have come down here to New Orleans, as my morning commute changed from the six block walk I had in Minneapolis (a trip just long enough to expose you to the extremes of Minnesota weather but too short to help you fully shake off a hangover from the night before) to my current 15-20 minute drive to the office.

The only other time in my life that I regularly listened to any radio at all was back in high school, which was the last time I regularly drove before the invention of iPods.  And for a variety of reasons, I did not listen to sports radio back then.  In a major sports city like Chicago, the radio waves are full of local sports talk shows hosted by fat, obnoxious, bigoted homers hailing from the South Side.  You even find these fucking mopes for a few hours here and there on the ESPN affiliate, so there is really nowhere on the AM waves to hide from these shitbirds.  And besides, I was perfectly happy rocking out to The Drive, probably the best radio station on the planet (although WWOZ here in New Orleans gives it a serious run for it’s money). Read the rest of this entry »

Over the past few weeks, I have reached the conclusion that jukeboxes were practically custom designed for complete assholes such as myself.  I am not content merely lording over the music in my living room and any car I happen to be in.  No, no, no.  I am the type of gaping asshole that needs everyone around me to be listening to music that I enjoy at all times.  I’m such a sick fuck, sometimes I can’t even tell what I like more: the actual song that I requested or the fact that everyone at the bar is listening to it whether they like it or not.

That is not to say that I punch in “Thursday Afternoon” every time I see a jukebox just to annoy people, but I definitely aim to please only myself.  Mostly of the time, my picks are at worst unusual, but they are not going to clear the room.  Of course there are some nights when I play The Band’s “Chest Fever” three times in a row before settling into a nice string of Steely Dan deep cuts.  Last night at Old Bruno’s was one of the those nights.  I’m sorry, I just can’t help myself sometimes. Read the rest of this entry »

Hmmm.  How do I explain the Rebirth Brass Band to someone who has never been to one of their performances?

Or, better still:  How do I explain the Rebirth Brass Band to someone who has never even been to New Orleans?

At the heart of it, to understand Rebirth is to understand the effect one of their live shows has on your face.  It’s pretty straight forward and extremely predictable:  That shit gets melted right off your fucking head.  You’ll probably shit your pants, too.  And orgasm harder than Rob Schneider at the mention of Denver’s no-huddle offense.

I have never been able to come up with a description of their music that I find satisfactory, and I have had a lot of chances to try.  Rebirth Brass Band are one the first things I mention when anyone asks me “How are you liking it down in New Orleans?”

Their mix of traditional brass band sounds, jazz elements like call and response and virtuoso solos, hip hop beats, and serious cow funk grooves is unlike anything I have ever heard in my life.  Everyone in the crowd – black, white, old, young – cuts a goddamn rug the entire time.  And whether it is an afternoon set at Satchmo Summerfest, a late night blowout at Tipitina’s, or a second line march down Frenchman Street during the Krewe De Vieux parade, they are always on their game.

Enough with failing to describe something like Rebirth with words.  Here is a little clip from last night’s show at Howlin’ Wolf: