August 12 2005 at Mary Jane's Fat Cat
Seven hours after the Brian Jonestown Massacre left the stage, I was standing in a field in Sugarland with four hundred mostly strangers. We were all holding balloons. On cue, we released them to the wind, and with that act the funeral for a seven year old child came to a close. Sweating through a black wool suit worse than I had been in Mary Jane’s just hours before, I walked through the dirt to my car mindhammered by the sight of a little bawling boy, refusing to let go of his balloon. He wouldn’t fcking give up on his friend; he could not physically let go. I left my sunglasses on until I composed myself. The drive back to the office was only barely long enough to do so.
The ceremony was intended to be the celebration of a life, rather than the dirgey formalization of death’s aftermath. And I would have to say that they did a good job of it. An open park pavilion rather than a cloistered chapel; photographs of the departed rather than a casket; and the kid’s favorite songs by Lennon and Ray Charles rather than Amazing Grace or Nothing but the Blood.
What in the name of killing the natural high of a Friday afternoon does this have to do with the Brian Jonestown Massacre, you may be asking yourself? Well, we’ll get to that. It got me thinking. If it was my funeral being held, and, rather than a single electric piano, I had the opportunity for an entire band to play the incidental, intro and outro music, who might I choose?
Up until today, I most likely would have said that I didn’t want a band at all, that I wanted the first several minutes of the Furry Things’ Nothing From Zero to be blaring while my massive obsidian casket was carried by a platoon of shuffling men in suits from the high alter, through the nave and into the lead hearse of an awaiting motorcade (I’m an event planner by trade, so I think I am permitted the use of garish pageantry in my own final soiree since I am so often prevented from its use in what I must plan professionally.) After last night, though, I think I might want to have the Brian Jonestown Massacre (if Spiritualized isn’t available).
Bianca from Heist at Hand was my partner in crime for the evening, which was a good thing because in the moments before The Quarter After took the stage, we simultaneously agreed that the past-capacity crowd was:
1) Almost entirely people we had never seen before
2) Older than we had expected
3) Far more to the frat side of the spectrum than we had anticipated
My guess is that Dig, which, every single time I have tried to watch it I have done so at 3 am after a night at the bars and consequently have seen the first fifteen minutes several times but never more than that, did a good job of broadening the BJM’s broad appeal. The singer for the Quarter After alluded to this before the final song of their post-punk Turtles set. “How much does it cost to rent Dig at blockbuster now?” he passive-agressivised. I’m not really sure what the comment was all about, but I know that it was the final straw that turned me off to the Quarter After, which is a shame because they only hit their stride in their final song. It was at this point that they channeled the psychedelia of the Turtles rather than their harmonies and chord lexicon – must more interesting in my book.
Third Sparks in Hand, I stood in the back of the club, and man was it hot. “Hotter than a gaytur in a desert swamp,” John Adams assured me. Indeed. It was at this point that I noticed I was standing next to the Quarter After’s front man. We had a little chat:
“Good set,” I mostly lied.
“Thanks,” he replied. “Do you know if security took care of that guy up front?”
“Security?”
“Yeah, the guy up front that was heckling us, do you know if security kicked him out? Who should I talk to about getting that done?”
Douche.
I immediately passed the L.A. resident off on an unsuspecting Andrew and Eric, who were sitting right there and, working the door, should have been more immediately obviously somehow involved with the club. You know what, I hear people say “New York: If you can make it here, you can make it anywhere.” Bullshit. Houston has the toughest, rudest, most likely to heckle your ass crowds I have ever seen. Bianca, who has toured extensively, agrees. Houston: if you can make it here, you can make it anywhere you pansy Sunset Stripper. Kick someone out cause they made fun of you? Get over it.
Fortunately, the Brian Jonestown Massacre began to play. I have only a passing (out) familiarity with the band, and so I didn’t know what to expect. I did know to expect, however, creative engine Anton Newcombe’s mouth. Even before their set, after the Quarter After’s first song, he was in the sound booth, yelling into to the overhead PA system “Turn down your treble, you’re killing us out here!” Between literally every song, overly long pauses were filled with Newcombe alternately chiding and celebrating the audience: “You don’t have any idea who my friends are, man. You have no idea who I brought here with me tonight and I think we should keep it that way,” he threatened; “My voice is dead guys, but I wanna do one more song. I’d rather cancel Arizona than stop now,” he called out to applause; But mostly, he just asked that we “chill, take it easy, have a good time.” Will do.
Getting back to the music (and my own funeral), the BJM really have their sound nailed. Each song has ‘their sound,’ a wax paper-wrapped hoagie of psychedelic progressive rock, with a light spread of Velvet mustard and Steppenwolf sauce. I’ll be the first to admit that I don’t really know much about the 60s music that BJM is alleged to be so derivative of. If I liked potted meat, I might say that it was the main ingredient in the BJM sandwich – a mystery combination whose contents I am willing to be ignorant about because it’s just so tasty.
Royal Albert Hall by Spiritualized has always been my favorite live album. And, frequently, I found the set I watched last night invoke the same satisfaction; a lazy river of the dynamic escalations and ebbs of three guitars tangling together in a bird’s nest of sound. The highlight was the second to last song – I don’t know if it went on for ten minutes or thirty, but it was ecclesiastic; a crescendo whose extent cleared half the club. They should have just stopped there.
And at my funeral, they will. Pushing the balloons every skyward, from close to distant, both playful and serene, as people who I publicly loved rub shoulders with those I privately loathed, across a little brook, in a wide field framed with power lines, here in Houston. If you can make it here, you can make it anywhere.
DJ Screw – Three ‘N’ The Morning: Part Two
Big Moe – City of Syrup
Double 7” Compilation
You know, New York is just fine. There's plenty of all night eatieries. Some of my nearest and dearest live there. But let me state, definitively, that New York has NOTHING on Houston if it allows a