Not Much Water Comin' Over The Hill

I

(David Berman, courtesy Drag City Records.)

David Berman passed yesterday at 52 – if you don't know who he is, imagine a richer baritone-d, off-kilter Leonard Cohen who softened his all-encompassing darkness with acid-country wit. Imagine Leonard disappeared near the height of his powers, occasionally sighted in the Internet's bowels, only to reappear after a decade with arguably the best record of his career and a slew of self-effacing, brutally honest interviews – only to pass away less than a week before hitting the road for his first performances in 10+ years.

I have to use a terrible comparison of two completely different artist in a weak attempt to express the simple fact – Berman had no peers. Very few songwriters of his (my? our? I'm 17 years younger, but grew up playing with many bands who out-aged us by a decade) generation can measure up – and certainly, his style and wordplay made him singular, even amongst aging indie demigods whose very existence in 2019 are challenged by the realities of the music industry. "Icon" doesn't feel right, but good friend Pete said it best today: "I've never read so many eulogies."

To hear him was to love him – to know him. Probably why I left a bar record night yesterday to go cry quietly in my car, feeling exactly like and completely different from the 19-year-old who did the same in his dorm after Elliott Smith. Maybe it's the additional generation that's passed since then, or just 16 years of sleeping, driving, drinking, and worrying – all that living formed callouses that yesterday's news sloughed straight through.

II

Vienna, Austria has an amazing fast, modern train whose terminal is just down a few escalators from the international airport – for 10 euro or so, you can jet right to the city center on one of the smoothest, quietest, most comfortable airport transit systems I've ever ridden on. In May, Tyler and I flew in together and had settled into said train, when I connected to WiFi to get that first news drip after hours spent on international flights.

In a tumultuous spring, I had publically asked for – then received! – news of a new Bill Callahan record. Thought I'd try my manifestation luck again in April by asking the Gods for Dave Berman to return. The first thing I saw upon turning on my phone was the Purple Mountains news. I'd done it! Manifested another record out of the ether – I put my phone in Tyler's face, we high-fived, then bounded out of the train into a sunny Vienna, late afternoon, basking in the Stadtpark while watching toddlers scoot over a pedestrian bridge and summer revelers sip wine and chat in earshot of a quiet city stream. 

2019 was looking up, ripe with the return of possibility – right as we overcame the bland vagaries of adulthood to take a group ride down the Danube.

III

It's Spring 2006 and Everything, Now! is touring in a disused airport shuttle bus with handicap lift built into the rear door – most of us are in school at Ball State, so we've called the tour SPRING BAKED. Not only is the band a 6-piece at this point, but we've also got two good friends and roommates along for the ride. It's basically a rolling party bus – one overnight drive, I hear screaming and nervous laughter and it's because one of the guitarists is pissing out the window while driving through Georgia's foothills so fast that the pee is just streaming back the side of the bus in warm rivulets, losing additional flow in each gap between the cheap sliding windows like a leaky irrigation channel.

At the close of this tour, we made a 2-night stop in Athens, GA (our lead singer/songwriter's hometown) to play one of our favorite DIY spots – a multi-story-tall basement set into a hillside beneath street-level commercial storefronts. Because it was a weekend, the show was scheduled early-ish, 7pm, so as not to compete with all the other venues in town. 

We'd begun making friends in Nashville with a bunch of angel-voiced, bearded dudes who played multiple instruments and had a shit-ton of great rock-n-roll bands: Hands Down Eugene, The Carter Administration, and some others I can't remember. Through one of these connects (God knows how any of these super-talented Nashville folks dug our shit-gear, longhair, psych-punk-junk-prog jams...) we met a brilliant slide guitar player. That night in Athens, he was sitting in with a band opening for the Silver Jews at the 40 Watt.

[Note: I'm realizing with some research tonight that this was the first Silver Jews show ever. Previously...I was only aware that it was their first tour.]

I was 3 or so years into a deep Pavement obsession that started the second I heard S&E – Silver Jews ambled into my ears via a burnt CD from some friend and the laconic sounds of what I first thought were Pavement gone honky-tonk eventually seeped into my veins. When Tanglewood Numbers came out in 2005, I was Music Director at WCRD – and songs from that LP that should be goddam standards today ("Punks in the Beerlight", "Sometimes A Pony Gets Depressed", "I'm Getting Back Into Getting Back Into You") rapidly made their way onto our automated playlist and my regular show. 

Back to Athens – slide guitar guy gets ahold of Jon and asks if 2 of us want on the guestlist for the Silver Jews show. We figure we can make it straight out of our set, and agree. I'm not sure how we decided it was us who could go out of the 8 other than...we were the biggest fans? It was Jon's band? Regardless, I remember squeezing into the packed club and hearing the Joos rip through a great set, Dave dressed in a maroon blazer and towering over the stage and band. Once he started singing, all felt right. 

This was a musician's dream – the best night of my life! I was pretty sure – I remember coming down from the basement keg beer, thanking Slide Guitar, and leaving 40 Watt on cloud nine, a completely different person than the shy, uncultured nerd who nervously moved into a dorm 3 years earlier. We decamped back to the DIY space and drank through a 3rd show of the night – some fast-as-fuck punk via Guyana Punch Line that jackhammered thankfulness into my skull.

(Everything, Now! circa Spring 2006, on a beach in St. Pete, FL.)

IV

As I sit and stare at my wall of records, I suppose that the reason my shelves are always overflowing (besides an addictive personality) is that music affords you a workingman's way to connecting with a higher power – 5, 10, 15 bucks to see or experience art created from some body/soul/sweat/tears – art that takes you places, bridges divides between strangers, and attaches itself, barnacle-style, to events in your life, accentuating and colouring in the meaning of life events and decisions that you don't recognize the Power, Importance, or Heft of when you are in them. 

Only later. The gift of hindsight is a weird drug for self-analysis. In some ways, a curse: it's hindsight and our need to shape stories in order to make sense of the World that forces Berman's existence into an arc, when, like our own, it was more likely a squiggly line, frayed here, grayed there. We wanted to see Purple Mountains as a redemption, as someone defeating something inside themselves, for a moment or a hundred moments, and emerging the victor.

Upon his passing, the arc shifts: the album becomes a presage; and who but ourselves can parse the two-sided coin of self-lacerating wit and darkness? Sometimes we don't even know what side of our own coin is heads up.

I'm deeply sad that DCB won't be able to look back at the outpouring of love inspired by Purple Mountains and his passing. I hope he found peace.

Stage Fright? Yeah, Right.

The domestic creature I have morphed into (sorry for clogging your feeds with pictures of a loaf of bread...) may not pass muster with the reality of my early twenties: more weekends than not, you would've found me on the stage (or in the corner of a room) with my brothers-in-sound, plying our woolly version of garage-psych-pop across the South...the Midwest...the East...the Plains...pretty much anywhere that would have us (and a few places that wouldn't). By my amateur count, not including practices, the number of shows I was physically present to play at exceeds 400.

For whomever is keeping stats: that's 3.7% of the nights in my entire life.

The halcyon days of thoughtfully rocking.

Fast-forward ten years or so: I took the stage twice this year. Twice. My percentage must've taken a hit. Those two performances though, would've been highlights in many past years, and included a magical aforementioned set with Athens, GA-based Circulatory System, and our seventh or so set at the annual Second Helpings Tonic Ball, which was ten feverish, sweaty minutes of Velvet Underground chord-bashing.

"Oh yeah," my body said, while gripping an ice-cold Hamm's in the overfull backstage room, "that's a helluva lot of fun." Which brings me to my realization for 2015: I like to play shows, and I should play more of them. And go to a few more, along the way...

But, like any artist knows, reality is an illusion unless you plan to go do something. So, I'm hoping a couple key things transpire that will be the impetus to sling some gear around in my hatchback and hassle my friends with a minimal amount of shameless promotion (just enough to let a hint of guilt into their conscience should they choose not to attend).

• a new Wooves record. Yes, I've talked about this before – the band formed from close friends who needed an excuse to hang out in a decrepit Eastside basement. Then, it turned out that we weren't that terrible (though, fair warning, it's still basement-produced-slacker-rock). Despite having but a single show under our belt (a year ago in October), we finally finished a second ten-song album, which should be out late this Winter in early 2015. And! We had a successful rehearsal, to quote a witness who was upstairs whilst we fogged the cellar with incense, Old Overholt fumes, and practice amp fuzz, "It sounded like there was a real band down there." That's basically a Christgau A+ for us. Springtime should see our new set unleashed upon the Illinois-Indiana highway corridor.
• some weirdo-skronk-experimentalism-turned-exercise-in-excess-and-restraint that gathers in a garage in-town to record noises to tape. It's a secret but it's not a secret. Rumor has it that a set will be carved out of the cut-n-paste spliced sound memories so that we may inhabit the corner of a stranger's party, or other such non-stage-space. I'm even contemplating a gear purchase for the first time since I had to buy a double-keyboard stand some five years ago.

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Day #9 of Think Kit!

Thirty Ain't Too Shabby

In January, I turned 30. In what has become an annual tradition, my buddy Andy & I took a bus up to Chicago to stay with our old roommate and man-of-fine-taste, Tyler. We feasted with the most solid dudes around upon hams and other hooved delicacies at Publican, which is where this stein set recessed and noble. Oh, and then we were accosted by a unstable fool, and nearly stranded by a polar-vortex-induced ice/shitstorm.

But that's another story.



Bread. I kept making it. And, I was able to eat some of the country's finest loaves. Tartine. The Mill. And stumbling upon Cellar Door Provisions. To be continued...

 

After Amelia got back from England and her grandmother's funeral, we took some day trips around the area, including her first visit to Turkey Run State Park, on one of the most astoundingly beautiful days of the year. Indiana, you clean up well...when you're surrounded by microclimates and funky, ancient moss-encased canyons.

In June, we moved. For the second time in three years, just a few blocks away to a two-story pad with a *ahem* baller *ahem* kitchen. I used the opportunity to set-up a new listening station (Pro-Ject deck, NAD amplifier, used Cerwin Vegas) in the living room. And yes, the speakers reside on the floor. Just outside the frame was our bedframe, waiting to be taken apart, carried upstairs, and put back together again.

 

Everything, Now! only played two shows this year (and one was a ten-minute set at the 13th annual Tonic Ball). The other? A mind-opening set before our psychedelic-pop heroes in Circulatory System. The night flew by in a dream-state, though their set (and new long-player) was phenomenal.

I got wrapped up in World Cup fever, again rooting for the squad while nervously watching the early rounds. Despite a terrible draw, we made it through to the knockout round, which necessitated the donning of my American flag shorts (courtesy Tyler) and a bike-ride down to Mass Ave., which had been closed off to watch the game on projection screens. We lost, but after a late goal and an impossibly near miss, hope was thick in the air.

Last year, I journeyed West for a thirtieth birthday gathering of dudes. Such an epic time was had driving south down the Pacific Coast Highway from San Fran to LA...that I had to go back. Had to. Plus, Amelia had to hear all the tales and see none of the sights. This time, we ventured north up the PCH to the Lost Coast and redwood country. 

It is simply the most stunning landscape, and raw, sun-showered coastline imaginable. I have to go back. Have to.

(Somewhere near Mendocino.)

(Punta Gorda, Lost Coast.)

(Amelia atop San Fran's Twin Peaks.)

 A few weeks later, my elbow randomly swelled up. Then it got hot. Then I got a fever. Then I went to urgent care. Then I went to the ER. Then I went home. Then I went back to the ER. Then I was in the hospital for three nights. I think this was the day I got out, before collapsing into a pile of exhaustion.

To celebrate being alive (and, I had already bought the tickets) – Amelia and I drove to Chicago to see the reunion tour for Slowdive, one of my absolute favorites (peep Souvlaki for hazy pop gems). The show was stellar, as much so as staying and eating breakfast (and drinking whiskey) at Longman & Eagle. To whomever planted that seed in my brain...good work.

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Day #1 of Think Kit!

did you hear the one about the snow

Being all weathered-in (even the gym closed for a day), we've been watching plenty of movies, in-between catching up on Egypt-happenings via the New Yorker's excellent "Dispatches from Egypt" online series and frequent Newshour viewing. Also, completed a large amount of updates to the oft-neglected Everything, Now! internet portal, including figuring out how to stream 4 of our albums in their entirety, and putting a sampler EP up for download.


Cover art for our new CD 4xEP...

In-between, managed to escape the icy clutches of the near-Eastside to see (for the first-time, shame on me) the best American band of the past quarter-century: Yo La Tengo. Post-brewpub pints & burgers, we caught both halves of their set, the first of which was decided by the spin of a wheel. Though I was rooting for a Condo Fucks set, I was pleasantly surprised by DUMP, as bassist James McNew took over Ira's axe(s) and played a stellar, pretty clean and vibrato-y set of guitar-pop numbers. Plus a shredfest at the end, and the dude can shred. The second half of the set was not surprising, but allowed for all the YLT tropes. After classic mellow-organ-and-polyrhythm opener "Autumn Sweater", there was the R&B skronk of recent jam "Periodically Double or Triple". Other highlights were Summer Sun standout "Little Eyes", and on the opposite side of the noise-spectrum, aged guitar-freakout proto-punk blast of "Artificial Heart". There was the requisite noise-kraut jam which saw Ira switching guitars, James roughhousing his bass into his full-stack, loads of feedback closing out their set pre-encore. The encore was mostly quiet & acoustic, a warming coda on a below-zero night.


Pretty much ready for a road-trip to India.

After watching quirky doc Home Movie earlier in the week (a must-see for the Gator Farm owner alone), on a whim we watched director Chris Smith's more recent offering The Pool, a serious comedy/coming-of-age tale in Hindi, set in the beautiful city of Goa. Besides making me want to travel immediately, it was an unexpectedly great movie. The dialog was warm in tone, funny, poignant, smart; the colors fantastically vivid yet real, the locations full of dusty beauty. Unfortunately, you have to compare it to Slumdog Millionaire, but I feel like The Pool is much more realistic and touching in its depth. Just an excellent story.


Get out of my head, Robert Blake. With your no-eyebrows face and glistening hair!

Last night we had a double feature of Lost Highway and...Aziz Ansari: Intimate Moments for a Sensual Evening. After the anxiety-ridden creepitude of another Lynch feature, I guess I just needed a palate-cleanser. Lost Highway, upon second viewing, may be my favorite non-Peaks Lynch creation. The story circles around on itself, the sense of suffocation and dread is fairly thick throughout, and the pace is deliberately slow yet carries momentum. Clearly going to need a third viewing. As for Aziz, his post-meta-whatever style does hold water; story-jokes about messing with a younger cousin via-Facebook and hanging out with Kanye both carry weight. For someone who's schtick is so heavy on "not-giving-a-fuck", all the intra-family joking was extra-funny to see. Meta, indeed.

weekly list, vol. 5

here's to another bi-weekly post. work has been crazy, and lots of shows/practices/gardening/visitin'/airport-runnin' has been going on as well.


these dudes were not this chilled out in the 100-degree room at the bishop

saw:
--tons of the world cup--
i was lucky enough to have several days off during the first couple weekends of group play, and devoured all of the U.S. games, the latter two of which were two of the most incredible games i've ever watched. i think it was 14+ years of playing soccer year-round, thinking about the world cup, the US team, tab ramos (!!!), looking at jersey's in the eurosport catalog...i think all of that built up an emotional investment in the national team that i still retain. despite not having access to many soccer broadcasts (and sorry...i just can't watch MLS. to me, the MLS is like the last 30 minutes of the US-Ghana match: long-balls all the time. show me some possession, fer cryin' out loud!), watching the national team can still throw my nerves into a frenzy. keeping track of/watching the algeria game at work was roughly equivalent to downing 6 pots of coffee over a 2-hour period. just shredded my insides. watching the US-Ghana game with mostly bloomington peeps i hadn't met was still a great collective experience. i don't know of another sport that inspires such revelry, such archetypal human experience. ball + grass + goal. poetry.

heard:
--tortoise (live @ the bishop in bloomington)--
i'm somewhat familiar with tortoise's back catalog, and recently enjoyed quite a bit the monochormatically-covered Beacons of Ancestorship. bloomington is pretty much the best place to go in the state, and the Bishop is a small venue (150 would fill it out) with the 2 most important qualities of small, nice clubs. Good sound and good (and cheap!) draft beer selection! So, when I heard Tortoise was going to be in town, I had to buy tickets. Amelia couldn't go, so former Muncie-dude Lord Zed went with. Aside from the club being 90+ degrees due to how hot it was outside,,,it was a really great show. Sound was superb, band was in top form...totally awesome to see a band like that in such a small club. Although I heard earlier that day that Tortoise, "is good for 5 minutes...and then you get the idea," I found the opposite to be true. They're good for 5 minutes, and then my brain locked into the grooves, and they were pretty awesome the rest of their 90-minute-plus set. And! It ended before midnight. Which just goes to show---rock 'n roll with older dudes are the best shows to see. Last time I saw Dinosaur Jr., they also wrapped by 11pm! I mean, you can still party afterwards...no need to wait till 11:30pm to start the show (I'm looking at you, Bloomington).

--consumed--
--my homemade pizza of the summer (made with light wheat peasant loaf dough----makes totally bomb pub-style pizza crust): fresh whole milk mozzarella + fresh basil + tomato/basil sauce + thin sliced andouille sausage. !!! so good.
--cheap & juicy pork brisket sandwiches at the smokehouse on shelby. and sweet potato krinkle fries! had never even seen these before. now...if only the service wasn't so on-and-off. but still, 6.50 for the sandwich plus 2 sides...good deal.
--made the brother, wes, try indian food for the first time at the lunch buffet at shalimar. everything was fresh, garlic naan was pretty supreme. now that i have a dining card....i'll have to go back. plus, wes didn't eat himself into a hole like i did.
--some mole enchiladas (with great chips & salsa) at bloomington's el norteno. only about 8 bux, and the mole sauce, while not as rich as el sol's, and with a pronounced cocoa-heavy taste, was pretty tasty for being relatively inexpensive, and not to mention, plentiful. if only i'd have thought about how hot the bishop would be later that evening...
--AND, perhaps most importantly, after making an early-AM airport run, i successfully conquered the U-shaped bar at the steer-in. where i injected a pot of coffee and a diner breakfast coated in tabasco while still cracking on john dos passos' U.S.A. trilogy.