That was a one line email from my Mom, which in many ways sums up how awesome she is. She let drove me and my friend Adam down to Pittsburgh (err… actually I drove down, she drove back) when we saw Sonic Youth headline lollapalooza ’95. Now what… 11 years later I’m seeing them for maybe the 7th time? not sure… First time seeing them since Jim O’Rourke moved on to doing other things. I’m pretty psyched as always for such things.
What is up with that? Where has the canned spinach and frozen spinach industry been while everyone has been throwing away their bagged spinach. I call for more people to buy frozen spinach, which at least I feel has it’s own good flavor and style and is super easy to microwave up. I mean people need their spinach. Also, I can’t say enough about swiss chard, mustard greens, turnip greens, beet greens and collard greens. People need their greens. I can’t say anything more other than that right now.
That said, well… yeah, that’s about it.
I would have to say one thing mainly… improvisational experimental, avant-garde music. John Zorn just got a MacArthur grant, which is to say there will probably be even more experimental music out there than ever before. For some reason the roots of improv Jazz run so deep in NYC that the far out stuff you see there is almost always being performed by seasoned veterans as opposed to youths obsessed more with loudness than anything. I still remember catching Cecil Taylor and Thurston Moore at the Cooler or honestly a million other acts there or at tonic or the knitting factory.
So there, I said it, that’s what I miss about New York the most. I guess I feel guilty about not specifically searching out improv experimental stuff here in LA perhaps for fear that I would find something that would compete with the clubs (often free) in NYC.
This was a great show. Deerhoof lit up the stage as a three piece. I didn’t know the troubadour was sort of a medium sized club, but it was perfect and nicely intimate. Ceramic Dog (sold as a sort of Marc Ribot project) was killer. I had seen Marc Ribot do random things around NYC, but this was cohesive rock/jazz/punk/techno everything madness. I say techno or disco cause there was definitely a drum machine bit (and a filter on the snare or something?) where they were all singing “party… on the dance floor” It was great. Marc Ribot was playing a Harmony Stratotone like the gold one in the middle of the page. I wish I had been closer during their set, because he just tore it up with that thing. His use of effects was seamless.
During the Deerhoof set there was a mishap when one of the guitar pedals died (I think it was just a boost pedal, some boutique brand) and the guitarist (whose name I don’t have on me at the moment) had to scramble. It was a great show. I was glad to be much closer to the stage for them, cause you can really see how they make a huge joyful noise out of seemingly nothing.