Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

Creative

Filmstar’s Sugartown Dance Party

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On Saturday night Filmstar (the band fronted by E, with me on bass) played the Sugartown concert series at Tritone, and had a lot of sweaty fun doing it.

Elise rocking the mic at Sugartown (in one of her fav concert action shots) on June 25, 2011. Photo courtesy of Tritone.

I’ve now played a handful of festivals and sold-out shows, but I don’t have a lot of experience with converting a crowd – that moment where an unknown band turns the tide of chatter to become the focus of the room.

On Saturday I watched from my vantage point on the stage – and felt in my gut – as Filmstar did just that. We had the help of a handful of boosters in the crowd, but for a moment during our second song I could feel the attention of the room focus on us. Suddenly we weren’t playing to the sides and backs of heads – we were playing to ears and eyes.

Part of what’s awesome about Sugartown is how common that conversion can be. Sugartown is a monthly show featuring (really good) all female-fronted or majority-female bands.

If you know me well, you know I’m not usually into reverse discrimination programming, but Sugartown isn’t about excluding boys. It’s about creating a haven for fans of female rockers to find four new bands to love every month.

And, as we know, I’m a fan of female rockers. As are all of the other Sugartown attendees. Thus the frequent conversion, and typical friendly vibe.

E and I quickly made friends with the first band, Yumi Sekai. Lead singer Salena Kress said she had tried to start up a failed math rock act before settling on the Yumi Sekai sound, but I felt like I could still feel the lineage. YS was like mathless math rock – all the crazy instrumental breakdowns and killer riffs with none of the “we’re counting really hard now” compound changes and screwed-up faces.

Dance party in-progress at Sugartown on June 25, 2011. Photo courtesy of Tritone.

Salena and Jackie Wechsler trade lead guitar duties while Salena delivers intensely pretty vocals. Even when she rises up to her topmost rock belt she sounds less like a screaming rock banshee and more like a Disney princess out for revenge.

I mentioned that to her after the set, and she totally got it. “I like melodic music,” Salena told me, “it can rock, but the singing has to be good.”

If that sounds familiar, it’s because that’s my policy too. Needless to say, Salena and I hit it off. We did some booty-shaking together during the closing set from Girls Dresses as Girls.

It’s so different for me being a bassist instead of a band-leader. My job of holding down the low end and supporting the rhythm leaves me more open to experience what’s happening in the room. When a dance party sprung up during our set, I did what came naturally – I danced, kicked, smiled, and laughed.

We converted the room, and the room converted me.

It was a good night.

I know I look like the band nerd here, but in my defense, based on Glenn's capo position I think this might have been the exact moment the dance party began to break out. So I was probably using my measure of an open E-string as an opportunity to execute a killer dance move, which is hard to depict accurately in a photograph. Or, I am the band nerd. Photo courtesy of Tritone.

it’s a glam rock life

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At about midnight on Saturday Gina and I were having some issues.

At that time we were on the third song of our full-length, fully-electric Arcati Crisis set at Fergie’s pub.

Actually, we were about four minutes into trying to start our third song, my one-minute and six-second tune, “Glam.”

In case you are bad at rock math, 4:1 is not a very good prep-time to play-time ratio.

On the left side of the stage, one of Gina’s two lowest strings was a hair out of tune. On the right side of the stage, I was playing the opening riff to my own song in the wrong key (which sorta made Gina’s ever-so-minor tuning issue a moot point).

Even in the moment I was struck by the Alanis-Irony that after six months of preparing for our big electric debut we were having the kind of rock-stoppage that regularly felled us a decade ago when we were acoustic teenagers, all while our brand new drummer looked on, bemused.

That’s rock for you. You can practice all your high flying solos and set up an awesome effects chain, but rock has some basic requirements to fulfill and one of them is playing in the same key as each other (unless you want to play more experimentally and/or with a lot more distortion than we do).

You don’t think about this stuff when you watch a pop band play their new single on Saturday Night Live. They have guitar techs. The drummer has a click track in ear so they can cue samples. One of the guitarists is actually playing into a midi sequencer so it doesn’t matter too much if he’s a hair out of tune. And on every chorus the singer is doubled by a ten-track, four-part harmony pulled right off of her record.

That shit is way above our heads.

Of course, if one of them forgets what key the song is in they’re still in trouble, so I suppose what I’m saying is Gina would do fine on Saturday Night Live, but I would be immortalized in my own Ashlee Simpson moment.

But not really. Because I am a freakish perfectionist, and we had played all of these songs hundreds of times already, and we already played an awesome sneak preview date and teaser set and two awesome songs, and I was not about to let me forgetting for three measures the song was not actually in F ruin my night.

The upshot of this story is that the gig was awesome. The whole “Glam” snafu was barely a blip. On our third try we just started the damn thing, and after the eight seconds of dischordant intro all of our issues were over. We proceeded directly from that into a raucous debut of our cover of “Moonage Daydream.” Then we played Gina’s brand-new “Song for Mrs. Schroeder” for the first time, and turned in pitch-perfect versions of “Apocalyptic Love Song” and “Love Me Love Me Not” to end our first set.

I even hit the little hammer in the last verse of “Love Me Not” I had missed in our last few rehearsals.

Over an hour later we closed the night by launching into one of the most awesome, hard-rocking versions of Gina’s seven-minute epic “Brother John” that we’ve ever unleashed.

When it was over we said thank you, doled out sweaty hugs to our friends that had hung around until last call to catch every song, and got paid.

And then I drove a car inside of the Philadelphia city limits for the first time ever – at 2:00 a.m. on a Sunday morning – and I didn’t even kill any drunk douche bags on Walnut.

In sum, the “Glam” incident barely even ranks. I’m only devoting precious digital column-inches to it as a reminder that the stupid crap that happens to me in the middle of a show only has to matter if I let it.

Otherwise, it’s eight painfully out-of-tune seconds out of a three-and-a-half hour gig, and that is a really effing good out-of-tune to awesome ratio.

Intuition (an Arcati Crisis adventure)

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I listen to and look at my favorite bands and wonder, “how do they do that?”

I don’t mean the rock star posturing or the songwriting. I’ve figured both of those things out, to a degree. They come with practice (in the mirror).

I mean the intuition. The knowing where a song goes, and how to construct the arrangement of thrumming bass and pounding drums that surround the initial guitar or piano that lie in the center.

I’ve always assumed Gina and I have some special magic in that regard in the the peculiar alchemy of our harmony. And, well, we do. It’s the intuition of best friends. We know each other so well that when one of us teaches a new song to the other it’s like we’re adding an extension of our own hands and voice. There is less and less of  us asking “is this part okay?” and more of   “yes, that!”

That hasn’t been our experience with other musicians. That’s not to say we haven’t played with some brilliant people who have made indelible additions to our songs. It’s just that the additions tend to add too much.

(A notable exception being Dante Bucci, who is invariably a perfectly intuitive collaborator in any setting on any instrument. Also, our friend Chaz arranged the definitive percussion for “Apocalyptic Love Song.”)

As a result, I assumed that there were only two kinds of potential bandmates – people who play well because they understand context (the Rolling Stones know each other, Gina understands me, Dante understands us, Chaz knows our influences) or because their bandleader dictated each note to them.

(That latter seems like an ultimate bit of hubris – why invite another player you respect and not trust them to do anything? But musicians can be freaks of control, and we’ve all seen bands run that way, so it’s certainly a valid angle (which is why we don’t (and may never) have a bass player).)

Now I understand that there is a third category – that an intuitive player can find their way inside of a song instead of adding layers to its exterior. Sure, practice helps. But, the intuition is an intangible. It’s either there or not.

Zina is there. Every one of our songs takes three plays. One to hear how we do it. One to try a few things. One with our new drum arrangement. Fin.

That’s not to say that she doesn’t continue to change and adapt her playing, or that we don’t ask for some tweaks here and there. It’s just that she hears it – us, the song, our gestalt with each other – and then she joins it.

I’m amazed every time. Now I understand my favorite bands a little bit better.

Want to hear the new drummed up Arcati Crisis spectacle, complete with rapturous Gina guitar solos? You can attend Dorian’s Parlor on Saturday 3/12, or just catch us at Fergies Pub on Saturday 4/2.

You Sound Like a Vulture (an Arcati Crisis adventure)

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For the past few months Gina and I have been rehearsing with Zina, who is also the drummer in E’s band Filmstar.

It started as a speculative exercise – what would Arcati Crisis sound like with drums? We got our answer pretty quickly, as Zina is a ridiculously fast study. We’re already eight songs into drumming up our repertoire, and last night Zina polished off “Bucket Seat” after only a second rehearsal of it.

“Bucket Seat” has been one of my favorite songs from the moment I finished writing it in 2003. When Gina and I made Arcati Crisis formal in 2007 it was the second new song I brought to her to add to the repertoire, and in minutes she found the off-kilter chords that tangle with my staccato diminished stabs. Now the song sounds nude if I play it solo.

Zina was proving to be equally as intuitive on it. After our first run with Zina we fine-tuned a few spots and ran it twice more. It was solid, and we were playing it at the right tempo, but I felt like it was over too quickly.

I turned to Gina. “I think you need to play a guitar solo out of the fast part after the key change.”

One of my favorite aspects of the drumming process is that rather than constrict arrangements around our guitar playing, drums have opened up more space. Zina’s rhythm takes the burden of the two of us. These are songs we’ve played literal hundreds of times, but we keep finding new spaces inside them.

That said, nothing’s structure has really changed yet. The songs are all the same shapes they’ve always been. We haven’t added any funky breakdowns. Or guitar solos.

“A solo?” Gina asked, a little tentatively.

“Sure. You know, like what you play in the intro. Try it.”

We tried it. Gina stopped after four notes, two of which were pretty cool. “It doesn’t quite fit.”

“Yeah, but if you keep the two that worked, and descend…” I started imitating her guitar with my voice, wailing a solo. “raw wah, whear wheh wah, rah weh wah,” I paused for a breath between phrases, “and then a lower ascending line.” I climbed back up the scale, “until it resolves!” I shouted, wheezing and wailing until I reached a bent note at the top.

I finished my performance and looked at Gina expectantly.

“You sounded like a vulture,” she said.

“Thank you.”

“You want me to play it like that?”

“Well, you know. That’s the general shape of it.”

She regarded me skeptically while Zina looked on from behind the kit, bemused.

“I could draw it for you,” I offered, “like David Bowie did for Mick Ronson on ‘Moonage Daydream.’ I could go get crayons.”

“Oh, sure,” Gina mimed with her hands what I assumed to be an elaborate David Bowie crayon drawing, “that might work. Or we could just try to play it a few times.”

And that was how “Bucket Seat” acquired a guitar solo.

You can stream or download our full-length Live @ Rehearsal, Vol. 4 LP for free. Hear “Bucket Seat” and other rocked up Arcati Crisis songs at Dorian’s Parlor Neo-Victorian ball on Saturday March 12. There will be steampunk costumes. We’re also working on a ninja weeknight gig for February. Stay tuned.

Tattooed Mom’s Bumper Cars and Textual Healing

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Rocking my song from the Textual Healing soundtrack, "End With Me," upstairs at Tattoo Moms in a vintage bumper car. Photo courtesy of the incredible @MikeyIl

A long time ago – like, about half a life – I attended a birthday party upstairs at Tattooed Mom on South Street.

That is the sense-memory that struck me in the face Friday night when I trundled my two amps up the stairs to the Textual Healing book release party and took in the room with its two pool tables. I’ve been to Tattoo Moms several times since then, but that was the only occasion I had ever been upstairs.

Now I have a second indelible memory of Tattoo Moms – me, standing inside one of the vintage bumper cars in the upstairs back room, singing and playing squelchingly distorted acoustic guitar licks from my place in the back seat.

The whole story of Eric Smith and his book is a sort of hazy dream to me. I can’t believe I wrote a song to the first chapter, or sent it to him a minute later, or wrote another one, or then wrote AN ENTIRE BOOK inspired by his manic and infectious “GO ARTS” energy.

That’s why I was so thankful to be playing for him, for his book, and for a room of people I’ve come to really love and cherish – literally too many Twitter folks for me to try to remember and collect their handles into this single post post.

What I do remember is finishing “Curves Sketched In Letters” and starting up my super-secret cover of “Fuck You” and watching the entirety of the room on my right – including Nan, Schmidt, Linzy and Jess, and a slew of other people – sing all of the callbacks every time I stopped for a breath.

The entirely too beautiful Allie with a copy of Textual Healing and author Eric Smith, courtesy of @MikeyIl.

(Also, intriguingly, the couch in front of me bore a girl I’m quite certain I went on a pseudo-date with in high school. I couldn’t tell if she was enjoying me or not, or if she even recognized me. Would someone from that birthday party recognize me now, playing guitar, if they hadn’t seen me in all of those intervening years? I was sorry she left early, as I sorely wanted to see if it was really her (and, if it was, have her experience how hot my wife looked).)

After my brief set half of Venice Sunlight took the stage bumper car to play a few songs acoustic. I had a grand time chatting VS’s Jay and Dave up well into the night about their band and brand new CD, released on Saturday and just-about-free to download.

Otherwise, the weekend was uneventful. I was couch-bound on Saturday with a howling backache (thanks to all the amp-trundling), and Sunday was spent cleaning and rehearsing solo music.

Now for a new week! Rehearsal, Freelance Whales show, Black Swan (!!), rehearsal, night off, and my tenth appearance at the Shubin Theatre Holiday revue – serving as the house-band with Gina. We’ll debut a cover of Counting Crows’ “Long December” in the long, proud tradition of sad Christmas songs as helmed by Judy Garland’s original “(Have Yourself) A Merry Little Christmas.”