Thursday Gig Tip: Béton Armé at the Cobalt

So on May 21st, Montreal street punk band Béton Armé headlines at the revitalized Cobalt. I don't know them, but they sound really great! Bandcamp here.

And it turns out I've seen and enjoyed all three of the openers, even shot vid of them. Code-22 isn't Oi! and (last I saw'em, anyhow) they have hair, but they're a witty, catchy pop punk band named for a code at a Commercial Drive grocery store that one of the members worked at, to catch people shoplifting. Caught them at Alf House and dug it. They stuck around and danced to Night Court afterwards. Was a great night, even if Alf was a bit dank. Gig report here.

Toy Tiger is Bugsy, one of the people behind the Cobalt, who I interviewed for the Straight online awhile back (before he was actually on the cover of the print version with this story by Mike). I didn't get to see more than a couple of songs by them because a friend got upset about some of Bugsy's political agitations from the stage, but I did manage to shoot vid of one. The bandcamp for their new album is here!

First Attack is Greg Huff's post-Bishops Green band, in which he takes up the guitar. I don't do a lot of street punk or Oi!, but I have very much enjoyed this album. Saw them at the Cobalt previously, shot a clip. Their Bandcamp is here -- they have a new song, as of this January!

Tickets are cheap for a bill this stacked -- under $30. Available here. Got mine!  

Lou Reed, Street Hassle, and Aram Bajakian night two: the songs

In many ways the high point, emotionally, of the Street Hassle performance at the VIFF Centre last night was overhearing an uber-Lou Reed fan named Dickie tell bandleader Aram Bajakian after the show a story about how, after years of following his work, he had finally gotten to see Lou in Seattle and was privileged to meet him after the show and tell him how much his music mattered to him. Lou was apparently very sweet and receptive, and Dickie got choked up telling the story; Aram was moved, too, in turn, and then they had a charming exchange about one of Lou's pedals, which Aram now owns and had with him: "Is that Lou's pedal?!" ...wherupon Dickie asked if he could pick it up, and since I was standing there, I offered to photograph him with it. Something really sweet about that moment. Someone show these to Dickie? Two variants, impossible to pick between them: 

...but if that was an impossibly touching human moment to witness, impossible to quantify -- hell, I got a bit misty writing about it just now! -- the songs were pretty fuckin' great too. My favourite moment was "Last Great American Whale," which never in a million years would I have thought they'd tackle, and which shows how fearless they were in trying to capture Lou's inflection, more-or-less speaking his way through the song. There wasn't a flub in the night. The chord structures may have been simple, as Bajakian remarked, but there's nothing simple about delivering a Lou Reed song, capturing his inflections and rhythms. They did this very, very well throughout the night, never with a syllable seeming misplaced or forced. 

"Whale" was one of two New York songs they did, the other being the night's most rocking number, "There Is No Time" They were the least-deep of the cuts offered by the band, along with "Cremation (Ashes to Ashes)," which ended up being the only song Bajakian sang himself.  

Note that any links here are just to Lou songs. I did shoot a few clips of the night, but have sent them to Aram to do with as he sees fit.  

After that, my other favourite tune of the night -- and certainly another I did not expect they'd play -- was "Families," off Lou's terrifically under-rated 1979 album The Bells. I had spun this at the bookstore where I work earlier the day, or at least side two. This is an album no one cares much about, it seems to me, unlike Street Hassle, which has some dark-horse fans out there, but they are very much of a piece, recorded a year apart, and both blessed with one seriously absurd stinker ("Disco Mystic" and "I Wanna Be Black") that makes them very hard to process as a whole, despite having some of Lou's most artful and ambitious music of the decade on them. Side two of The Bells (which has Ornette Coleman sideman Don Cherry on it; he even gets a co-credit as songwriter on one track!) is particularly astonishing (and it's the side "Families" is from). These two records are really where my interest in Lou as a solo artist begins -- completely the opposite of ARGH!!,who was in the audience both nights, and who grew up with those early Lou solo albums. There's no arguing with that sort of attachment, and I learned that his favourite number was probably "Coney Island Baby", which they did a beautiful reading of, for sure. But it's a song I just haven't fully connected with ever. I never much wanted to play football for the coach, even figuratively [and I find the album it's on weirdly produced and a bit too ornate, in a smooth pastel kinda way; it's maybe my least-favourite-sounding of Lou's 70s albums, right down there with Sally Can't Dance, different as those albums are]). I experience each of the studio albums pre-1978 as Lou trying to find his voice as a solo artist. Berlin succeeds, artistically, and Transformer succeeded commercially, but there's a who-am-I quality through the whole decade that only seems to really resolve into self-knowledge on Street Hassle. 

That's my thesis, anyhow. With Street Hassle, especially with that amazing title track (which they did, everyone who knows it waiting during the break between movements for someone to start clapping, which, impressively, only one person fell for), things get darker, richer, smarter, and we see the person who would give us Ecstasy and Magic and Loss and Lulu and such discovering his true voice (he'd found it live long before that but in terms of studio albums, they seem like they are all restlessly searching for an identity during that decade and never really finding one that wholly worked). There were still missteps post-1978 (is Mistrial his worst album, or have I misunderstood it?). And there's oddities like New Sensations, which produced two songs that were such hits back in my day that it's easy to under-appreciate the better tunes on the album (two of which were also represented tonight, "Doing the Things That We Want To" and the title track). It's actually a really good Lou Reed album, if you can forget about the singles for a bit.

There were two songs I didn't much know at all tonight; "Ennui" and "Rooftop Garden." The first is off Sally Can't Dance, one of the Lou albums I've owned and sold and do not now have, along with Coney Island Baby; the latter is off an album I have, Legendary Hearts, but I also tend to play one side of that more than the other. All three men sang at different points, with Aiden doing the most (and apparently freaking out a little when he developed an itch in his throat and had to sing through needing to cough!). 

All the members of the trio gave stellar performances. All the songs were very enjoyable, even the ones I didn't know. Bits of Stevan's and Aiden's phrasing sounded so close to Lou's at times that it was kind of eerie, really. And Aram really gets into his playing, rocking with his guitar, not in the sense of rocking-and-rolling, but in the sense of moving-back-and-forth with the music, kind of entranced. He goes deep into these songs. He would have been something to see live with Lou. He was something to see, live last night. 

Oh hey, look, someone has a video on Youtube of Lou live in Copenhagen in 2012 doing "Street Hassle" with Aram in the band... here's a clip I shot of the song at the VIFF event... 

RIP Cris Derksen, plus Aram Bajakian on "Street Hassle", Lou Reed and Metal Machine Music

Before I get to the Lou Reed events, ongoing at the VIFF Centre, I have to give an RIP to Cris Derksen. I am saddened to learn that she was taken from us, far too young, in a traffic collision in Alberta yesterday. I wish I'd seen her live more often. I no doubt have caught her as part of some ensemble VNM or jazzfest event but never in a front-and-centre capacity. My deepest association with her playing is the cello on Bison's "Wendigo Pt. 1: Quest for Fire" -- though I don't think I ever saw her join Bison onstage for that (I would have remembered!). 

What was that Eric Dolphy quote? (It was appended to a recording of a late, but not actually the final, performance of his, as suiting the context of a posthumous release): "When you hear music, after its over, it's gone in the air. You can never capture it again." My condolences to those who knew her or worked with her. 

That said, I've come to write about Lou... Note also there are a couple of significant errors in my Straight article about Aram Bajakian's presentation of two nights of Lou Reed, apropos of night two, which is tonight: I say that the performance of the music this evening, as with last night, comes before the film, but that is not so. If you wish to see Wim Wenders' Faraway, So Close! (which is included with the cost of the ticket), you have to get to the theatre THIS AFTERNOON at 3:30, before the live music (which starts at 7:45). I've never known the VIFF to do it this way -- usually the movie plays AFTER the music -- and confess that I simply did not read the blurb. The error has remained in the article, since my editor is literally on vacation. If anyone ends up feeling cheated out of the Wenders movie, my profound apologies! 

Also, it was Stellar Regions, not Interstellar Space, that Bajakian referenced, or the non-extant portmanteau of "Interstellar Regions" that saw print, which again was 100% my bad; Bajakian said it right, and I thought he meant the other album, and "fixed" it, but bungled my own fix. The error was caught and noted, with the aid of Tim Reinert, but again, my editor is sipping Suntory and posing for shots at various Shinto shrines, so as the Japanese would say, "shikata ga nai." (The equivalent of "It can't be helped" or the more Beckettian "Nothing to be done", sometimes also given as "sho ga nai"). I have no direct access to the Straight website, unlike this one, so if there's a fuckup, there's not much I can directly do.    

Sho ga nai.

Aram Bajakian and Lou Reed, 2011-2012? 

I do think it's going to be a very special night of music this evening; I'm quite excited to take it in, especially Bajakian's reading of "Street Hassle", in particular, which is a Lou Reed song I am still in my early acquaintance with, but find really moving. Bajakian explained the inclusion of that song in particular thusly: "When I got the gig with Lou, there's a really good friend from elementary school whose parents were, I think, hanging out with the Velvet Underground in the 1960s, and then they moved to this small town outside of Boston, and that's how I met him. And he was like, 'Oh, you have to play "Street Hassle".' 'Okay, I'll check it out'. And we worked on it. I think with 'Street Hassle' and also 'Sad Song' from Berlin, they were really hard songs to play live because of the lyrical content. Like, they're so dark. I'm wondering what Vancouver audiences will make of it..." 

The lyrics to "Street Hassle" are here. To say nothing of the harrowing story told, Reed's delivery on that track is going to be pretty challenging to replicate, I suspect! Lou does that deadpan/ doesn't scan spoken thing where he jams extraneous syllables into a line that he can just bluster his way through, because he's Lou, and anything he does will count as "the way Lou does it," but someone covering the tune is in a different position! It will be interesting to see how Bajakian negotiates that. 

About the range of what Reed does, Bajakian's comment, which didn't make the Straight piece, was "he writes these beautiful, delicate songs, that have R&B influence, that have pop influence, that sometimes have cheesy lyrics, that sometimes have lyrics that just break your heart. But there's this whole other side. I look at this as a part of a complete artist's work, and for me, especially given a lot of music today, Lou wasn't afraid to show these different aspects of his output. He would have his Tai Chi master doing Tai Chi onstage with him. That was also part of his work. And so I think that's how I would see it."

Appropriately, we can expect a range of different songs tonight; the night is not *just* songs from Street Hassle -- there will also be music off Magic & Loss, Lulu, and... I don't now what else! I deliberately did not ask Bajakian what his bandmates tonight picked; I want to be surprised. 

Aram Bajakian by Art Perry last night 

I hope it's a much fuller house tonight. I assume everyone who came out last night will be there again. It turns out Metal Machine Music, live at the VIFF Centre, was much easier to listen to than I had anticipated: droning, trance-inducing, sculpted feedback that reminded me more of seeing Tony Conrad or Pauline Oliveros or even an Indian raga than listening to Lou's infamously abrasive album. I was girded for torture, expecting Swans-level volume and throbbing eardrums afterwards; I even packed extra earplugs and contemplated whether it might not be wise to double-up, which Reed's friend Art Perry, who I brought as my guest, also quipped about before the show. Instead, I was transported and soothed. This is not a complaint, but it was a surprise!

Art Perry and I agree on all that, note. He described the performance as "a wondrous night of meditative audio metal magma ...Lou lives on and he's still shaking the fat of the bourgeoisie." The band had begun playing as we were ushered in, and continued for about an hour. The performance had some drama to it, in seeing the musicians (mostly the seated Bajakian) shaking and waving their instruments in front of their amps to modulate the feedback produced, but mostly it was about deep listening. People listened pretty intently (even that worrisomely shitfaced dude who could be seen gobbling gummies while staggering about in the lobby, like he wasn't intoxicated enough: I gotta give him credit, he proved a better listener than I expected, though I do suspect he was the dude who gave a single rock-concert "Whoo! Yaah!" at one point, no doubt drawing some stinkeye from those seated around him. (To that dude: Grumble as you might about people on their high horses, man, you were not looking like a promising audience-mate; I'd be anxious just riding a bus with someone as obnoxiously loud as you were in the lobby, nevermind your colliding into me or trying to hug me like we were friends. My friends are better-behaved than that! But thanks for not being an issue once the performance started).      

Anju Singh and Aram by Art Perry

About my own "transport": I let the music take me where it would, and that ended up a sort of deep-listening trance that, uhh, some people might describe as, errrm, "falling asleep." Which is often taken as being an insult or a criticism, but it's not: my consciousness was profoundly altered and I let it happen and, I mean, I probably drooled into my chest a little, but "drool-inducing" is also not an insult when it comes to drone: I came, I slept, I drooled. (Note: I mean "came" in the sense of "I attended the event"). The closest sonic experience of recent years that I can relate it to was listening, when recovering from my surgery a few years ago, to LaMonte Young on headphones while I was opiated. Fell asleep then, too, but it's a different quality of sleep with that in your ears. My only regret/ fear about zoning out last night is worrying afterwards that I might have snored? I'm sure Art would have nudged me if I did. 

Also by Art Perry, now with Stefan Maier

Art said afterwards that he contemplated taking my picture alseep but chose not to. He could have, I wouldn't have minded, and I would post it here, if he had done. I hope he comes again tonight!

(By the way, you can see one of Art Perry's candid photos of Lou here, cuddling his pooch). 

It's going to be a good night! Tickets still available 

by Art Perry

Fresh start needed, plus a few big-deal shows

Recalibrating my life. It has been pretty cluttered this past year, with new things crammed in mindlessly and lots of unnecessary stressors. 

Rest assured, I am not walking away from writing or seeing live music. But there are lots of ways to engage with music and lots of venues for writing. 

Still, I am looking forward to the Lou Reed events this weekend (Straight article here, with a couple of errors I haven't been able to get fixed; note that the Faraway, So Close! screening is actually BEFORE the movie, not after it. Figure it out on the VIFF Centre website.)

Dead Bob, the magnificent supergroup started by John Wright of Nomeansno, plays the Rickshaw on the 23rd. More to come on that.  

I am beyond excited that the Ex is coming to Vancouver. 

And I went whole-hog on a Deep Purple ticket and am neck-deep in Purple.

More locally, I want to see Tower of Dudes on June 6, apparently doing farewell shows! Great Victoria band, kind of "Slavic Camper Van Beethoven" if that makes sense. Plus they are billed with the Campfire Shitkickers and China Syndrome. That's going to be a great local gig.

But I've written so much in the last year that I've developed chronic shoulder pain, so blogging won't be a priority for awhile. Take it easy, folks! I'll be back. 

Kitty & the Rooster, Fred Frith, phipps pt., and Daniel Romano -- gig reviews and photos

I am adding some Daniel Romano notes at the bottom!

Did a fun feature with  Noah Walker here, and very much enjoyed the Kitty & the Rooster "full band" variant last night at the WISE, though we did not stick it out for the supergroup at the end. Shirley Gnome and Jack Garton had somevery rude hand gestures to illustrate the lyrics to certain songs: scooping upwards for "Underbutt", for instance,  or doing a sort of  double-jerk-off move for "Banging on a Cock(tail drum)." It was fun to see Walker's parents in the audience, too. I don't know if I could get onstage and sing a song like "Sexercise" in front of my own folks, were they still around! (The gestures for that were very fun, too).    

As for Fred Frith, the one thing that got cut from my two features on Frith -- interview; show review from Nanaimo -- was that he saw John and Yoko's notorious gig in Cambridge in 1969-- the first time that a member of the Beatles had performed outside the Beatles, after the Beatles had stopped playing. I'd love to hear what he made of that (he didn't actually weigh in, just said he was there. But was he pro-Yoko from the outset? Is he now? I'm actually quite into Yoko, and advise anyone whose defacto setting is anti- to listen to this, say. It's practically Krautrock). 

The Vault was a marvelous room, and phipps pt. (in the first photo) were captivating, too. I don't envy people going to the Vancouver show; the quality of listening in this city sucks compared to Nanaimo! But everyone listened VERY closely, even to phipps pt (with Wobby of Negativland and local Lovage Sharrock). The band is apparently named for a location on Hornby Island.

I had been a bit unconvinced, actually, by the prospect of seeing Fred Frith doing solo guitar, but it was brilliant, very enjoyable, very musical, and fascinating to watch. In recommending shows on social media, I've told people that if they haven't Fred Frith before, they should go see him; if not, they should go see Daniel Romano. 

(Turns out that Romano was an early show, one of those things where they clear out a roomful of people so they can have a DJ set or something. It almost always seems to me that that never works for the venue -- anytime I've been to a gig that did that, there sure seemed to be more people at the early live show than the people waiting to get in for the second thing. The band also expressed some annoyance with this arrangment. I probably could have seen a big part of Fred Frith's set, if I hadn't waited to get records signed). 

Also had a real fun experiencing zipping back across from Nanaimo to downtown on the Hullo ferry. The trip across the water takes about the same amount of time but when you land, you're not an hour away from things out in Horseshoe Bay or Tsawwassen. I would do this again! 

The one weird thing that must be noted about Nanaimo is the near-complete absence of easily-accessed thrift stores. I guess the locals are all so hip and cool that they'd just hoover up anything good that came to town anyhow. I bet there are lots of shop owners in Nanaimo who make runs over to Ladysmith... every thrift store I could see on Google maps was at least a 25 minute walk out of town. 

Oh, and I crashed at a friend's and made a new cat buddy. There were two cats. I only saw the butt of one, briefly, but this guy came up and said hi to me during the night. I was glad he did.

That's about all I have to report. I am going to be trying to change my relationship with this stuff soon. Money is now a serious concern, since I have transitioned from being a fulltime VCC employee to being a part-time used bookstore guy. (At least I'm out of debt! The buyout was significant from VCC, but it's going to be an interesting few years). I have bought ahead for a couple of concerts -- most notably, Dutch punk band The Ex, whom I have wanted to see for decades. But, like, there isn't going to be quite as much of my writing about shows, I don't think (as soon as I clear a few things I committed to doing). 

One show I didn't write about at all, that I would have, happened  Saturday night, in fact. It's the reason I went to see Fred Frith in Nanaimo, because I have wanted to see Daniel Romano's Outfit for a few years now, and I absolutely love the album he's touring. (I am also really partial to side one of How Ill They World is Ordered, if you want another point of reference, but he's got a very varied musical output, not all of which has hooked me, so I'm glad to be seeing him on a tour for my favourite thing he's done so far). 

Indeed, the band was incredible. There's a real 70s-rock vibe to them, in the way they dress and attack their songs; it was even reflected in the garb of the audience, who looked like they could have come straight out of a Detroit rock show circa 1973, with moustaches and mullets everywhere. 

Romano was wearing a plaid shirt and jeans. Bassist Tommy Major, who I believe is also the leader of Tommy and the Commies, was sporting a Creem t-shirt under a vest and at one point dropped an MC5 lyric reference into a song. I think Romano actually introduced him as being from Detroit, but what I'm seeing online seems to suggest he's from Sudbury. So I think that was a joke, maybe? 

Tambourine player and occasional guitarist Carson McHone appears to be from Austin, Texas, though I think she might have moved to Canada herself (I heard her tell someone she was from Austin "originally," which suggests she's not there now). She wore a little black dress and cowboy boots and rocked her instrument as hard as I've seen anyone play tambourine before (there's a reference to a tambourine in one of Romano's lyrics on the new album which makes different sense now that I've seen her). 

Romano was very democratic in letting Carson take a lead vocal for one song, which might have been "Downhill"--which was the one on the Seattle setlist from the night before, anyhow. She had her own little merchtable niche, too (and was the merch girl last night: the band sell their own records, have no other merch person with them, and all that biz gets taken care of at the end of the night).

Finally, drummer Ian Romano sported a trucker's cap, and played like Keith Moon. He seemed the youngest of the members, and I presume is Romano's kid brother? I didn't get any particularly good photos of him but he drums like someone who loves his instrument; you'll hear that abundantly if you buy an Outfit album--the drums are a very strong presence.

I liked so many details of this show -- from Tommy taking lead vocals on the first song, "Firebreather", maybe the most punk rock song on the new album, to the way Romano would play so hard that his face would be overtaken by a grimace of horror.

The face of a great guitar solo

I also adored one of their t-shirt designs, where they riffed on that old Germs idea, "What we do is secret"; theirs was "What we do is sacred". It was a cool enough design that it crossed my threshold of size: I normally hold out for 3xl, but I had to get this. I love that there is a strong sense of, uh, "spiritual values" informing the new album. 

Here is what an AI search turned up for the image, complete with reference links: 

The design on this Daniel Romano t-shirt features his band's logo and the phrase "what we do is sacred," which centers on his personal philosophy of "Rock & Roll Magick". [1]

This concept represents the belief that music and creative expression are sacred acts that serve as a spiritual current, reconnecting individuals to something larger than themselves. [1, 2]

Key meanings behind the design include:Communal Experience: The design reflects the band's focus on music as a form of communion and a shared, almost spiritual human experience. [1, 2]

Creative Rebellion: It serves as a declaration against the "mono-agriculture of the mind"—a term the band uses to describe the modern flattening of culture into something banal and uniform. [1]

Icons & Emblems: The circular, geometric emblem is part of a broader set of mystical symbols used by Daniel Romano's Outfit. These icons are meant to be "secret signs for those who know," signaling membership in a community that values primal and immediate artistic expression. [1]

Spontaneity: The ethos behind their "sacred" work often prioritizes spontaneity and "truth" over polished perfection, viewing recording and performance as documents of a feeling rather than a product. [1]

My own thought looking at that symbol is that it is rather Rosicrucian, but who knows, maybe it's stolen from an Ontario stained glass window in an old-school diner or something. I'll ask Romano if I ever get the chance (I stupidly forgot to mention to him when I had his ear that I do some rock journalism). 

But that's all I've got: I didn't go as a witness last night; I went to dance, and I got to, especially to "Unseeable Root," one of my top three tracks off Preservers of the Pearl, and again with lyrics shot through with mysticism and magick. 

I love the whole new album, actually. Of the songs I did not know (about half the set), the one that made the strongest impression was "Boy in a Crow Skin Cape", and I was pleased it also was on the merch table. Lots was, also including two 7"s and a CD by Ancient Shapes (they've put out 3 LPs, so far, Romano told me later, but they all seem to be out of print now. That's his punk band; I haven't heard much of it, to be honest!). 

The band was in a rush to get off the stage, so I didn't get to chat much, but I got a few of my records signed (I was merciful and didn't ask them to sign everything. Carson liked that I asked her to sign in a different colour from the other members). Like I said above, my favourite of the ones I have heard is the one they are currently touring -- so if you  have the energy and inclination, I would see them at the Capital Ballroom in Victoria tonight. Great band, great show, great album, great t-shirt!  Real glad I did things the way I did.