Shattered Nerves & Savage Monsters: A Revelation in the Ways and Means of The Devil
The freeway bends to the north and the jawbone silhouette of downtown Minneapolis suddenly looms in the windshield. Studded with brilliant lights and awash in a muddy orange glow that splits the horizon, the buildings rise—in ultra sharp focus—into the winter night. It is a fine sight and it’s coming on fast.
I am streaking down the freeway in a plain white van—a gutted, unmarked cargo model favored by kidnappers and drug smugglers—dictating this review into a handheld recording device. Both windows are rolled open and bone-cold air roars into the plastic interior. The rushing cold is barely tolerable, but an unfortunate necessity: raw gasoline is sloshing around on the floorboard. In a complete mental breakdown, I failed to screw the cap on the emergency gas can, or secure it in an upright position. Now the metal can is toppled and rolling around unchecked in the rear cabin. Even with the widows down, the unholy fumes steadily burn at the eyes. Like black vomit, it’s another sign I’ve pushed my luck too far.
At any moment I expect to be seized by the police. This stinking van was stolen from a furniture delivery operation. Or technically, it was borrowed without permission.
Whatever.
I’m sure we have passed the point of semantics. There is no sense in using fine language to describe what’s been done. Whisking the van away under the cover of darkness was a foul, left-handed maneuver.Its unexplained disappearance has surely been discovered by now.
“Say, Johnson… where did you park the van?”
“Out back.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yeah. Why?”
There is a perfectly reasonable explanation for stealing it, but it’s a long complicated trail of pure logic. Essentially it boils down to a gripping need to drive to The Deaf’s “This Bunny Bites” CD release show. I doubt this could be successfully communicated to a ham-handed police officer from the shoulder of the freeway at two-thirty in the morning. Especially in my strange condition and reeking of gasoline. The odds of walking away from a scene like that are mind-boggling. Three seconds into an attempted explanation I would be thrown to the ground and dragged off by the ankle.
“You see officer, I’m a rock critic and—”
Whammo… a nightstick across the kidneys and a face full of pavement.
The coppery taste of doom circling inside my mouth is the reason for composing on the fly. The end is near. But it is wholly important that these words get published, even if it means playing the audio transcript into an editor’s answering machine from a jailhouse telephone during the dead of night. And despite the permanent damage to my nerves, or the wrenching possibility of several thousands of dollars in lawyer’s fees, I’m certain this was the right thing to do. Tonight… only a few blurred hours ago… a local band nearly set my hair on fire.
Ah… yes, indeed. Just the fiery memory of the band’s performance pours resolve down the spine. It’s a shot of fatal madness needed to drive this albatross straight down the throat of disaster in a desperate attempt to pierce the heart before the teeth come down. This van, while commonplace during the working hours, is outrageously conspicuous when rambling down a deserted moonlit freeway. It feels like the bugger has been greased in some kind of special lightning. The radio is cranked to top volume for Glen Campbell as I swing the nose onto an exit that will take me through the very heart of downtown.
“…where hustle’s the name of the game and nice guys get washed away like the snow and the rain. There’s been a load of compromising on the road to my horizon But I’m gonna be where the lights are shinning on me…”
—Glen Campbell
"Rhinestone Cowboy"
**********
Maps of Norway - Photo by David de Young
The Turf Club churned away, slowly shaking loose the hours of another busy Friday night. A wild mixture of hipsters, geeks, and geezers lounged under dirty lighting at ancient veneer tables. Others stood along the edges or roamed mindlessly through the empty spaces. The long sturdy bar was constantly turning over with people purchasing armloads of booze from two disinterested bartenders. A slender waitress snaked through the crowd with practiced grace. There was a din of chatter flowing overhead and the flowery tang of cheap perfume sucking out the entrance each time someone entered.
It has been over a year since ownership of the Turf Club changed hands, and while the backstage business and politics have shifted, the public side has changed little. The strings of dust stained Christmas lights that rained down from the ceiling have been torn down for sometime now—the new effect gives the room a slightly colder, more distant touch—otherwise the longstanding St. Paul music venue beats on as it always has: one band at a time. It was the perfect setting to see a hard-nosed rock & roll band come charging off the stage like a bloodthirsty bull.
Two other solid bands shared the Turf Club’s squared stage tonight. With a weaker grip and softer consistency, they sandwiched the true meat of the lineup like slices of buttered bread. Both had their fair share of character and genuine charm—one vaulted by the random branding of local media buzz—though I wouldn’t steal another vehicle to witness either perform again. It would not be good Karma to shit in some stranger’s lap in order to gain access to mediocrity. I do not anticipate being reincarnated as Lester Bangs, but it would be a real bitch to come back as a sickly hyena.
I might steal a bicycle to watch Maps of Norway. Performing in the opening slot, Maps of Norway acted as bottom half of the local band sandwich. A combination of lone guitarist, bassist, drummer and female vocalist, they used the first long minutes of their set building a hypnotic swell of interlocking guitar notes, bass riff and snare drum punched at jarring intervals. When the song stretched to the precise breaking point, the silent singer, standing idle behind the microphone, broke out in a voice that kept the whole thing from collapsing in a noisy heap. It was the mark of musicians familiar with the inherent principles of architecture.
Maps of Norway spent the rest of their stage time concentrating on similar songs that cantered out over the audience. They built carefully, slowly, into a polished sound on the foundation of warm droning guitar sequences fed through electronic pedals with the drummer lighting the landscape in snapping danceable beats and the female lead baying in a forced sultriness. The effect was listeners swaying on their heels like charmed snakes rising from a wicker basket.
A long note on the bassist:
Open the nearest road map—even a Norwegian edition—and look close for thin gray lines tracing between points. They represent small two-lane roads that generally travel across country untouched by larger highways and interstates. Purposely taking these routes to a particular destination is referred to as “gray lining.” It’s typically a more scenic way to travel by road, often winding through quaint small towns and backwater areas. It is also the analogous way of explaining the Maps of Norway approach to the bass line. In a fresh twist from the standard, economical way most bands treat the bass, the Maps of Norway bassist let his instrument take the scenic route. He went off into the wilderness, against the wall of trance coming from the other members, to deliver the song’s catchy hooks. In a tragic stereotype of regulars on the scenic routes, in customary plaid button down dress shirt and wholesome face, he bopped around stage like an Eagle Scout.
With the last dying note of the Maps of Norway set wailing in the rafters, I slipped outside to check the status of the cargo van. There was no evidence it had been disturbed. I stalled for a few cautious moments in the deep shadows of an alley looking for signs the police were waiting to pounce with bullhorns and vicious dogs when I intended to drive away. Part of me wanted to make an adrenaline dash for the van to get on with the business of taking whatever lumps I had coming, but there were two bands still scheduled to perform and this was essentially a business trip.
And so I slunk back around the corner, melding into the heaving mass of patrons smoking cigarettes in the night. We stood on the frozen sidewalk shuffling our feet against the cold; flanked by the white stucco storefront of the Turf Club and the high sides of a mobile concession stand butted along the curb. Wading through this temporary valley, cast in stray neon from beer signs hanging in the windows, I tried picking off pieces of conversation.
What brought these people out tonight?
Was it to watch The Deaf? Does the presence of the giant concession stand signal an expected full house?
Whoosh… an old short man came shooting out the door. He was wearing a glossy leather jacket with stalks of long gray hair falling out from a stocking cap. Bending down low with a piece of bright yellow chalk, he scrawled “BUSH SUCKS” on the sidewalk in large lettering.
Okay. So what?
But then he did something strange: he added a Jesus fish and a swastika. Our eyes met briefly before he walked off under the jeers of a nearby idiot. I shrugged off the confusing message as horrible gibberish from a washed up hippie and went back inside.
I mention this conflicting symbolism now—one religious, one depraved—as I wind around downtown Minneapolis in a stolen van because I am beginning to believe there was a higher power in play tonight. Indeed, some unseen force has wrapped its fingers around my brain and squeezed intermittently. First to make me screw my head on backwards with a combination of rare and household substances, then to steal a van, then to get jolted by a reckless impulse to drive the van across town at great risk to watch three bands I’d never heard of. And now to commit the entire harebrained adventure to tape.
Where will it end?
Egad…this whole thing reeks of the Devil. It’s too heavy-handed for God. If this was God’s hand pumping inside my skull, I would have taken the bus to a Christian nightclub to watch mushy bands whine about salvation. No… this is the Devil’s work all right, and I pray He has the strength left to get me home.
Message to the Devil:
I understand why you made me do it. I disagree with your tactics, but the message was loud and clear. I saw your magnificent demons burning up the Turf Club stage. A glowing review is imminent. Now how much of my soul will it take to make this van invisible?
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The Deaf - Photo by David de Young
I do not want to spend too many words on The Deaf. They are a good enough band, but their performance, while sometimes throbbing, suffered from following on the heels of a much better band. It was decidedly anti-climactic, though it wasn’t for lack of effort. They were stacked up against a mountain of fire and, to be fair, it’s hard to picture anyone else having an easier time sliding down the backside.
The Deaf have received a fair amount of positive press lately. The papers have called them “powerful,” “bombastic,” “fabric-rippling” and “terse.” The word “pummeling” was used in two separate articles this week.
Well… fair enough. I am willing to lay down with the grain on this one. It does, however, leave a few less words to describe The Deaf’s predecessors.
Promoting the release of their debut album “This Bunny Bites,” The Deaf’s set was a hard grind of fuzzed out, low-end heavy material. It was an up tempo mish-mash of many genres, most notably punk. Vocal duties ping-ponged between guitarist David Safar and affable bassist Stephanie Budge, once resting briefly on drummer Jack Kalyuzhny. Safar’s songs pounded with urgent repetitive phrasing that served almost as a second drum line. Budge’s turns at the microphone went in another direction, letting her girlish voice bounce along bottomed-out bass lines. The imagery created was a sort of angry resolve against the inner workings of love and life.
At one point, in what appeared to be an unrehearsed and unexpected cameo, a mangy abominable snowman pranced onstage to throw toilet paper at the audience. It looked like he had been dragged off the mountaintop in chains for the zoo, broken free somehow and run amok through the muddy streets of St. Paul. Closer inspection revealed the snowman to be something called St. Pauli GRLA in shabby, traditional Native American dress. He is a show-crasher of recent fame, and while I am a proponent of vulgar nonsense, someone should put this dingbat down. His act is already tired. The people who had come expressly to watch The Deaf headline seemed pleased with the band’s performance. The practiced three-piece—guitar, bass, and drums—started long after the stroke of midnight and by the end the Turf Club had bled out many casual attendees. The thirty or so diehards who stayed were crammed together at the foot of the stage rubbing shoulders, leaving only me and a jackbooted sound engineer to fill the empty wasteland of abandoned space behind. I used the isolation to scan the remaining bodies and spotted, sitting humbly at a table near the stage, one of three men who a half-hour earlier gripped me from the spine and tried to shake out my teeth. It was hard to resist the temptation to run up and slap him on the back for a job well done.
“Life becomes religious whenever we make it so: when some new light is seen, when some deeper appreciation is felt,
when some larger outlook is gained, when some nobler purpose is formed,
when some task is well done.”
—Sophia Lyon Fahs
If you have ever stuck your head in the mouth of a lion, you understand The Blind Shake. They are stone-cold champions of rock & roll, a lean three-piece featuring a dual guitar attack that will put stars in your eyes and a lump in your throat.
It was immediately clear why the Devil had shoved me down a path of dark behavior. He is a very proud creature—and for good reason. What The Blind Shake did tonight will be with me for a long, long time. I’m left with a deep brain scar and the will to move heaven and earth for the sake of throwing myself under their bus again.
The Blind Shake has been stomping around the Twin Cites for some time, and it may be that I am late to the party.
Who knows? And who cares?
I am here now and already stoned on their brand of venom.
The Blind Shake performance tonight was a thing of rare beauty. A machine-gunned set stripped of all fat and pretension. They shot a true bullet with bloodcurdling guitars, pitch-perfect vocals and a
The Blind Shake - Photo by David de Young
wham-wham-whamming from the drums that might have sheared a few inches off the stage. Watching the three deadly serious musicians proudly roar, in the slot between Maps of Norway and The Deaf, I felt a coal black aura drift over the room. The change in temperature and full-on menace in their movements left the unmistakable impression they fully intended on bringing down the moon. It is a testament to the craftsmanship of the Turf Club that the building didn’t go up in flames.
I have the same newfound respect for The Blind Shake’s music as the cool, restrained manner in which they handle themselves. The set lasted less than forty minutes, long enough to set the record straight and short enough to leave the crowd wanting more. No time was wasted engaging the audience with bad comedy or sheepish grins or much of anything but red glowing eyes. The figure they cut is nothing short of imposing: shaved heads, plain clothes, stiff-necks and stone faces. The band could easily pass for convicts on the lamb, if it wasn’t obvious they’re demons on loan from Hell.
Their sound is a flat-out, pedal to the metal run for glory. And wild as it is, these savage monsters have somehow managed to tame, and thus aim, their high white noise. Where most bands bind up and go off the rails—breaking down into plain screaming and jangled messes—The Blind Shake stomp forward and forward and forward without slipping a gear. Sweet Jesus… they were harmonizing the vocals the entire show with dead on accuracy. When one of them was going at it alone the vocals had a golden quality, with two of them crying in unison the vocals could have pierced lead.
Incredible.
My first instinct was to place a chair between the stage and myself. I mean hot damn, here was a band wailing at their instruments like human hammers, holding key, andharmonizing. How long could it be before they sprouted horns and hooves and went tearing into the audience for ripe souls to drag back to Hell? I clapped and cheered and whistled with every song hoping that my enthusiasm would buy me some extra time to get out the door when the transformation happened.
So did everyone else. The audience may have been young, but they weren’t stupid. I’m sure they understood the stakes.
The Blind Shake never swooped down into the audience with sickles and chains; their music reaped all the souls they could carry. It’s too bad. I would have liked to watch something like that unfold; it would have spared me the agony of driving this stolen van back across town. Getting whipsawed with a chain by a trio of savage monsters and tossed into the fires of Hell cannot be as degrading as getting mauled by the police for grand theft and hauled off to prison.
But it does not appear that I’ll end up in Hell or prison—at least not tonight. I’ve made it through downtown unscathed and come to rest at a red light within walking distance of the rightful owners of this van.
Thank you Satan.
All I have to do is sail the van back to the furniture deliverymen’s parking lot and wipe down the fingerprints. I’m sure there will be some head scratching over its return. In the coming days, I might mail the poor victims an anonymous copy of the latest Blind Shake album. I think it will explain everything.
