Song of Zarathustra at Triple Rock Social Club

My screenplay-fixing bike-fixated friend Kraus said “Yeppers!” to close the evening on the way out the door and the next day I deconstructed a few pages of Derrida and felt karaoke (a lil’ bit a’ Lil’ Wayne) — it was what many of us would call a good old-fashioned American afternoon — but despite my best efforts to turn the penetrating memories over to distraction, I simply could not get the final Song of Zarathustra set from the night before out of my head for long.

I had gawked at a rarity — a Captain Kirk Edgar Allen Poe rupture in the thoughts and traveling of temporal laces and what happens within them — and I wasn’t getting back to business as quickly as I had hoped. Maybe I have been prepping for an Alice in Wonderland viewing or three, but what these guys from Sioux City, IA, one-offed after a seven year hiatus was steady, pinpoint, furious and remarkable. I dealt my original hometown energy with all the chips down and each new completed project to ponder and the spins and dips and flight and sprinting felt pretty damn good — like rain on your skin when you are out in the woods by the water, alone and connected to each movement in the world.

This was personal. I mean, I had a hard time getting it down in a coherent fashion. “Nice and still new hardcore pastiche,” was not a phrase that occurred to me after two Saturdays ago at the TRSC. The message was really major releases desperately needed wow now do not forget how to move, strike and entrance. The quartet literally forced us to dance.

From the first moment of the first song, everyone from reluctant guides to the purely uninitiated jumped and reached and grandly bandied themselves about — gleeful and humble and truly righteous and angry — gaping at the rabbit hole and easily divining what transpires within all the concepts of every possibility ever known.

Recollecting how to ditch the small town woes, I felt cloudy, rowdy, bawdy and tawdry in simultaneous frequencies of tumult, and I thought, “where do we go from here?” Everyone knows what that question means, in any situation brimming with epiphanies — I knew that was the best bet to take on how to approach a story of what took place, and I could not stop grinning from ear to ear. A telling symphony of realization was throwing exclamation points at all the full circles, and the one-time only don’t-look-now circumference locked us in for a top-ten ride. A burnt sienna, Bob Ross euphoria swept across our faces — an involuntary muscle action signaling approval, contracted and free in the same elevated breath. A healing to behold.

Any notion of pretense was stripped from the stage, and misunderstood irony lay gagged and whimpering in the distance.

I could happily fill these column inches with a meticulous appreciation of each song’s every brilliant and authentic nuance, but this night’s rendition of the decade-opener “Messenger of Heat“ put people over the edge especially fast, without resistance and in a hurry.

Ultimately, Song of Zarathustra provided us with what we had been craving and raving about since we first heard about the plans for a reunion trip last autumn, unleashing an onslaught that took no quarter at any point along the perilous path. Prisons fell away like life before lasers and a Dionysian joy reigned. We wondered aloud at the proud permutation breaking through the daily grind — while I was there bearing witness, the set popped with permanent liberation that promised to last forever, but now I sense it as a second, and a lit mirror on my life.

As the band took the stage that night, I leaned forward to ask singer and keyboard worker Travis Bos if they were going to play “Quantity at Hand” off that famous, black, year 2000 7″, a question to which he quickly replied. Then there presided over us all a great pause of urgent expectation, and the final beginning began.

Addendum:

On top of the audiovisual explosion Song of Zarathustra conjured, D. Witt limited prints also emerged from the evening — profound cerebral commentaries, masterful, composed, provocative, cheap and often disturbing. I can’t think of anyone who wouldn’t want more than one of these propped up at or hanging about their living places. Genuine genius, with a little bit of this and a whole lotta’ that — D. Witt has a mind-boggling find to please every tough-buy in the family. Celebrate spring, break the icy ground and check out these conversational koans as soon as you can.