First a few pictures of Joey and I doing shit on First Friday. Got good response / attention… still sorting this out, but it was satisfying to do and people be damned, which feels right for us.
(pics to follow. too fucking tired, internet too fucking slow.)
I don’t really know where to begin. I’ve got writers block, had for days, and now I just blew two more speakers on the guitar cab I just bought to replace the one I blew two speakers on last week. Playing electric guitar is awesome but owning electric guitar equipment is a load of shit. Fuck The World.
Let’s go with this dream I had to kick it off.
I first found this place myself, I walked across this rotting wooden bridge / walkway thing, it led to a high light place with tunnels and mysteries and then my friends were there. Together we tried to cross back across the bridge, but even though we went slowly and one at a time, big pieces of boards kept falling off. It was something like a 12 foot drop into piles of softish earth and leaves, maybe up to 20 feet at the highest point. One girl fell down and managed to land without hurting herself or even losing her balance.
A piece had gone missing so you had to jump at this one point and when it came to the last four people, myself and another person I don’t know or can’t remember in the rear, the first two jumped and brought down this huge section, falling with it. It looked like a far drop and timbers were spinning all around them while jagged rotten teeth flared out from the torn wooden pilings; a sawdust blizzard glimmered the air in sun specks and a cloud redolent in smell of an old New England barn. As they were hitting the ground and sorting themselves out, we began (or I did at least), to hear sirens in the distance. Time became thick and viscous, events come with a rushing and a saturated multitude that I have as much interaction with as does a twig in a river, pouring over a cataract.
Friends scatter like the pigeons when I open my door at prime. Into the woods they take off, the two fallen, perhaps injured, they
go away too and there is shouting that echoes up from the table of land below off the peeling maples and up to us, lain flat on the damp boards now with iridescent green moss lighting up our cheekbones and nose tips, fuzzy if you pause for just a moment and let your optic chasm be fully revealed to light, soaking in nanometer detail and then you can see the terrifyingly opulent texture that infests a bald layer of scum so thin as to barely be there. And just a moment before we were staring at the breaking downward trusses which supported this now swaying spine, the splinter and crumble of flashing white wood and its softer rotting skin or else corrupted members of the support gone fully to spongy dead weight. I crawl backwards along the damp board, in retrospect I should have just taken my chances and jump but in this moment of fear I hesitated. One, three and now six police in plainclothes have run by the end of our shielded wooden trench, the handrails being atop solid walls of ply. The seventh, in a blue collared polo shirt and dark brown pants (or did I just make that up? was it a white turtle neck and brown longcoat?), catches us and turns in.
We give it up instantly, silently standing. I at this point lose all track of this forgotten other person who was hiding up there with
me, I think another cop pulls them away to a separate destiny by the woods. I actually gesticulate for silence and care from the arrestor and he complies. This walkway is rotten and we must be very quiet now because I am giving up without a fight anyways and I just can’t hear your brash yelling right now. So please, and thank you. I go with him, time buckles and we are already at the holding place. It is an elementary school. Broad shallow staircases that double around a vast square chasm and then join overhead backlit by two story windows. Blonde plaster walls, lofty cold ceilingboard, cinderblock and brick to the roots far below by institutional grey concrete floors and similarly painting pipes who everywhere run and are painted to match the walls but house boiling black water and find their source in a knot, contained in a sunken concrete tub with reinforced walls deep in the earth, a great boiling shell, encrusted with jewely dials and gauges, attended by a lightbulb (new kind, tall smooth rectangle described by
folded glass pipes filled with gas) headed balding man with tiny lozenge shaped spectacles who hovers over a chessboard and a green thermos filled with coffee. It is probably bad coffee I guess now.
His name is Billy or Mr. Bill and he grew up in this town and went to this school and never really left after graduating. He is really quite good at chess.
They interrogate us in classrooms, I am remet with my friends and continually encouraged by them to try escape, a window, a bathroom break I must have hypnotized a cop to allow, alone in the womens, possible fucking with myself through my pants before sneaking away up a linoleum hall. Stacatto footsteps beat the autumn light in a race to make you dread the dying world because they are the death that’s imminent. Somehow away we get.
Palaces of yellow leaves reigning from peeling white/black columns attend our solemn march away from this bad place, vast sheer
cubical shape heaved from the earth unwilling. People are being shot within, spirals of blood are being allowed to circle drains and leave rooms and a simple solution to the problem of a mess and this is all that it is fucking looked at as by the shooters. Don’t climb in behind those dead lights and look out. All too human.
Dry-mouthed I awake and gulp water from my clear plastic gallon. I face the window, sky is deep blue of dawn coming. Hangover is coming but I doze off again once my thirst is satiated.
This was the night after the night after the Wolves in the Throne Room show at my house, during which I had an even more vivid but shorter dream where I put on a pair of pants only to find that they were crawling with corpse-eating millipedes and maggots because I had been storing a raccoon carcass in them and forgot and just put them on anyways.
So what to say? Well, here are some videos somebody shot. That will help and also delay me actually writing anything.
http://www.youtube.com/user/briangenepool
(or http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eZisYJjzkt8&feature=channel_video_title if that doesn’t load).
Anyways. Well, that was the most well attended show with the largest amount of the most complicated equipment that I’ve ever run, but for the most part WITTR + Brandt the tour manager and Matt from Backstabbers Inc. (acting driver) had their shit together and ran their own show. I made sure there was enough power supply and that it stayed on, did crowd control and herded people and cars into the appropriate spaces so that the show would continue without interference. The original venue cost $300 (an aside about that in a second…), but since this is my place I didn’t charge anything but asked that Wolves give up $100 to spend on food so people could eat for free if they wanted. Falls of Rauros graciously did this food run / cooked huge amounts of food at their home and brought it to you all, so thank them. And buy their fucking amazing album, which I have had on repeat since last Saturday. For that matter, after you’ve bought their album (bindrunerecordings.com) if you have money left over, buy the album Summit by Thou and then Celestial Lineage, the new one from WITTR, in that order (being the order of least established and needing money and support, to most established). I will say before my aside that it is rare that I see a show where all of the major bands have albums out, new ones, that I am actually excited about. Wolves are cool, they have never been an end-all mind-blow influence to me but I have a lot of respect for what they do and there are moments of spine-shivering on all their records. I may like the new one most after Diadem of 7 Stars… not sure yet.
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The aside: if anyone knows this Dude (in every negative sense of the word) Jason Simcock, where to get at him or how to make him hear, let it be known: he almost fucked this show into non-existence. I happened to have a ready venue and a wish to have this show in the first place, I happen to have known about it for months now and happen to have had my phone on me and been free from work enough to make shit happen and then have nice enough co-workers to pick up all my slack by leaving early on Saturday and showing up Sunday having had only 3 hours of nightmare filled sleep, but IF NOT for ALL of those things, I am not sure that Wolves in the Throne Room would have played anywhere in Maine on this tour or any other one. The reason for that is Jason Simcock.
He demanded $300 up front which was extorted from WITTR (don’t worry, they can afford it, but they are on a tour budget and this is a very shitty thing to do), wedged himself between Ryan Fairfield (who was the original promoter who agreed to take on the show and had to do so from the Waterville area, which I am certain made it harder to judge this douchebags character accurately) and Deering Grange Hall, even though he didn’t need to be in the way. And in fact, his being in the way only served to obscure the fact that the Grange Hall had at some point lost its permit to host concerts, a fact which Jason Simcock neglected to tell anyone until THE DAY OF THE SHOW.
Let’s go over this again: extorted payment up front. Overcharged. Did nothing other than profit. Failed to inform Ryan, Wolves or anyone that Deering Grange Hall had lost its permit to have shows until it was waaaaay too late to book an alternate and then DID NOTHING to find another venue. Jason Simcock is now blackbooked. No one in Maine will book shows with this fuck, no one will host shows that this fuck tries to book. He is out. Smashing is not out of the question. End transmission.
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So things were hectic, trying to back that fucking full-sized RV plus trailer into my humble dirt lot was shitty but patience won the day. No real problems with power, had to run 4 cords from 3 rooms to spread it all out over enough breakers, only tripped one. People were by and large very cool and happy to be there, which I predicted they would be and it was a beautiful night with a nearly full moon. It was good to spend some actual time talking to Nate W. from Wolves, he is doing mostly exactly what he wants to be doing and is currently succeeding, he’s into farming and good organic food, so we talked about that since I work at a place that focuses on such things. I was interested to learn about the strategy of this tour, which stands out to me as unique among touring arrangements. Nathan and Aaron have been putting this huge PA together for a number of years for the main purpose of being able to do a band-controlled mostly underground venues tour of the U$A.
Instead of asking a guarantee and splitting profits in some way, the band takes all financial risk and responsibility and in turn reaps all reward (or all loss. Most of us know how it feels to ‘pay to play’ when you drive to a show that doesn’t cover your gas expense, but it is something else to be at the level of acknowledgement / popularity Wolves is at and still willingly encumber that risk). They have to take in around $1400 a day to stay afloat, calculated for paying the two non-coms, Thou, gas, buying a venue, paying local bands / the promoter and eating. They did at least break even in my front yard, which is saying something for a last-minute venue change to an off-the-map unofficial venue. I gave instructions to Ryan and friends on what angle to take if armed intervention arrived, but it didn’t matter. Here is nowhere, that’s why I live here and love it. Nobody wants to be here, no hipsters (except when a show like this happens, of course, but whatcha gonna do?), no cool kids, nothing but trash and woods.
Let me say again thank you to Ryan Fairfield for taking on the stress of this show, being held responsible for the promotion and therefore the money to a certain extent (which I absolved myself of because I had enough shit to do with jumping this in 18 hours into a viable event and because I had offered to take a part in things early on and twice more during the summer, but Ryan took full responsibility) and also to his good fucking friends who ran the door and kept an eye on trouble.
Shows like this happen because people give a lot of time and effort, usually without recognition, into making them right. This is what makes a scene thrive, dedication and strict anti-bullshit action.
I guess I will just let people’s pictures and memories carry the story, I didn’t let myself enjoy the show until the last hour and I don’t want to try to describe it. Let’s say it was a personal high in my life, a top 10 moment for the time being. It fucking ruled, so many of my friends were there and had an awesome time, it was really awesome to see so many people have good or even potentially moving experiences right where I base my life. Rad.
