Uncle Dave's House of Useless Crap

De Fenstrian Tour Diary Part One

Friday September 9, 2005

We got kind of late start, a bit of annoyance for me as I had taken off work early to be ready for Will and Phil to come get me. But I later learned they’d been stuck in nonstop traffic. As it was, when they arrived I was taking a nap. I stirred out of it and loaded in; we left Ann Arbor at about 5 after 5.

We headed down 23, gassed up first at the Pilot North of Findlay. This station, which also serves as a Greyhound bus stop, is usually the cheapest in NW Ohio along 75. But on this day it is clearly not at $2.93, which we learn once we get a little farther down the road.

First musical selection on the trip is Will’s choice, which turns out to be Neil Young’s new album, not yet released. But Will really has his ear to the ground for anything relating to Neil – it’s an obsession - and somehow got the album early. You’ll find my comments on it at the end of this diary entry.

On my suggestion we have dinner at Kewpee in Lima, a place that started as a Hamburger stand in 1928. The food is cooked in full view of the customers, as they wait at the counter – it’s always fresh. Their burgers are excellent – sort of like Wendy’s, only hotter, tastier and better. They also serve pie - likewise delicious. Unlike most fast food joints, which employ 5-6 persons to man three registers, a counter, drive up window and a kitchen, at Kewpee there are always plenty of people working – in the kitchen alone I’ve never seen less than seven pairs of hands. The building they are in dates from perhaps the 1940s, and has plenty of that old school, steel counter charm, although the dining area is modernized and kept squeaky clean.

After our classy dining experience chez Kewpee, de fenestra resumed its road journey and didn’t stop until Cincinnati. Our gig was at the damage, a spot located on the second floor storage area of a former Woolworth’s on Hamilton Avenue in Northside. It’s only been open about a month, and it is named in honor of my ex-radio program Art Damage, so being able to play there finally was an honor. I have been there once before to practice with “Uncle Dave’s Lookout Boys,” and not much change has gone into it since then – still bare pipes running along the floor and overhead electrical sockets hanging from the ceiling. While I was able to avoid tripping on the pipes, I think I whacked my head on every hanging electrical box – I’d hit one, regain myself, take a few steps and whack my head on the next one, just like a pinball bouncing off rubber bumpers. My old friend Mark Shafer, amused at my klutziness, gave me a CD he’d done with his band as a measure of sympathy.

Griaule (aka Amish Robots, bka sometime Art Damage host Stephen French) was the opener, and was already in progress as we arrived. It was loud, confrontational and angry, and wasn’t bad, except that the extreme volume involved made it kind of difficult to communicate with others during load in. We were fairly well squared away by the time Realicide came up and did a set that combined hostile suburban artpunk with Artaudian Theater of Cruelty. As always, they were terrific. But every time you talk to the guys afterward they say things like “Aw! We sucked. This or that went wrong, I didn’t know what I was doing,” etc.

Will did his solo set next, and surprised everyone by breaking out of the industrial noise into a song, in this case an old one called “Sexual Tension.” Then I followed, first with a screening of Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray’s short op art film “Anemic Cinema” (1926). This consists of Duchamp’s Rororeliefs rolling around on an old, hand-cranked phonograph with French intertitles that are totally meaningless - the film consists of 20 shots - eight intertitles, eight Rotoreliefs, front and end titles.

For the Rotoreliefs I played sine tones on my frequency generator, moving the pitch up and down gradually to "spin" with the spirals. I used Wagner for the front title and some pretty, rather plain sounding French wind music for the others. I’d tried, but failed to feed these bits onto the video in advance so that all I had to do live was play the generator. I ended up performing all the audio live, with the tester at my left and a pocket CD player at my right. Ron and I likewise tried to set up a strobe light behind my little home movie projection screen, but the effect was too weak.

Nebulagirl has put up a marvelous gallery of photographs taken at the show, including a fine, animnated simulation of the movie at
http://www2.nebulagirl.com/TemporaryExhibitions/defenestra/

Then I played “Dorothy Stratten”- pretty good, but I’m having a hard time remembering the guitar part. I rolled out that old chestnut “Batman” for the first time since Sacred Grounds, to try and warm up the crowd a bit, and that went okay. Then followed with an absolutely horrible “Charity Case” – worst version ever, couldn’t remember the lyrics. Then onto “Jackie O,” which was good. After that I decided to cut to the chase and went to the premiere, “Control.” That is what I’m singing in the photograph where I am holding the notebook in my hand. I used a disc for this, burned from a Finale file. It was okay. Then “Kennedy,” as always, was the same, and achieved the same result.

De Fenestra went on at like 11:30 and played till about 12:20. It was the only show on the tour where we were able to play the four structured pieces we had planned to use. When we did the sound check, Mark Milano joined us on double bass. The sound check was recorded, and wound up being one of the best pieces of the night when we played it back. We did the first two pieces without Mark, and the last two we did with him.

Mark used the bow a lot, which was really effective in the context of de fenstra. He was bowing up in the range of my frequency tester, and together we were kind of gliding around the same locus of microtonal pitch. Will and pbk were also very on it in Cincinnati. It was a good show, but as you can see in the photographs, it was hot as hell up there, and my shirt turned into a pathetic demonstration of the ultimate in failed anti-perspirant protection. That’s what I get for poking fun at Sade’s drippy pits on MTV back in the 80s.

Afterwards we pulled our crap through the drywall and nails back into the van in the alleyway. We’d made a little money, almost enough to cover our gas to St. Louis. We went to Mark and Nebulagirl’s for the afterparty, where they were watching a wonderful old black and white dubbed Italian Space movie directed by Mario Bava which I had never seen. I had two small glasses of port, and since I’m such a lightweight it began to make me sleepy. The movie was a perfect synch with the recording of that night’s performance. Nebulagirl brought down an ancient looking Casio SK-1 that had its circuits bent by none other than the master craftsman of such devices, Reed Ghizala. She played it along with de fenestra’s recording, saying “This is my way of contributing. While I wouldn’t have minded contributing while you guys were playing up there, I prefer to do it here, in the comfort of my home.” That’s the last thing I heard as I dropped off to sleep on the arm of their couch.

Neil Young: Prairie Wind

Folks who liked “Harvest” might well like this also, as the approach is similar, coming from Neil’s smooth country-rock side. But it’s also terribly dull – I hate the poorly played drums and disinterested chord changes. Neil only brightens up when he sings “He Was the King,” a song about Elvis, which is cute and plays to Neil’s cult of personality, but has dumb lyrics that fail to offer up anything about Elvis that we haven’t heard before. “When God Made Me” is a nice song, done in a real low key way with just the backing vocals and guitar. It’s good just to get away from that lousy drummer - ugh!

I guess it’s a pretty good album for a fellow who is undergoing brain surgery as it is recorded. Prairie Wind was made in Nashville rather than LA, and is the sort of album David Geffen once tried to sue Neil Young into making. Neil is an unusual case in that he can pretty much record what he wants and the majors will release it, even though he’s only ever had one top ten hit. This is in a sense a return to form, but it’s a form of Neil Young performance that’s admittedly none too exciting pour moi. That said, it should be pointed out the production job is laissez faire, lacking in depth and bland, and the band sounds like it’s half-asleep. Sorry, Will.

Uncle Dave Lewis