Thursday, May 15, 2008
Oct 21, 2002 | 1-3) Mekons, Mercury Lounge (Sept. 21, New York City)
Swinging east on their 25th anniversary tour, the old punks added a special show by popular demand -- "a concept," singer and guitarist Jon Langford said from the stage, "with which we are not that familiar" -- at 6 p.m. Noting that one fan praised the idea as "a Mekons dream come true -- home by 9!" Langford announced the door policy to the crowd already crammed into the small room: "Nobody under 40." Nobody left. The band, from accordion on one side to fiddle on the other, ranged from the primitive rant "The Building" to singer Sally Timms' dreamy bombscapes of a ruined London, but it was when various members began to read from the group's just-published "Hello Cruel World: Selected Lyrics" (Verse Chorus Press) that the performance transcended the night. Elegantly printed, illustrated with photos and Blakean cartoons, the book doesn't read like a conceit -- that is, you actually can read it -- but that was no preparation for what happened when the words were read out on stage. The idea seemed an utter contradiction: Why have someone step out of a band and read song lyrics when the band was present and ready to play them? In truth, the first reading, Langford with "Funeral," came off as a clichéd political speech. But then the lyrics truly began to change shape, to lift off on such flights of rhetoric they became unrecognizable as songs. When non-singing drummer Steve Goulding stepped to the front of the stage and raised the book, the words rang like Shakespeare.
"Failure in the short run guarantees success in the long run," Neil Young once said. The Mekons' run, not exactly toward success, a quarter-century of small clubs, small labels, day jobs and a calling that has not worn out, has been a long one in itself. So long that later that night, as Langford, Timms and accordionist Rico Bell broke for dinner at Chinese place called Kam Chueh, the fortune that turned up in one cookie did not quite communicate as a portent: "The seeds of success lie in your last failure." On the terms of success, every Mekons show is a failure.
4) The Great Crusades, "Never Go Home" (Glitterhouse/Germany)
When this Chicago foursome set off on their third album, with "Hand Grenade Head" and "Out of Our Little Town" ("They don't sell sleeping pills over the counter," Brian Krumm sings, and you know that's as hopeful as the song will get), they carry themselves like Midwestern gangsters: with the determined, bitter nihilism of Tom Hanks in "Road to Perdition," but also the gleeful nihilism of Billy Zane in "This World, Then the Fireworks." But as the road out of town gets longer, you hear a guitar player putting a south-of-the-border melody on "The Wild Bunch," surf combos tuning up in Southern California in 1962, a steel-guitarist clocking in in Nashville, a banjo player picking for himself somewhere in Virginia in the 1920s, and the band never hurries a step.
5) San Francisco Giants vs. St. Louis Cardinals, National League Championship Series, Game 3 (Fox, Oct. 12)
At Pac Bell Park in San Francisco, as a man in the bleachers had a home run bounce off his hands for the second time, a camera picked up a shirtless man sitting behind him, his mouth hanging open. One announcer speculated that the shirtless guy was dumbfounded that rubber-hands had blown two chances in a row. A second announcer noted that shirtless was wearing headphones, and the camera pulled in: The guy wasn't surprised, he was completely zonked. "He must be listening to the Grateful Dead," said the announcer. Someone back at Fox World Domination put on an impossibly vague Dead track (Deadheads would call it abstract), with Jerry Garcia whispering "odelay" over and over as guitar notes struggled to take shape and then died like minnows and the tune went on and on and the face of the man in the headphones never changed.
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