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So Owen came to play, and it was basically like being in Portland.
Owen, who used to live in P-Town but now kicks it in a tour van, is my good friend and one-time intern (if you are a publicist and ever got a tearsheet from me with a giraffe drawn on it, he is responsible). He plays under the moniker Casiotone for the Painfully Alone, plugging rudimentary pop melodies and pre-set “Samba” rhythms into a malfunctioning assemblage of junked Casios, which are in turn plugged into an overloaded jenga tower of practice amps. At any moment, the entire precarious rig may burst into flames. His lyrics* mostly capture listless wanderings of ReadyMade, post-crash SF hipster intelligentsia, but he’s packing serious heart, got warmth in a zoom lens.
His Brooklyn show happened on Warren, a half-block from Wyckoff Gardens, one of two housing projects in Boerum Hill. I walked there along 4th which, at 11 pm, feels more like a highway, with a speeding kind of emptiness. Every half-block, clusters of stoop-sitters chattered but mostly it was car clamor, scratch tickets and smashed water bottles in the gutters, and sticky dudes in undershirts who wanna know how ya doin’. Because you are sexy.
And the wormhole. That’s how Owen described it: the wormhole to Portland. On Warren, we quantum leapt through the hallway of a walkup, into the private courtyard out back, and got swept into Our Town, like being Melanie’s backyard for the PDX sunday vegan cafe–leafy, intimate, slow. Protected from everything outside by trees, a spotlight, and sameness. A hushed ensemble of cute naifs, 30 deep, crouched on lawn chairs as some guy in cowboy boots and a trucker hat (yep) plucked a soothing Bob Ross landscape on an acoustic guitar and sang wispily of love and faith. (The courtyard, incidentally, belongs to this Portland expat who promoted some of the first shows I saw when I moved to P-Town. The older I get, the more I see boomerangs.) The unkempt guitar boy arpeggiated, well-learned but topically unsound; he had a lyric something like “close your eyes and see the world inside your mind/hope when you open them everything is fine,” which was aiming for the Sound of Silence or rather, more obscure ’70s folkies who pulled the shades on Vietnam and started practicing inner-light meditation. I wanted to pull the Jadakiss back on my iPod.
But then there’s this guy Zeke Healy, who plays in The Boggs (home to another incredible musician, Philip Roebuck). He whips out this undersized guitar that looks like he found it in the back of a caboose, all weathered and chipped, straps on some fingerpicks and a glass slide, and tears open the swamp, hammering on and on and on, such jagged blues, his body flinging.
* Casiotone sample lyrics:
carson, flannery, & jerome line the bookshelves at home
waiting tables at some cafe to pay my student loans
a listless intellectual in her prime
scrabble high score 409
with nothing remarkable to leave behind
smoking lights, working nights
& frequent trips to the public library