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June 20, 2006
Jackie O Motherfucker at Tube 6/19
How good was Jackie O last night at Tube? So good I left halfway through, walked to the Madison street bus-stop, and went home. Which is not to say it was bad, or that I was disappointed. It was just that I reached a point where the music was making me so confusedly emotional, making me feel the sound so intrinsically, that I had to split and go be alone for a while and think about shit.
Good art, good personal expression gives you big reactions, visceral ones, the kind that aren’t summed up by writing or thinking “journalistically,” and Jackie O took me in some strange and heavy way. It was somewhere I’d been before, not exactly foreign territory, but it wasn’t my usual stomping grounds.
I guess I should say I couldn’t see the band. There were a lot of people at Tube, many of them yeti-basketball-tall, so I stood in the back with Dan and Eli and closed my eyes and just let it all froth over, around, and into me--the drum rolls strafing down like potshots from a Fighting Tiger, the vocals aching out and warped into… what? Into what? A sax solo played by a whale. Not to be cutesy or anything; that’s just how it felt…. low, moaning, stricken, inhuman but natural, pained, sorrowful, anxious while the guitar picked out some deep deconstructed twanging boogie and the overall, overriding sound (again, couldn’t see where or who it was coming from) droned and swelled and shimmered.
So it got to me, hit me “where it counts.” (Which, really, is an unknowable place; don’t let anyone try and say What Is or compartmentalize it for you.) On the way to the bus-stop, passing by all the rich drunks staggering out of bars, and poor drunks in doorways with shiny yellow dead faces, I got to thinking about some of the music I give my time to and about how a good bulk of it is nowhere near as real, original, contradictory, or experience-orientated (does that make sense?) as a good Jackie O show. Bands that hold fashion above substance, singers that preach and pimp self-destruction as a marketing tool… all empty, dry husks and a king-hell waste of time. (“I came all the way from Texas for this shit” said a guy behind me.)
After the big ride down Division, staring out the window into black and streaked yellow and white lights, I got home to find my house cold and my pet tortoise, Tat’yana, dead. He’d been sick for a while, lungs full of fluid, eyes swollen shut. The vet bills had been high, recovery more or less doubtful, but my housemates and I had been giving it our all; shots once daily, various medications from tiny white tubes, hand feeding, lots of love and worrying. But it was, after all that, not enough. Tat’yana went away somewhere between yesterday morning and last night.
I can’t help, then, but feel like Jackie O’s set was some kind of –pre-eulogy—at least for me—a funeral before the funeral. This is probably not what you want to read in a show review, but fuck it, that was the experience I had, and I want to tell the truth as it came to me. I’m not a big fan of hokey, tidy, standard music writing, and there are a lot of writers that’ll dish it out in spades… so I give what I can and I’m not going to try and be anything I’m not. I hope that’s okay with you.
Posted by Adam Gnade at June 20, 2006 1:52 PM
Comments
Green Milk form the Planet Orange turned out a decimating set afterwards; it may have been enough to bring you to, it may not have been. But I haven't had a more physical, eyes-rolled-back, eyelids twitching, brutal repsonse to a rock set in a long, long time.
If anyone wants to see Green Milk from the Planet Orange (Japanese speed-prog art / noise band), they're playing again tonight at Sabalas.
Posted by: Marcus at June 20, 2006 2:26 PM
Yeah, I'm gonna come down to Sabala's tonight and check 'em out. I'm glad they're playing so many local shows. More bands need to do that.
Posted by: Adam Gnade at June 20, 2006 2:46 PM
That is so OK with me. Rad review, dude.
Posted by: Matt Wright at June 20, 2006 3:49 PM
Ditto r.e. Green Milk From the Planet Orange. They make my bones rattle.
Posted by: s. meadows at June 20, 2006 4:17 PM
Well spoken, and sorry about your tortoise.
There was a solid out-of-body ten minutes in that show...not a crest, or climax, or freak-out, but something else. My brain forced my eyes closed and turned off my taste buds for the sake of my hearing. And my brain confirmed again--as every JOMF member I've talked to has explained in some variation--that this "band" is some seriously deep spiritual shit. It's fucked up, but I wanted that "something else" to be over too, that if it went on too long I would be stuck in it forever. That wouldn't be such a bad thing but my parents would miss me and cat might be sad. And moreover-all respect to Nathan-it didn't seem to be the place for that. Tube is fine for a few tall Hamms and some death metal, but not for this. Mysticism doesn't reflect in the same way as light, so those curved green plexiwalls and high def movie screens wind up as insulation.
Posted by: Michael Byrne at June 20, 2006 8:08 PM
"Jackie O Mother F****R is on time"
Posted by: robert wiedenfeld at October 30, 2006 10:17 AM
