Live Performance - Part 2 - The Dishwasher's Dream & Its Corollaries.

In Indianapolis on February 15, there was a light crowd at the Marah show that got even lighter when the main attraction went on a bit after the ideal time for a weeknight. Those who remained were die-hards, so the applause was fervent, but not voluminous. Despite great promise, it was somewhat subdued compared to the band’s previous performances in town. Very fun vibe, great setlist, put together with great care, but still, subdued. And then came “The Dishwasher’s Dream”.

The ground work for the performance was laid by the frontman, David Bielanko, who is one of the great rock / comic straight-men. Dave’s singing and overall performance is so dependably solid that even a night in the clink doesn’t keep him off-stage, much less affect one note of delivery. He’s the perfect Abbot or Martin to his brother Serge’s Lenny Bruce meets Garrison Keillor onstage patter and vocal adventures. I believe I once called Serge’s singing akin to watching a blind-man on a tightrope. You know he’s gonna make it, otherwise he wouldn’t even try, but the whole trip across you dare not blink.

The entire show slowed down for this wonderfully theatrical moment when “Dishwasher’s” was finally brought out. Dave quietly perched himself on the edge of the stage. Serge, who normally careens into the audience, propelled by some holy chord in the aforementioned “Res. Girl”, picked up his mic stand and deliberately, conspicuously set it down ten feet into the throng at the front of the stage. Marah made their bones tearing off encores that, before you even knew it, punched you in the eye, pierced your nipples and left you feeling like the Tasmanian Devil’s front door. This was most certainly a departure from those moments. But it just might have been better.

A wee trip back in time to that moment.
The opening chords are strummed and the song begins:

Born with a face that life would erase
I chased the frustrated winds to New York.
I fell in love with Monique during a Yanks winning streak
And we danced to the popping of corks.

I found work in the weeds of the kitchen where the seeds
Of my dreams I did plant in the sink
Where the tower of plates threw shadows on our fates
And I had too much time for to think.

Of course it’s like Dylan. Let’s get that out of the way. But so is everybody, whether they play Nu-Rap-Metal or Xylophone Acid Jazz, so why fight it? This is far richer than any Dylan homage. The images and anxieties in the first verses suggest a song so deeply American that it draws from more artists than I can even consider. Edward Hopper, Theodore Dreiser, John Cassavettes, and yet it is immediately a voice unto itself, relying on none of the artistic ancestors to hold it up.

And in comes Kirk on the keyboard and Adam, on his big ole geetar:

Fourteen hours a day left me little time to play
With my lover who slept through her blues
As the sizzle of filets was the soundtrack that played
While I scrubbed through my headaches and flues.
And my vision of a day when we could get away
Seemed to sink into the suds of the soap
That I used to make money that I spent on my honey
For to keep her in Cheetos and dope.

As he sings, Serge looks like the emcee at an AFL-CIO tent meeting, some secular holy man preaching about how work both kills us and lifts us up at the same time. The drums are the steady thrum of feet on the floor of a restaurant kitchen, all tight circles and intermittent crashes that are quickly trumped by the never ceasing heartbeat of the Friday night rush. Kirk, “The Barber”, keeps a low melody that drops in with three almost silent chords followed by a sweet but stinging fourth chord that propels the rising action.

In Indianapolis, the band played this one song as if the rest of the night didn’t matter. Even though sound wasn’t the best, even if the crowd had thinned, this one was gonna hit. And it did. Slow, certain, and right in the solar plexus. Like a long, low wail from a weary traveler impelled to stop and get out on the side of the road and make himself known to the world. Serge wound up on the floor gazing up at the world, like the protagonist in the song, looking a bit reticent to step back into the less dramatic world of a Midwest bar on a weekday night. But he popped up, the band silenced their instruments and they headed off-stage. The play was over. There was a curtain call with two songs that would normally have stolen the show, but “Dishwasher’s” was the coup de gras.

***

The next night in Lafayette, Indiana, the band was playing an early show at a local brewpub. The Brewing Company had a very nice selection of beers, a big room, and a decidedly aged demographic populating the crowd of about 160. It didn’t matter that they were collecting pensions and social security, these boomers were ready to rock and Marah gave it to them. Davie B. was on, channeling every whiskey-throated rocker that the crowd might have listened to in the 70’s and early 80’s, but the man never looked or sounded like anybody but himself. Adam and Dave P. built up a head of steam that kept the set barreling down the tracks. People raised their fists during “Round Eye Blues“, and pogoed during “Demon of White Sadness”. But once the pump was sufficiently primed, and the audience was just catching their breath after 90 minutes going full bore, Serge hoisted his mic stand, grabbed his jaw harp and his whiskey, and headed out into the crowd.

He dedicated this one to a few names that I’m guessing were the bartenders, dishwashers and servers at the brewpub that they had met that night. Conscientious son of a gun, that one.

One day alone with my thoughts and the pans and the pots
I was beginning to fear for our life
While the burners threw heat from out under the meat
I lunged with the edge of a knife
And as my blood formed a rose with the sweat from my nose
On the face of a China white plate

I returned to a time when hope was our friend
Instead of this bitch that we hate.

These may have been retired mechanical and electrical engineers and university professors he was singing to, but you think this didn’t resonate? Hope is a girl that we all wanna dance with, but few have the balls to ask. I like to believe, perhaps delude myself, that live performance is a way of engaging in a very collective hope. The idea that one group or person will fulfill their yen to engage and entertain and connect with an audience, and vice versa for those out the crowd. Sometimes that hope is a promise unkept, sometimes it is realized so fully that articulating a response seems foolish. This performance verged on the latter. Again, the time machine:

And the harmonica blew, and the crowd closed in.

I fell to the tiles my face was all smiles
The sink overflowing, a flood
As sous chefs and waiters and vegetable traders
All stood in the path of my blood
I began to relax and slowly unwind and drift off as the maitre'd cried,
"Well this is what happens when love starts to rot and poisons the dishwasher's mind."

The music drops out a bit at this point. A few in the crowd think this might be the end of the song. If you don’t know the tune, it might sound like the song has ended. A bit anti-climactic, I suppose, but it could work. Remaining firmly entrenched at the microphone, Serge makes it clear however, that the song is not over. There is more, the tale must have a denouement. He downs the rest of his whiskey, turns sharply on his heel and lofts his tumbler, which now only holds ice, through the air, onto the stage, where it cracks into a dozen pieces and hundreds of microscopic bits.

He broke the dish. He broke the fucking dish. How do you get more perfectly theatric than that? Okay, it's a glass, but who the hell cares? It is a moment that I ‘m certain has never happened before, because he played it so perfectly unaffected that it couldn’t have been rehearsed. But perhaps I’m wrong, because if executed it right, Serge could use this move every night in a different city and it would be one of the most potent bits of stage business ever used in a rock show. A sparkling, razor-edged image of everyman rebellion that cuts right into us, before he sings:

I awoke to the sound of Monique calling out from her nightmarish side of our bed
My wrists were all flesh there were no signs of cuts
As I reached out to touch her sweet head
As the sweat on her face found a new resting place
On the tip of my fingers I leaned
Into her ear and told her no fear
We're just having the same awful dream.

And the door gets kicked in. There is nothing left to say so the harmonica blows again. But this time, every bitter taste and disappointment the song lamented gets exhaled through those tuned holes and turned into sweet release. And the drums wash over themselves in the rhythm that doesn’t stop, not even for a nightmare. And Frontman watches his silly older brother writhe on the floor, but wouldn’t quit strumming his guitar for that sibling if you made him the goddamned King of Prussia.

As the song reached its last throes and fits of life, the crowd swelled around the splayed singer, trying to get closer to this shambolic (there, I said it) wildman, and also checking to make sure that he wasn’t dying himself. With a hand from one of the few youthful longhairs in the crowd, he popped up and dragged his mic back to the stage. And again, the act was complete. On this night, there was an even more rousing encore, replete with Willie Nelson and Replacements covers that shook the house like so many New Madrid faults. But “The Dishwasher” still tied it all together. If they hadn’t played this song, it still would have been a great show that rocked the town and gown. But with it, the show went far beyond great live music. A simple, well-timed toss of a glass, combined with a sense that the audience was being led somewhere special, a back way through a kitchen door like Ray Liotta, but nothing so crass as a mobbed-up nightclub. Rather, some steam filled world where the people who carry the burdens of quotidian life go to spread their souls out in a magical hot-springs. A hidden place where they achieve some momentary respite from the knife-against-the-wrist inducing banalities to which they will have to return. It would not surprise me if some in the audience harkened back to this piece of art when they watched the Ecuadorian busboy schlep fifty pound tubs through the dining room of their local Chili’s. Those who witnessed Marah on Feb. 16th will, at the least, hold the performers at the next rock concert they attend to a higher standard. Subconsciously or not, the quality of Marah live, specifically “The Dishwasher’s Dream” raised the bar for what they expect and desire from a live performance.

When introducing the band, Dave Bielanko frequently praises bandmates Adam Garbinski and Dave Peterson with the acclamation, “These guys save Rock ‘n’ Roll every night.” For a long time, I used to recoil when I heard utterances about someone saving rock and roll or, about rock and roll being dead. Ever since I played air guitar as a four year old, I have firmly believed that the genre was alive and kicking. But hearing the younger Bielanko’s specific phrasing, I have reconsidered my stance. Live rock and roll, live performance in general, does need saving. But not by any half-assed record company Rock-essiah, and not for thirty days in June at your local Verizon Coors Chase Wireless Music Dome-a-lladium-phatheater. Rock and roll needs saving, like the man says, every night. No matter how many tapers have their DATs running, a live rock show dies when it is over. That one show and its soul ascend to the stars never to be seen in earthly corpus again. And so, a true performing artist must take up that mantle of resurrector and bring their songs, their play, their dance back to life the next night, and the next and the next...

Call me a fossil, a luddite, a hopeless optimist, or anything you like, but despite our current insatiable appetite for technologically captured art and culture that can be stored, burned, canned, ripped and pro-tooled, I believe live performance will live forever. The evanescent experience of watching a person create art in a moment has fascinated us for millennia, and outlived dozens of civilizations. Humans crave the spark of communication that occurs when another person steps out into that numinous pool of light and opens their mouth to speak, or leans over in Arabesque, or counts down the opening number. To share a creation that will, in truth, never exist again with a group of others closely surrounding us is magical, spellbinding. The caves at Lascaux are spectacular, but they are Platonic shadows of the live spectacle that those prehistoric Frenchmen witnessed out their troglodyte doors. Likewise, no matter how many “Sgt. Peppers” are pressed into wax or turned into bytes, those who saw John, Paul, Ringo and George on top of the Apple Records building witnessed a human interaction so intense, I’m not sure rock has matched it since. But those Liverpudlians had to stay away from the stage for years to have that kind of impact. Now, don't let this twist your wig. I'm certainly not venturing close to the territory of "Marah is better than The Beatles." That would just be silly and wrong. But when it comes to stage performance, if the whole of live rock and roll were to have been left to The Beatles, it might indeed, have died. I’m far more comfortable leaving something that important in the hands of a band of brothers who pack up every tool they own and build a new cathedral every night. And when they’ve set the keystone and hung the bells in the tower, they rear back and knock the whole damn thing down with one perfect song. And so it goes, night after night, live and in the flesh, the boys in Marah step onto the stage and into the footlights and save rock and roll.

Live Performance - Pt.1 A Meditation (The Junkie's Fix)

Before I get to the point, I have a question for you:

Have you ever had a dream that you are standing in a pool of light on a stage, performing in play that you have never rehearsed, the lines for which you are totally ignorant, and eventually all the supporting cast abandons you to languish under the gaslights all by yourself, struggling to fill the empty air with anything but the sound of your innards strangling themselves? It is my certain belief that anyone who has spent any significant time in the performing arts has had this dream, or some variation of it.

Performers battle and overcome this scenario and the dread it produces with practice, rehearsal, more practice and more rehearsal. Repetition of piece of art until it exists in their blood, their DNA, until it is a tattoo on a fold of cerebral tissue, accessed even when the performer is scared, tired, drunk, high, or just bored to death.

Once this point of indelible familiarity is reached however, the struggle is quickly turned around on the performer. They must now resist the natural tendency to make the piece too pat, too easy, too much like a route they walk every morning on the way to work. There must exist the credible illusion that this might just be the first time they’ve performed this song for people, the first time they’ve said these words to the person standing next to them onstage, the first time that this particular candle has ever been lit.

In the audience, we who watch the performance struggle, too. At a concert, we watch a band, a great band more specifically, and take in their performance. We hold on to the belief that this night is special, that this bold and awe-inspiring performance is a rarity, a gem or a fabulous meal presented to us, consumable only once. It is when the thrill of this single night gift begins to lose its luster and the viewer needs more, more music, more sweat, more boozy cheers and applause, that a concertgoer starts to look for more. They being to think that perhaps this kind of performance is not lightning in a bottle. The concertgoer ponders, as they exit the bar, "Perhaps if viewed on multiple nights, consecutive nights, the same kind of artistic high can be achieved. The band can surely play those same notes from which I drank so deeply the previous night, but with just enough variation that these same neurons in my music riddled brain will fire over and over in a shuddering climax of sensorial delight." It is at this moment that the concertgoer becomes a concert junkie. My name is Eric and I'm a concert junkie. Hi, Eric.

Once the full transformation has occurred, the concert junkie, not easily satiated, will travel to see a band several nights in a row. Foresaking their jobs, their general health, sometimes their family, and frequently at great expense, they will set out to judge the boundaries of a band’s ability to perform at high level consistently and still imbue each performance with a slightly different tone or ebullience. With many bands, the junkie quickly discovers that, while the consecutive performances are enjoyable, they do not dance on the consciousness like they had hoped, and perhaps did not warrant the extra time and money.

I will never begrudge a band for having a sturdy, well-rehearsed, but very predictable stage show. This ensures that all your fans everywhere get to enjoy the same product and no one ever feels cheated. In that case, however, I will only endeavor to see that band once on a given tour. Likewise I will never be a regular attendee at concerts of a group that is so desperately eclectic and improvisational that all semblance of consistency and regard for your audience’s desire to see a song they might happen to recognize has been thrown out the window. There is a happy medium. Several of my favorite bands walk that tightrope of precarious steadiness with seeming ease. Often their broader performance can be epitomized by one particular song. Sometimes that one song is reason enough to drive all night to see a band live.

In the case of Marah, their song “Reservation Girl” has always stood as the bulwark, the giant beast that stands for all that is a Marah live show. It is tight and composed for the first few moments, gives way to a sestina style verse that veers in and out of its lanes but, nevertheless, stays on the road. But like a trucker on bennies after a Jack Daniels chaser, everything kicks in and reckless abandon becomes the name of the game. This song is spectacular live, don’t miss it.

Of late, however, “The Dishwasher’s Dream” may have replaced “Reservation Girl” as the perfect microcosm of a Marah show and the band’s general musical aesthetic. It doesn’t approach the flame-throwing blitzkrieg that Reservation Girl can be, but it doesn’t try to. Instead, it encompasses every element of depth, idiosyncrasy, and entropy that makes up a Marah performance. It stands as the paragon of live music that is executed with stunning precision and focused energy but, with an unpredictability so palpable that the band itself might not even know where they will end up. This song has become a reason to see this band every night that you possibly can.
To be continued...