Don't be a David

Boredoms, Dave Longstreth, Momus as King of the Ghosts

77BOADRUMs There was still two blocks worth of packed people trying to get into Brooklyn Bridge Park when they shut the gates at the full capacity of 4,000. Many gave up, some went to the neighboring park, but a large number of enterprising souls walked up Brooklyn bridge and stood on the tower decks, getting a bird’s-eye view of this once-in-a-lifetime installation/event/concert: 77 drum sets arranged in a spiral, all playing at once, for one day only, 07/07/07.


This Week:
Dave Longstreth and his Dirty Projectors will be playing for free at the Whitney on Friday. I, honestly, have never been to the Whitney (American art? what's that?). The show is part of a series curated with the "Summer of Love" exhibit, bringing in musicians "inspired by the radical spirit of the 1960s... a tapestry of new work that is intrinsically connected to the sounds and visions of the psychedelic era." Yeah, right. The Dirty Projectors last LP was a cut-and-paste mashup of Don Henley lyrics and unfindable Longstreth juvenalia (I wrote about the amazing short videos made of it previously). The newest album Rise Above, which won't be out until the Fall, is, I shit you not, Dave's attempt to rewrite the entire 1981 album Damaged by Black Flag -- from memory. The press release says he was helping his parents move out of his childhood home and found the old Damaged cassette case sans cassette and proceeded to recreate it on a four track. It compares this endeavor to Borges' "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote", the guy who tried to rewrite Cervantes from memory.

1) When the arena of music journalism starts referring to borges... well I don't know what exactly it means but it's sure weird. 2) What the monkey does this have to do with psychedelia and the "spirit of the '60s"? A show like this might make sense at the Whitney, since the pastiche, the utter lack of connection between word and music, is terribly, uh, post-post-modern, and Longstreth seems more likely to get support from the art world than the music world, though the music world is remarkably into subtext these days. Or maybe they'll just put up with anything. He's no Momus though, and it's doubtful he'll disappear into pink clothes, white noise and Japanese girlfriends anytime soon.

It's important to note just how different Rise Above is from Black Flag. It's not merely the gap between original and cover. They really have nothing at all to do with each other, and the knowledge that one came from the other is only like an extra intellectual layer of listening.

Mind you I had no idea he was covering Black Flag when I saw the Dirty Projectors open for Deerhoof a couple months back. I just thought he'd gone crazy. The first time I saw Longstreth it was in a shitty Greenpoint bar that I had trekked to in order to see Ramona Cordova (who was so much fun to hang around with, I'm sad I didn't get to run into him again before he left for the West Coast). Longstreth was alone, unknown (most of us were there to see Ramon), unfamiliar with his acoustic guitar (said he hadn't picked it up in months) and generally unkempt. He did play the first bit of the Getty Address, which floored me, but otherwise he was just another dude, one of us. Which is why the Deerhoof date was so eyebrow-raising. There he was again, decked out like Prince in a shiny suit and sleek lacquered electric, bookended by harmony-singing girls and backed by an actual drummer and not a laptop. Playing these, weird, fast, ear-bending songs that made no lyrical, musical or harmonic sense. Has he simultaneously gone glam and deaf? What's with the rockstar getup?

Now I hear "Six Pack" and "What I See" and it's brilliant. Peppy and tricky songs with weird guitar riffs (certainly no one would play something like that on purpose, oh he's playing it over again!), then you realize the words are "I wanna live! I wish I was dead!" or "I'll get a six pack in me and be all right." My favorite right now is "Police Story", which is, in the Dirty Projectors version anyway, a sad, slow song with gentle guitars floating around flute orchestrations, and is about flipping off the cops, getting beat with a billy club and being thrown in jail.

Longstreth also screams a bit in that song. Now, there are many kinds of screams a male can use. You can scream, like Rollins, out of 'roid rage. Or like Kurt Cobain, because it's the only way your voice can get out of your nasal cavities. You can scream like Will Sheff, because you're a New Englander trapped in Austin, or like Rock Plaza Central, merely because you're Canadian. But when Longstreth screams it's far more primordial. When he screams it's exactly like he were being pinched, or given a purple nurple. Or stabbed with a pencil right in the middle of a phrase. Like, "IiiOOOOWWWWwwaa walk down the street..."