It’s Day 213 of the lockdown. We haven’t been to live music in seven long-ass months. Usually, Carol and I go out to see or even play live music a couple of times each week. But there’s absolutely nothing usual, nothing normal about October 9, 2020.
Thomas Helton and Damon Smith have insisted we come to their social distancing shindig. It is a CD release party for Damon’s latest “What Is Not Stone Is Light”. How quaint. Who the fuck buys or even listens to or CDs anymore? Oh yeah – old fucks like me, who in turn pile them up in the too-small houses, like the one Carol and I live in. Then I get pissed at our cat Lou for climbing over the mound of them stacked on the table in the middle of what once was our living room.
This is different, though. We are actually going to see live music. No mediation except for masks and keep your distance cuz I don’t know if you’re sick, you don’t know if I’m sick and, fuck, even I don’t know if I’m asymptomatic. Sounds coming from people in front of us. The kind of weather that if we had it year-round, there’d be 12 million people living here. Thankfully, we don’t.
And we get to see our pals in person: Rebecca, John, Danny, Agnieszka, Sandy, Chris. Actual human contact, not Zoom or Hangout. There’s about a dozen of us total, including the musicians, and Carol or I have performed with almost every one of them at some point and even a couple of the audience members. An incestuous gathering of friends and collaborators who haven't seen each other in way too long. We even get to hang with a couple of strangers. We are inhabiting this dreamworld that Helton has built – a social distancing performance space. He’s wedged weirdness between two of the last remaining row of old-school HTX houses. To our north is some low-end light commercial and beyond that, IH-610, strangely quiet for 8 o’clock Friday night. To the south, townhomes. Thomas built the stage next to the nomansland between the remnants of the barrio and the built for today slums of tomorrow townhomes. Stuck this performance space in deep, where it doesn’t belong at all but somehow fits perfectly. Improvisation in opposition to the least planned thing of all in Houston: development. Cool as fuck cuz the weather is nice, but even if it was a hot as balls no clouds July day in petrochem plant fire resistant clothing or cold drizzly February in a t-shirt and shorts, this place Helton created would be fucking well cool.
Damon gets up on stage. I know him well. He is a monster. A big man, literally and figuratively. A titan of free jazz and improvisation. He’s played with a whole pile of people you’ve heard of and even more that you haven’t.
His double bass is his lover, his dominant and his submissive. He knows her inside and out. He pries sounds out of her and she extracts sounds out of him. They each go from master to slave to equals, back and forth, sometimes gradually, sometimes abruptly. Many times I’ve seen them in this duet of tension, this intimate collaboration of adversaries, these lovers who alternately caress tenderly then hate fuck. Hell, Carol and I played with him and Sandy Ewen just a month or so ago. But it’s 2020 time. So was it four months ago? Last week?
Damon tells us that it’s gonna be like this: three duets, first with sax skronkmaster Danny Kamens; second with Thomas, whose bass wizardry is the reason Damon agreed to move to Houston in the first place; and then with Sandy, our homegrown Canadian heir to Derek Baily. Then we get to have a drink/hangout break and then he’s going up there solo.
I introduce myself to the stranger sitting next to me. Well, not next to me – she’s actually about six feet away. We exchange pleasantries. Normally, this would be a banal, let’s-get-this-over-with moment for me, but fuck oh dear she’s actually someone I don’t know that I am voluntarily inhabiting as close a space as one can in this fucking plague-informed madhouse. It feels good to actually introduce myself to a stranger – normally I would hate it. But there’s nothing, absolutely nothing, normal about this most accursed of years. We are in the middle of a genuine pandemic. Don’t get me wrong: I dig the fuck out of history and really enjoyed reading The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History. Living through history isn’t nearly as enjoyable.
Oh, and there’s this fucking election coming up. A little more than three weeks from now. The last one was fucked-up enough. The only thing that most people could agree upon in 2016 was that things really sucked and that we had to have change. So the two most loathed candidates in presidential election history squared off. The one less detestable to more people prevailed and the winners hated the losers and the losers despised the winners. It got worse from there, and here we are now.
The rancor has turned to real violence. Our little performance space is a speck in a country riven with dissent. The rancor is no longer confined to pundits, drunks in bars and family members screaming at each other over Thanksgiving dinner. Idiots are burning cities down, hurting their cause more than they’re helping it. A kid goes on a militia fantasy camp vacation with an AR-15 and kills a couple of protesters. Another young guy guns down a couple of white supremacists. But hey, at least he’s old enough to own a firearm. The left hates the right and the right hates the left and both groups hates those who won’t go along with the hate. At least I get to early vote starting on Tuesday. And believe me, I am voting.
Danny gets up with Damon first. Only armed with a soprano sax, apparently the first time he’s played one in public. Wait, what? Where is the bari, motherfucker? The first live music we’ve seen in almost eight months and you’re not bringing out the heavy artillery??? Come on, we’ve been waiting this long and all you’re going to hit us with is THIS?
They crank up immediately and it is blistering. No amplification, but I almost run out to the car to get earplugs, till my mate reminds me that we have them on our key chains. In they go, so my tinnitus only gets a tiny bit worse because of this set. It’s visceral – Damon holding down the low end while Danny goes on a rampage, drilling that reed weapon into the ears bypassing the nerves and piercing our brains. I’m on my first beer, which for me means totally sober, and I feel as jacked as a 15-year old who has gotten away with convincing the school counselor that he has ADD and now has a jar of Adderall to play with. It’s grabbing me by the throat, throwing me on Helton’s lawn and pummeling me. Damon is collaborating perfectly. He’s not too polite, as once told me I was after a set, and he’s not cutting into the space that Kamins is brutally carving out of the HTX night air. It’s perfect. Perfectly disturbing and just what I need after an aeon of no live music.
It ends abruptly. What is this, a Richard Ramirez set? 10 minutes, tops. I want more. Whether I need more is a whole different issue, but I want more of the brain-drilling, the high-end squeal, the bludgeoning that these two have just inflicted on me and the nine other people. And the moment is near perfect. With my friends. Actually seeing live music. Holy shit. Literally.
With due process, Helton take the stage. Crap, the pat down at the last White Oak show I went to was way longer than the break between the sets. And this is a whole different thing than just three minutes ago. Damon and Thomas are going for interplay, subtlety. The music shimmers. Both men bowing their axes and it’s breathtaking. The night is cool. It’s actually chill here. Not lethargic, a feeling all too familiar in COVID times. It ain’t torpor, it’s nice and everything is just right. Then I notice where we really are.
Behind the stage, townhomes loom. We’re sitting next to the DMZ between those who’d just moved into the neighborhood that was leveled by developers and those who’d lived here longer than they’ve been alive. The music comforts me, envelopes me in a calming way. But behind the stage, two rows of miniature Towers of Mordor. They loom over, looking down. And these drywall abortions’ residents, what can they be thinking? Yeah, this part is ok but WHAT THE FUCK WAS THAT A FEW MINUTES AGO? Where is the homeowners’ association? We moved here from suburbia and we knew that that area was changing but we didn’t expect whatever that was. At least it’s over.
Oh, a tale of woe for these urban pioneers, living on the frontier civilizing the place. It is not over. Because Thomas exits and Sandy takes the stage, with the same military precision. No break between these compact sets. By this point, we know it’s gonna be concise. As always, Ewen has two amps. The big one is misbehaving. Again. She has to bang on it a little. Strong fists for a girl. Shows her gear who’s boss by punching it where she knows it will feel it. It finally consents to making noise. It’s not stupid, just contrary. Both performers go over the top. Damon is putting shit in his bass strings and on the bridge, likely homage to one of his mentors, Ben Patterson. A feather duster appears. Two bows in the strings. Sandy bounces plucks, squeals and squalls between the big amp and the little amp. Smith straps a galvanized dildo onto the bass and proceeds to whack it, but intermittently. Make no mistake, dynamics abound, calm along with the grating discordance. The duo overpowers us at times, but it’s not unrelenting. But to normals, it’s gotta be hella annoying. The people in the townhomes have given up on the homeowners’ association and are calling 911. The old school neighbors probably wish the IH-610 freeway racing sounds that have started up would drown it all out. Me? Nirvana. No, not the band you fucking tard. The Hindu analog to JudeoChristian heaven. And it’s a metaphor. If you’ve gotten this far in this review and you’re still taking things literally that’s your problem, not mine.
We take a quick drink break. I think I convinced Chris to adopt Carol and me so we can get on their health insurance. We’ll be his older-than-normally-allowed children and one of the presidential candidates can point to us at the next debate. We don’t care which one as long as we don’t have to go in person. And Rebecca is gonna manage Drone Strike and book us into House of Blues. I really need to follow up on all that.
Damon is now ready for solo sets. To be honest, or more accurately, to continue to be honest, the three sets somewhat blur together at this point, a few hours later. All are great, everything is near-perfect. Smith and his double bass lover collaborate to give us beauty and ugliness in three short sets.
The first piece starts off melodic, bringing our nerves back
into place after the aggro of his set with Sandy. He starts bowing the bass
gently and then a few moments later it’s like John Cale wailing on his viola in
1967 scaring the fuck out of Sonny and Cher. He is in command, going back and
forth between ambience and chaos. There’s
an awkward moment when Smith stops the first one and waits for applause. We thought the silence was part of the piece
– maybe Helton can put in a lit-up sign in front of the stage to que the
audience to clap and cheer. But we catch
on after a minute or two and show a pile of genuine appreciation. I mean the first set is fucking gorgeous,
bringing the adrenaline levels down after the visceral romp with Ewen then sonically
goosing up the synapses. A roller coaster, which is completely appropriate in Houston music history.
Fucking Eddie Van Halen shows up for Smith’s second set. Yeah, I know he’s dead and no, I’m not a big fan, but Damon starts tapping on his bass. It’s still all acoustic, but it’s making quite a bit of noise. Thumping. Thudding. Then it gets soft. Gentle double-handed fingering the upper fret board. Tension builds and subsides throughout. Again, nirvana for me. No, not the band and it’s a fucking metaphor. You call that reading comprehension? One of my favorite things in music is the buildup of tension then the collapse, the orgasm-like release, the sonic little death. And Damon brings it. By himself. Second set in a row.
Uninvited collaborators show up for Smith’s third and final set. Dogs next door get really worked up. Howling, growling, snarling, tearing each other’s flesh. Is it in reaction to Damon or are they oblivious? Is the canine violence inspired by or despite his manhandling the double bass? It continues, even after the he is done and he’s put down the instrument that Helton has reworked for him and that he has deployed on the stage built on the edge. The edge of civilized Houston. The edge of old school Houston.
We are likely sitting right at the high water mark for gentrification in HTX. Like looking at a stain left by the flooding after one the last decade’s many tropical storms. The floodwater from Memorial Day got to here but Harvey got all the way up here. Gasoline is almost at a negative margin. A barrel of 86 octane is worth less than a barrel of crude. The industry that is paying for my retirement can’t avoid collapse. It’s probably best for what’s left of the planet, but people will be poor and will flee this place, looking for something better. Just like they fled the Rust Belt in the late 70s, coming here for jobs. Not necessarily good jobs, but work that paid.
It’s how I got here and why I am here tonight. With a dozen friends on an island of improvised music. Next to the DMZ, the sporadic racing on the freeway, the snarling dogs, the odd plague silence. It’s a good night in to be on the edge in Houston.
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