photo by Carol Sandin Cooley
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.
