#bimarks

THE MEAN JEANS, THE BI-MARKS, THERAPISTS, THE BUGS

April 20th, 2012

Eagles’ Lodge, Portland, Oregon

       The Mean Jeans have two types of songs. Some are in minor keys and they all sound alike. The rest are in major keys and all sound alike, except even more so. It pains me to say this because I liked them very much as individuals. I don’t know them or anything but onstage they radiated genuine warmth, a quality rare in people and rarer in musical acts these days with so many assholes running around playing music. You know who I mean. Anyway, here’s the deal. The singer/guitarist, Billy Jeans, looks like Paul McCartney’s evil twin. He has piercing eyes and a gorgeous head of hair, like you’d expect P. Mc.’s evil twin to have. He glowers at the crowd the whole time he’s singing and lasers everyone with his blue eyes but it’s a bit camp, a bit tongue-in-cheek, unlike the singer for Therapists, who emanated genuine malevolence (about whom more later). The drummer, Jeans Wilder, who sings quite a bit as well, I found to be absolutely compelling and charismatic. His demeanor was like that of an eternally optimistic dolphin. He issued running commentary on his own playing: “That was really good! I nailed that one!” or an affable “How’d I do, guys?” Richard Jeans, the bass player, who is the replacement for someone named Howie, is one of those hair-in-the-face musicians. He has long wavy locks and when he’s playing bass his hair does this Tasmanian Devil thing where there’s just a fuzzy cloud of keratin and no face. He didn’t have a microphone so I didn’t feel I got to know him as well but I liked him anyway. I liked all of them. They are fun people. That is not an issue. We will return to the Mean Jeans presently.

     Fun people deserve a fun venue, and the Mean Jeans and friends were performing at the Eagles’ Lodge on Hawthorne. It’s exactly like you’d expect it would be, this Eagles Lodge. There were Eagles and the wives of Eagles everywhere, serving drinks, taking money at the door, providing security (I know this because there was an Eagle wearing a large sign on his clothing that read SECURITY).  Did you know that the Eagles not only founded Mother’s Day but are in part responsible for distributing monoliths listing the Ten Commandments on them in public places? You do now. They are not responsible for serving drinks quickly, however, based on my experience; I spent thirty minutes standing in line waiting for a beer (or two beers) after the Bugs played, wedged in between groups of chattering couples, and eventually I just gave up because Therapists was starting. A pattern soon emerged: between bands half the audience would leave the Eagles’ Lodge and go the Space Room down the street to drink because the situation was so intolerable. I would walk to my car to smoke weed and then go to the Space Room where I’d pound beers with the others who had been at the Eagles’ Lodge (not that getting a drink at the Space Room under these circumstances was any picnic either) and then we’d all wander back up the street just as the other band was starting. This worked much better than standing in line at the Lodge, where the Eagles had resorted to making exhortatory speeches from the bar to calm the irked crowds waiting to buy beers in plastic cups. For some reason there was also an inch of water on the floor of the ladies’ room and we ladies were resorting to acrobatic techniques for the sake of micturition. Anyway, half of the Lodge is devoted to performances and dancing and that sort of thing; there were stage lights hanging from the ceiling that shook ominously every time someone threw a cup or can at them, which happened more frequently as the evening continued. It’s a great place to have a show. There are patriotic posters with soaring eagles and inspired free verse, and little photographs of members past and present everywhere. It was a marvelous contrast to the assorted crowd of aspiring punks and successful hipsters (mostly the latter), who looked severely out of place and at home at the same time, all immensely pleased to be in the presence of so many artifacts, inanimate and otherwise, of a forgotten America.

     Now I can’t really talk about the Bugs, who played first, because I only saw their last two songs. They are a duo. I did like the two songs I heard – their music sounds vaguely like 1950’s or early 1960’s rock. I thought the singer/guitarist was quite gifted with respect to his vocals and I liked the atmospheric coda on one of the songs I heard but it’s not fair for me to comment further because I didn’t see their set. I did think the drummer’s bow after the show was gratuitous, but hey – I didn’t see them play. Therapists is another matter.

     So the Bugs finished and I did the whole standing-in-line-for-beer thing, contemplating hipsters and America, and then, like I said, the four-piece Therapists were starting so I went to check them out. They were righteously scuzzy individuals, except for the drummer, who radiated youth and health (and wore a Youthbitch shirt). The singer, Adam Hess (who wore a shirt reading DAS WAS UP, a sentiment echoed on the bass drum head), oozed grungy menace. I had no doubt he was capable of randomly assaulting a member of the audience or one of his fellow band members with a beer bottle at any moment. Jon Barron, guitarist, whom I suspect is the musical mastermind of the group as far as songwriting is concerned due to his calm and authoritative countenance, stood to his left, and the bass player, the exceedingly tall Louie Hernandez, to his right. (Hernandez’s bass guitar timbre is fuzzy and prickly, like the buzzing of a robotic insect. I didn’t think it was going to cut through the drums and loud guitar but it turned out to do so perfectly well.) Anyway, Therapists blew me away. They were the best of the three bands I saw that evening. Their stage presence was no less compelling than that of the Mean Jeans would turn out to be later, although its polar opposite in nature: whereas the Jeans exuded communal, sunny fun, even during their songs in minor keys (during which time their sunny disposition remained present, though obscured by clouds), Therapists preferred to evoke imminent violence and barely-contained rage. However (and this is the crux) Therapists are far more musically experimental and daring than the Jeans are. Their set at times reminded me of Black Flag, or Buzzcocks, but they were indebted to no single artist or time period. Now they were not experimental in the way, say, Wire is/was experimental, in the sense of challenging all musical formalities, but it was obvious someone had been working very hard to push themselves creatively where the chord progressions (some very dissonant, some very consonant) and arrangements were concerned. Everything was very well thought-out and constructed. Even Hess’ use of certain clichéd punk tropes (such as sinister laughter over dark instrumentation) worked well within the respective songs. They were able to collect and distill several decades of punk (not postpunk exactly, but almost) into a spectacular live show with fantastic songwriting (and audible vocals – see below). Additionally, they sound-checked with “I Wanna Be Adored,” which always gets points from me.

     After going to my car and the Space Room it was time for the Bi-Marks. At first I thought the Bi-Marks were a four-piece band (drums, bass, two guitars) but read on, read on. The members of the Bi-Marks looked like they were barely out of their teens (and the drummer looked twelve; he made the drummer for Therapists look positively venerable by comparison). I certainly didn’t expect them to attack me (again, read on, friends) and I wasn’t prepared for the sonic onslaught that was about to ensue. So color me surprised: at a prearranged signal the cherubic drummer went BOOM BOOM and then the Bi-Marks all exploded at once into extremely loud, extremely fast, blues-based punk rock., with the guitars and bass spinning pentatonic webs around each other over the machinegun fire of the drums, on and on. And then something else happened, which is that much of the audience near the stage was consumed in a frenzied elliptical vortex of moshing. Now I wasn’t paying much attention to this vortex at first because I was so mesmerized by the band, especially the exuberant drummer, who had taken off his Jimi Hendrix shirt to reveal far more tattoos than any twelve-year old should have. After about five minutes I became aware that one of the members of the mosh pit had become quite aggressive and was alternately rolling around on the floor and crashing into people with the full force of his narrow frame. Was he the hype man or something? Upon closer inspection I realized that this particular reveler was clutching a microphone. He wasn’t just a mosh pit member or a mere hype man – he was the singer! I have no idea what kind of a singer he was because I couldn’t hear him at all, but behind his long black hair his expression was one of shock, confusion, and absolute fury. His eyes were those of an insane, homicidal individual. He looked like he was screaming at the top of his lungs directly into the microphone, but he might have well have been whispering for all the vocalization I was able to discern amidst the ongoing conflagration of the other Bi-Marks. I caught glimpses of him only periodically but every time I saw him I moved away. Therapists might kill you; this guy definitely would. I kept imagining him running into me and hyper-extending my kneecaps, so I listened to the rest of the Bi-Marks’ show with a slight crouch, knees bent, elbows defensively raised and facing outward. This fellow could have devoted even more energy to assaulting people at no musical cost if he had renounced the microphone entirely. I think the only thing that saved me was his one occupied fist. And so the Bi-Marks continued and then concluded their set, exploding and exploding, displaying true collective virtuosity in being able to speed up and slow down together or else shift from a straight four beat so something a little swingier and Black Mountain-y at will. At times the blues riffing receded into the background temporarily to be replaced by basic three-chord pop-punk progressions but never completely. I supposed I would say they were less musically adventurous than Therapists, and certainly less diverse in their range of compositional approaches to their material, but their set was so energetic it hardly mattered, did it? I don’t begrudge them their victories.

     After a final trip to my car and the Space Room it was time for the headliners, the Mean Jeans, who were celebrating the release of their new LP, Mean Jeans on Mars. The Mean Jeans, as I said, are impeccably fun. The mosh pit that had really started under the Bi-Marks continued and became more homogenously violent but less extreme, the singer/hype man for the Bi-Marks either having left the room or settled for a lower energy orbital. Now there was a major problem with the Jeans’ set, which is that the vocals of Mr. Billy Jeans, while not completely inaudible as with the Bi-Marks, were very difficult to hear, meaning that I was listening to an instrumental version of the band, really, and as I said, well… their songs were not particularly memorable. They were mostly fast and mostly cheery but that’s about all I recall of them. Even the Bugs’ songs are more vivid in my mind although I only heard two of them. I can’t recall a single musical highlight of the Jeans’ show except for one well-placed flat VI chord (this is a Beatles-like technique where you play, for instance, an F major chord in the key of A major) and a brief flirtation with a Rage Against the Machine cover. Not that the dancers cared. They were in their element. The Jeans were presiding over a controlled riot. That was their job. It reminded of a quote from William Blake: “Fun I love, but too much fun of all things the most loathsome. Mirth is better than fun, and happiness is better than mirth.” I was bored.

      Here’s the point: of the three bands I saw that evening (apologies to the Bugs) it was obvious that the Jeans had most successfully traded in any pretensions toward making the four-letter word ART in exchange for providing the equivalent of safe, hipster, family entertainment; their music was fun but (and I’m sorry to say this), left no abiding impression on me at all. It was just a blur of what was essentially lo-fi, unimaginative power pop, press comparisons to the Ramones to the contrary. Although the Ramones seldom deviated from tried and true chord progressions they were capable of writing fantastic hooks with superb melodies. I expected to hear something similar from the Jeans, given the hype around them, but I was disappointed (although again, it’s not wholly fair since the vocals were so hard to make out). In their defense, following the 78 rpm 100 dB Bi-Marks would have been difficult for even the Ramones, so the Mean Jeans were in a tough spot. I had the distinct sense that the Jeans were providing a community service by giving hipsters an opportunity to mosh together without too many crusty punks around (and the Jeans are definitely a hipster band, not a punk band, about which more in the future) and this is worth commending, but it’s not 1976, and in the Eagles’ Lodge, it wasn’t hard to picture the Jeans playing for their peers there thirty years from now, invoking the same deadly chord progressions over and over for now-elderly hipsters and their kids, one of Plato’s faithful simulacra, having terminally succumbed to the heroic flaw of hipsters everywhere: nostalgia. As Eddie Vedder once sang in a song he recorded with Mike Watt, “the kids of today should defend themselves against the seventies/ It’s not reality/ It’s just someone else’s sentimentality.” I left before the show was over. The moshers showed no sign of stopping: wasn’t this the real thing, real punk rock? No. If there is no innovation, but only imitation, it can’t be punk rock, let alone art: it’s the musical equivalent of a Civil War reenactment. Maybe it’s the next-best thing to reality, but not for me. I missed Therapists.