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Fiery Furnaces at CBGB
Friday, November 9 2001
Most mornings Sally wakes us up with obsessive licking and assorted sounds of impatience. These include ear flapping, loud yawns, and the clickety-click of her nails upon the wooden floor. Last night she was suffering from diarrhea and woke us multiple times with these signals, as well as a far more urgent one: a low desperate moan. It's a good thing we have a backyard when Sally's bowels are acting up, especially after the weather turns cold (and it has).
Some days ago, my East Village friend Mikila had written to tell me about another performance of her band, The Fiery Furnaces, taking place tonight at the world-famous CBGB venue, also in the East Village. Gretchen was off visiting with a friend up in Long Island, so I decided to go all by myself. It was the first time I'd been in Manhattan in a week, and I had to pay attention to the PA announcements as I went up the east side, since I am not very familiar with the green line subway system.
CBGB, which I've walked past before, was an unexpectedly small place. It was long and narrow, reaching far back from the street, with a low stage and a limited dance floor featuring the sort of unevenness that has probably caused more than a few twisted ankles. The walls were covered with silvery padded material, perhaps to retain sound. On nearly every surface there were also layers of stickers advertising past rock and roll events.
There were only a few people in CBGB when I arrived at 9pm. But once the Fiery Furnaces began playing, a reasonable number of people materialized out of nowhere and went down to the floor to watch them. Nearly everyone was drinking Rheingold beer, because it was fifty cents cheaper than the next cheapest brew. The Rheingold bottles looked like Budweisers from a distance and they sort of tasted like Budweiser too, absent whatever flavor multi-million-dollar advertising campaigns impart.
The Fiery Furnaces managed a tighter, more practiced performance this time than they had the last time I'd seen them, with a fairly long set and a good number of new songs. But there's still something a little odd about the Fiery Furnaces: their songs don't really sound the same every time they're performed. Mikila thinks this is mainly because the lead guitarist dude insists on playing a different overlay of continuous solos every time a song is performed. Mind you, this isn't a bad thing, but it's not conducive to the audience enthusiasm that comes with song recognition. There are aspects of the Fiery Furnaces' sound that seems rooted in classic rock (like the Chrissie Hind stylings of the vocals). But then there are aspects that are truly post-techno contemporary, like the tight repetition of even the shortest riffs.
After the Fiery Furnaces were done with their set, I sat at a table with Mikila's boyfriend Drew and their friends Matt and Eleanor, the latter of whom hails from New Orleans and seems determined to return (since New York no longer seems like such a great place to live).
After considerable delay filled with absolutely appalling pre-recorded music, another act (named "Bolt") took the stage. It consisted of a single scrawny white guy with a big poofy head of hair and a keyboard. Over some pre-recorded samples and a drum machine, the poofy-haired guy sang songs from the 70s and early 80s with matter-of-fact flatness, periodically taking off an item of clothing and progressively revealing his shocking scrawniness. It was bad, but not so bad that it was good. Indeed, people started donning their jackets and leaving. Mikila and the others were getting hungry, so after the scrawny guy was done, our contingent headed out on foot to an East Village pizza parlor somewhat to the north on 3rd Avenue.
We ended up in Mikila and Drew's place, playing virtual tennis on the video game console while others banged away on Mikila's electronic drum pads. I proved about as proficient at virtual tennis as I am at actual tennis, that is, not at all. The Dead Milkmen were on the stereo and people were smoking pot and drinking beer. It kind of reminded me of my life back in Charlottesville.
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