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Guided by Voices at the Bearsville Theatre
Saturday, August 10 2024
A couple days ago, Diane the cat started acting like she might be ill in the most feline way imaginable. After all that heavy rain (but not the most recent rains), I couldn't find her in the house, so I went down the greenhouse and found her lying on the couch. I tried to get her to come back to the house, which she eventually did. But then she didn't seem to be interested in eating her favorite foods (a lump of wet food or little oat milk). She's subsequently recovered from whatever was ailing her, though someone this morning left an extremely fragrant puddle of diarrhea in the cat litter box completely unburied, and it stunk up the house so bad that I decided to take my Saturday morning coffee and go sit in one of the chairs out in the yard. That was a great decision, because the weather was perfect and there were no irritating insects. The ground was still saturated with recent rains, but plastic Adirondack chair I was sitting in was dry. At some point a strange-looking flightless insect started walking on my arm It was black with small with dots and a large blob of fire-engine red, like something created by a whimisical artist. I later looked at pictures of the nymph stages of the spotted lanternfly and saw that it was a "late nymph" instar. Later Gretchen and Charlotte returned from their walk and Gretchen joined me outside. We played Spelling Bee on our respective devices (she still plays it on the New York Times website, though I of course only play it on my version).
This afternoon I had yet another landlording chore over at the Brewster Street house. The bathtub drain was clogged and nothing seemed to fix it. The tenant said she'd tried both Drano and a snake. So I went there with Liquid Plumr, a snake, and a plunger. Plunging had been the thing that ultimately broke up a clog in the sink drain in the second floor apartment at Downs Street, so that was what I started with. Unfortunately, though, I'd brought a toilet plunger, and they don't really fit correctly over a bathtub drain, which is basically a grilled hole in a floor. I was able to get a little plunging in, but it didn't seem to be doing anything. So then I dumped some Liquid Plumr down the drain (despite the fact that it was backed up), and that didn't do anything at all except make the water too corrosive to put my hand in. So then I tried the snake, and that was also useless. I was wondering at that point if perhaps I had been outmatched. But then I wondered if the air in the plunger was tempering the power of the plunges, since air, unlike water, can compress to a much smaller size. So I ran the water until I had several inches of water in it, filled the plunger with water, and then tried plunging. When this seemed to improve things by a tiny amount, I then used the plunger to rapidly push and pull the column of water it was controlling. This seemed to do the trick, evidently dislodging or breaking up the clog, wherever it was, and letting the water drain. After the bathtub emptied, I dumped down the last of my Liquid Plumr and marveled at my success, having once more vanquished a vexing landlording challenge. On the way home, I stopped at the Ghettoford plaza to return the old Subaru brake calipers ($59 refund!) and get another bottle of Liquid Plumr at Ghettoford. While there, I also got a plunger specifically for sinks (should the need ever arise again) as well as a block of non-Nasoya tofu and a bunch of bananas.
One of the reasons we hadn't gone to the cabin this weekend was so that we could see Guided by Voices at the Bearsville Theatre tonight. As one of my favorite bands ever, how could I not see them when they would be performing less than eight miles from our house? I had a bit of a hangover, mostly from drinking too much gin after getting home from Lisa P.'s party, so I thought I might be in a better state for the show if I took a late afternoon bath.
Before the show, Gretchen and I went to Bearsville to dine at the Bear Cantina. Unexpectedly, we found both Woodstock and Bearsville mobbed with people, the latter because of a one-day event called the Awakening Festival, some kind of New Age nonsense involving vibes, crystals, "energy" (not in the James Watt sense), and chanting. Parking was a little difficult, and then we found all the best outdoor tables at the cantina (the ones just above the Saw Kill) were taken, so we were forced to sit out in front, on the side of the cantina where a constant stream of people walk by. It was perfectly nice there, save for a yellow jacket and a couple honey bees who took a strong interest in first my jalapeño margarita and then my Impossible enchilada. The cantina was unusually stingy with the rice and beans, perhaps because they had to make them go farther with the mob of people wanting to eat there, so I was able to eat all my food in record time without feeling uncomfortably stuffed.
Gretchen had messaged our friend Jeff to see if he would be coming to the Guided by Voices show, and it turned out that he and Alana would be. We met them in the bar area a little before the opening band started playing, and they'd run into some friends both they and Gretchen knew. It turned out that this friend, I think her name was Karen, was a big Guided by Voices fan, though she'd gotten into them in the mid-oughts. (My peak of listening to them was probably not long after 1995, when I first heard a bunch of their songs played on a deep-dive aired by WXJM from Harrisonburg, Virginia.) It turned out that Jeff had actually hung out with Robert Pollard back in the early days, on their first performance outside Dayton, when they came to Chicago. Jeff also knew a bunch of other things and had worked with Cobra Verde, the band of competent musicians from Cleveland that Robert Pollard raided when he felt the need to upgrade his band (after the "classic period" albums of the mid-90s).
The opening band was the drummer from Sonic Youth surrounded by a group of musicians who performed a sort of constant meandering wall of sound, like a noise rock jam band. Occasionally the guitarist would break into a melodic riff that he would repeat, and there was a woman whose singing could barely be made out over the din. The songs each went on for something like ten minutes, and they played five or six of them. It reminded me a bit of a band I listened to back around 2000 called Nurse With Wound. It wasn't great, but it wasn't terrible either. Somewhat surprisingly, Gretchen really seemed to like it.
I'd been drinking a $14 Jack Daniels on the rocks but that was done, so when I thought the opening band was wrapping up, I made a mad dash to the bar to get a $10 IPA. It was a Devil's Path and very good.
As the band members set up, I saw that the Guided by Voices lineup was a variation of the "new" band that Robert Pollard has been using since 1997 (that is, not his chums from Dayton, with whom he temporarily reunited back in the mid-teens). This featured Doug Gillard from Cobra Verde and a youngish local (to the Hudson Valley) guy on rhythm guitar and two youngish guys on bass and drums. (The wiry bass player in particular looked like he was out of central casting for a rock star and sipped from a whiskey bottle as he got his equipment into a playable state).
Looking around at the others attending the show, it was a very white audience, as one would expect for this sort of band. But the gender ratio was about equal and the average age was maybe in the late 40s (a little younger than me). Most people there looked to be in their 50s, though there was a smattering of people in their 30s and 40s as well.
After disappearing for a bit, the band suddenly stormed the stage and opened with one of my favorite Guided by Voices songs, "Game of Pricks," from Alien Lanes. From there, though, the band mostly performed unfamiliar material. It's impossible for most people to keep up with Guided by Voices' prolific discography, and there are numerous albums from which I'd never heard a single song. I'd known nearly all their material the two other times I'd seen them (back in 2001, first in Los Angeles and then in Brooklyn), but that was 23 years and several dozen albums ago. I would say I knew maybe a quarter of their material, and, later when I went to sit with Gretchen up in the small balcony area with seats (the guy checking people's credentials at the entrance to make sure they had that kind of ticket, which only Gretchen did, didn't try to stop me), she said she recognized maybe an eighth of the songs (all of it stuff I'd had her listen to back in 2001). Gretchen had been saying that the sound system of the remodled Bearsville Theatre is great, but perhaps it wasn't optimized for rock, since nearly every song Guided by Voices played sounded like a buzzsaw was one of the most important instruments, drowning out Pollard's beautiful voice and turning the band into a wall-of-sound noise act. I like that sound, but two hours of it is a bit much.
Robert Pollard is 66 years old and has crazy curly grey hair and sharp features, leading Gretchen to say that he looks a little like someone from my family. He's kind of wacky authentically-visionary brother I wished I'd had (instead of the kind of brother who only seems visionary to people who aren't paying attention). Pollard is famous for his occasionally-awkward-looking rockstar moves on stage, though tonight he only attempted one high kick, otherwise restricting his stage moves to passages of air guitar and mic twirling. He also didn't seem especially drunk, though he drank beers throughout the performance. Alcohol served an interesting purpose I'd never seen at any other show before. Perodically Pollard would grab a couple beers from the cooler and hand them to people near the stage. There was also a moment about a third of the way into the show where he pulled a bottle of whiskey out of the cooler, had a perfunctory swig, and handed it to the audience to pass around. Such gestures of good will cost a band almost nothing, but are the sorts of things that can make them legendary.
Near the end of the show, Gretchen came down from the "rich old people" balcony and Jeff got close enough to the stage that a woman who was handed a beer by Pollard handed it off to Jeff.
Including the six encores, the two-hour show came to 42 songs total.
There was some milling around in the lobby after the show, and eventually I was so bored that I marched up to Gretchen and Alana (who'd been talking for a long time) and said that it was time to go.
Robert Pollard tonight, singing in front of Guided by Voices.
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