The Post-Rockist

This is a Test: Lite Brite Day 1

Posted by Todd

Man Man

The Southgate House
Newport, KY: July 28, 2006

Do you wonder sometimes about sound and vision? Yeah, me too. Fancy that. And so have the organizers behind the third annual Lite Brite Indie Pop & Film Test in Newport, Kentucky. The festival, if it can be called that since it didn’t even sell three-day passes, was confined to filling three floors of the historic Southgate House with, well, independent film projections and live musical performances, often at the same time, in a collusion of the senses that my younger self would have earnestly characterized as somewhat “psychedelic.”

I was running late to the premiere of Brothers of the Head, a fake rockumentary about two tragically conjoined twins who were plucked from a life of farming on the east coast of England to be groomed into becoming a gritty, two-chord freak show rock band at the start of the country’s emerging mid-’70s punk scene. Thankfully, the event was running late too, as I was informed by the bartenders that this place runs on “Rock & Roll time” and that they’ll start “anytime we damn well feel like it.” (Which, curious readers, if you’re interested, is the same time plane the Post-Rockist functions on; hence the lateness of this post.) After Brothers of the Head’s exploration of the exploitation of image and the homoerotic inclusivity of rock & roll, a chilling and ultimately somber note with which to start the festival, this reporter found himself lurching from screen to screen, cheap PBR can in hand, seeking entertainment. There were comedic shorts about abortion, montages of color set to music in tribute to Philip Glass, documentaries apparently about social issues, music videos, and even one lone post-rock (no -ist) band creating a “cinematic soundscape” set to images of landscapes and war scenes taken from educational film reels. All this was fine and good, although some could have stood for improvement, but nothing would have prepared the unsuspecting listener for the nightmarish jubilance of the uniformed group from Philadelphia, Man Man.

The “anti-fashion” statement made by the all-white clad Man Man wasn’t fooling anyone. Their carefully crafted non-image was an apparent farce the moment you laid eyes on the cocksure posse before they went on stage: swaggering about with ironic hipster mustaches, ironic hipster mullets, ironic hipster trucker caps jauntily askew on their ironic hipster ‘fros. The manly clan rendezvoused in the little boys room to relieve themselves prior to laying down the gauntlet. The bassist/xylophonist/tin clanger/falsettist with the ironic hipster Amish beard left without even rinsing his hands, allegedly because his prick was manufacted by Dial. The keyboardist/saxophonist/throat hollerer with the beard and the headband was kind enough to demonstrate that at least he was not raised in a barn.

No, the real reason Man Man dresses in white? Virgins. The whole lot of ‘em. Yup, god’s honest truth. Besides, if it was published online it must be a fact.

But can you fault them for trying? Yes, we can. If you’re still a virgin clad in all white when you’re pushing 30, you have one of two options to get that sexless monkey off your back: One, become a cable guy, because Lord only knows what sorts of sordid escapades they encounter on a daily basis fixing old ladies’ TiVos so they can digitally record The Bold & The Beautiful marathons while the cable guy is on all fours for them. And Lord knows I’ve the videos to prove it. Two, if you intend to woo a respectable woman with music, stick with the tried and true path of the grit’n'honey vocals of someone like Otis Redding or Sam Cooke. Don’t get on stage and start blasting jumbled free jazz in the hopes that some loving mama might care for you for the night. Yet that is exactly what Man Man chose to do. Sure, some ladies started moving in what might appear to the casual observer as dancing, but to my medically attuned eyes they were no doubt seizures, epileptically induced by blasts of cacophonous noise and the swirling images of cartoon tigers and jack rabbits on the giant screen behind Man Man.

Man Man

Honus Honus, the Sergio Leone gaucho-inspired vocalist, sat jerking atop his piano stool, making funny faces at the drummer drummer who sat directly opposite him in the front of the stage. “Fe! Fi! Fo! Fum!” he bellowed, more gruffly than I suspect came naturally to him, while his bandmates chanted in return, “I smell the bwood of an Engwish man.” The music took on a life of its own - a veritable Rube Goldberg machine sputtering out competing hooks, lines, and rhythms. The band seemed to be falling all over themselves, twisting backwards and upside down to make noises by hitting metal bowls, blowing into amplified kazoos, winding up plastic penguins, even playing trumpets and guitars to reach a massive, forty-minute climax.

I was exhausted. Some films were screened between Man Man and Danielson, but the images merely glossed over my eyelids. When Danielson went on stage, I was resting on the balcony. Like Man Man, Danielson were dressed in matching uniforms, some ambiguous cross between security guards and marching band, complete with Grecian sailor caps,nametags, and hearts sewn onto their sleeves, as Daniel Johnson neatly pointed out. They were not cool by any sense of the term: five plain-looking people in dopey outfits, no macho bravado about them, and no obvious pretensions about their own importance. When Daniel started singing “Ship the Majestic Suffix” - a high-pitched squealing that never quite hit falsetto and never quite lost track of the melody - half the floor was cleared. By some strange pull, however, I was enchanted. Was this how Devo first received, I wondered.

“All you people up on the balcony are missing out. It’s a completely different experience down here,” said Daniel, pointing to the cluster of the dedicated up front. And he was right; the closer I got, the more I was drawn in. The quirky song arrangements, the sing-a-longs, the clap-a-longs, the snap-a-longs, the videos of tractors and children playing - it all added up to make non-urban America seem like the most wonderful place in the world. Halfway through the set, Daniel picked up a trumpet to much applause. “What? You people know what song I’m about to play next and yet you’re still sitting up there?” Daniel continued to josh the balcony viewers throughout the night, saving his most humorour barbs for a drunk gentleman from Columbus. “Has anyone here ever stepped on a trumpet?”

“I have,” responded a fellow behind me.
“I mean literally, not figuratively. You have?”
“No, I really did step on a trumpet once. I was coming out of my bedroom one morning and my roommate…”
“What part of the trumpet did you step on?”
“I can’t remember.”
“How can you not remember what part of a trumpet you stepped on?”
“Well, it wasn’t the big part, and it wasn’t the mouthpiece, so…”
“So it was somewhere in the middle, right. Why did your roommate leave a trumpet on the floor?”
“We used it as a bong a lot.”
“That explains why you don’t remember where you stepped on it. How on earth did you make a bong out a trumpet?”
“Well, we made a chamber out of…”
“Alright, alright, there’s a story in every city. Has anyone in here ever offended anyone? Well, that’s what this song is about. From now on, instead of saying, ‘Oh, I’m sorry. Did I offend you?’ Just look at the person and say, ‘Did I step on your trumpet?’ They’ll know exactly what you’re talking about. It’s a very memorable experience, for most people, to step on a trumpet. ‘Did I step on your trumpet?’ It’s the catchphrase of the summer. Catch it!”

Boy, did I! Infectious, that song is. Full of childish pomp and imaginary circumstance. All through the rest of the set, and the requested encore by an audience member who didn’t even know how the song went that he was requesting, it felt like I was being finally included on a big cosmic in-joke. O! what a feeling! It left me reeling.

Stay tuned… more Lite Brite to come.

Danielson