Here is the concert hall, here are the Marshall stacks, open the doors and here’s all the feedback. I am a smoldering shell of impotent longing, a one-man show with no audience in a crowd of tattooed strangers, all of us brought together in the name of rock ‘n’ roll. Music binds us, strobes blind us, all of us together. I showed up here tonight in hopes of experiencing something profound, like a beggar wandering into a church to get out of the rain, in danger of being converted.
Shuffling through the front doors of the Variety Playhouse, the crowd parts for me, a dyed sea of red hair. Girls wearing horn-rimmed glasses and ornate halter tops and fish-nets. Boys wearing thrift store t-shirts, canvas messenger bags cluttered with minature pins, shaggy unkempt hair masking carefully wrought expressions. I feel self-conscious and alien: for looking showered and sober, white v-neck undershirt and jeans – my uniform. There’s no smoking allowed inside so everyone’s jittery, sucking on imported green bottles of probably Heineken.
The opening band, London-based Part Chimp, is well into their set when I arrive, sounding like they are trying to deafen a response out of the crowd. Singer/guitarist Tim Cedar, obligatory mesh trucker hat pulled down over his face, forces strained syllables into the mic and your guess is as good as mine. His life must’ve felt out of tune when he wrote these songs and he’s singing them with as much ragged realism as he can muster.
When a band’s music isn’t really doing it for you, the trick is to find the most interesting performer on stage and content yourself with studying his or her movements. In the case of Part Chimp, the scrawny drummer (John Hamilton) is the obvious choice, arms flailing wildly, head banging rapid-fire in a Dave-Grohl-like frenzy, a third drumstick almost. This guy means what he’s playing, he’s exited his body momentarily for that ethereal plain reserved for musicians caught up in the act of creating. Not so much a glory to behold, in this case, just fun to watch.
Part Chimp’s decibel-torture eventually draws to a close and they wander off into the stage wings. The Variety’s speakers drone out a fuzz-drenched, pre-recorded storm of white noise for about 20 minutes until the house lights dim and the five members of Mogwai amble onto the stage, strap on instruments, adjust keyboard knobs, pick up drumsticks. Then it happens. A harrowing sound emerges like a pipe organ’s groan on Sunday morning, followed by rippling guitar ambience, calling rock fans to repent of their tawdry escapades with Good Charlotte and All-American Rejects, inviting them to step inside this sprawling rapture. In response, I walk the aisle of the club and take my place amid the mob up front.
There are no words being sung in this show, and yet Mogwai is saying everything I need to hear from rock ‘n’ roll. In response I do everything but fold my hands, although that wouldn’t be much of a stretch. The concert hall is our tabernacle where we come to bow our heads and feel the power of something humming in our chest, the earth-shaking power of a bass amplifier, the immediacy of a guitar’s echoing distortion.
The show I’m watching with my eyes shut has beome a lesson in contrasts, a fading hypnotic mid-tempo cadence erupting periodically into a euphony of febrile strumming. And Martin Bulloch, Mogwai’s staid drummer sitting behind his kit like a red-haired Larry Mullens Jr. (exhibiting the type of posture my mother begged from a 10-year-old me slouching at the dinner table). He is methodically laying down the tightest drum beat I’ve heard in ages, a beat which sounds mathematically precise, beautiful in its metronomic stability.
I don’t know the names of these songs but I’m comforted by the fact that it doesn’t really matter. Mogwai’s most recent release on Matador Records contains such seemingly arbitrary song titles as “Kids Will Be Skeletons,” “Golden Porsche,” and “I Know You Are But What Am I?” And I answer, This is what you are, your music anyway: transcendent, inscrutable, inspiring, worshipful, immense, warm. This is what I am: inspired, awestruck, dumbstruck, thunderstruck, goldstruck. There is no stage banter to distract from the music, just the occasional “thank you” spoken in thick Scottish brogue into the mic. It seems bizarre to me that Mogwai is thanking us, the crowd, and not the other way around. After all, we’re just slapping our palms together. They, on the other hand, are spinninh–not words–worlds.