The Fergie Pissing Herself Award for Witnessing 2010’s Best and Worst Live Experience at Practically the Same Time

The Books / The Black Heart Procession :: 3 December 2010, The Aladdin Theater, Portland, OR

Temporary Residence Ltd.’s pairing of the Books and the Black Heart Procession, while semantically pleasant enough, made some logical sense: both bands are small, minimalist oufits, band roles clearly delineated amongst players and dinner parties kept affordable. Both have pragmatic use for a giant screen and multimedia picture show because both bands try to draw as much attention as possible away from their minimalism, seeing as how their music is often, in contrast, maximal. Both bands work best in a place where you can sit down.

For the Books performance, Nick Zammuto (prehensile voice; guitar) and Paul de Jong (cello, pretty much the whole time) invited Gene the multi-instrumentalist along for the tour, a guy who we were introduced to before hearing “Tokyo” because, according to Zammuto, he was the only guy who could actually play the song live. Zammuto and de Jong, technically astounding in their own right—witnessing Zammuto sing in sync with “Smells Like Content” video is a harrowing and shivering five minutes—know some people are expecting more than two guys with fewer than three instruments each, know that some envision them Daft Punk-posted behind bank after bank of triggering pads. And so they bring in a guy who can help a live “Tokyo” match the intensity of their recorded “Tokyo” underneath a pitch-perfect collage of bodies zipping and pinging from one corner of the projection screen to the other. Rarely did they affect the soundbytes, or at least appear do be doing so—instead, theirs was a performance perfectly suited to their brand of thoroughly recontextualized pop: one throwing the focus of the event back to the pop part. The context was clearly defined, the recontextualization visual, funny, and kept at arm’s length. I sat in awe of what they were doing while people who sat next to me sat next to me in awe of what they were doing. Theirs was simple communal bliss, inspiring but unchallenging, and laced with all sorts of giddy.

Only a miserable 40 minutes before the Books began, the screen that would later fight to contain this kinetic splash of guts and stuffing slowly cycled through a Power Point bummer of old, lame, artsy pictures of clocks and timepieces while a deeply unnerving track of ticking, tocking, and ringing accompanied, often in intolerable cadence, the stock wallet of images. It was a dumb beginning to a dumb performance, and it happened for about six minutes, in the dark, the spookiness and uncomfortable rhythm of the room probably only exacerbated in the brains of the approximate half of the room most likely really high. Then Pall Jenkins, the dark-complexioned lead singer with long, greasy black hair, whose first name may or may not actually be that, God help him if that’s his stage spelling, that turd, came out followed by the guy who would only play the saw for about 35 minutes, and they knuckle-crawled into the first of 35 minutes worth of solemn piano-and-saw dirges about lonely tears and sad eyes.

I learned a few things: that most Black Heart Procession songs are about lonely tears and sad eyes and adjectiveless hearts; that I no longer have any love left in my adjectiveless heart for this band; that Mel Gibson once dressed up as Dracula. This latter lesson I received in one of the only moments of levity in the BHP’s super dour and super serious set, when Jenkins whispered into his mic that they had no idea which pictures were displaying behind them on endless loop; we had laughed and Jenkins asked us if our laugh was directed at Gibson, later assuring us, “Oh, well that’s something to look for.” In that one measly moment he was admitting so much, telling us that he knew the show was paced morbidly and monotonously, that the Mel Gibson picture had no thematic consistency besides sadness and the amateurish use of hoary, ill-colored filters, that, indeed, there was something to look for if we waited patiently—that somebody needed to say something lest we all pack up and leave before too many lonely tears and sad eyes and wrinkled portraits rendered uselessly and magnified quintuply above all our heads send us and our cold, adjectiveless hearts out into traffic in front of a speeding bus to get the sound of that fucking saw out of our malnourished brains. When relief came, when they finished and the lights came on, exposing those around us to our naked, blemished selves, shame filling the air like a paid-for, impotent stench, I said out loud, “That was mercilessly boring.” I said this to no one in particular. And no one in particular heard me.

After a pee break to shake off the ever-present weight of mortality, the Books came on, picked the flecks of dry skin from our noses, pinched our cheeks—not condescendingly, but to engender in them rosiness and a new shade of beauty. The audience, all together, sighed. They were happy again.

And if the Books only put on the best performance of the year because they played right after the worst performance of the year…well, I’m fine with that. Though, in retrospect, I would have stayed longer at the bar before heading to the venue.