Rat. Bar. Pellet. Pain.

Last night I went to see a triple bill of Meat Puppets, Dinosaur, Jr. and Built to Spill at Terminal 5.  I was really only going for the latter two bands, but I decided to check out the Meat Puppets set as I was not familiar.  They were okay, but not particularly memorable.  No offense intended to anybody who was a fan in their heyday.  I can see how it would have been fun when you were 19, but the music isn't interesting enough to hold up.

I've seen Dinosaur, Jr. a few times now and I cannot understand why I keep making the mistake of getting up close to the stage in front of J. Mascis without earplugs.  His rig last night was three Marshall stacks (i.e., three 4 x 12 cabs) and a small Fender pointed directly at him.  It's not a rhetorical question when I ask how he can possibly have any hearing left after playing 4 feet in front of that set up night after night.  I really don't understand how he can continue to hear with that much abuse.  I was probably about 15 feet away from the setup and my ears are still in pain this morning.  It's not just the loudness, it's the fullness of the sound.  I suspect he has each stack working a different frequency range (high, low, mid) so he can really tweak the sound.  The result is the kind of guitar sound that makes you weep, but it also causes permanent hearing loss.  If I go again tonight, I will be watching from the back of the hall with earplugs.

Dinosaur, Jr. are specialists at those kind of triumphal loud guitar moments that make your chest feel like it is filled with helium and the Mascis guitar sound is a major component.  I have to say that he was not on last night as far as soloing was concerned.  Maybe it's because I've been listening to so many jazz guitarists lately, where a tight rhythmic sense is essential to playing good lines, but I was really disappointed in how sloppy Mascis' playing was.  It was almost as if there were no drums.  He's always been a bit of a college rock Dickie Betts to my ears, but once he ventures out of smooth, straight eighth note patterns his sense of rhythm gets awfully shaky.  Maybe he was just having a bad night, but every triplet was too fast and every trill was unstable.  Weird, because I'd always enjoyed his playing.

After that sonic assault, Built to Spill hit the stage to play Perfect from Now On which is something of a masterpiece.  After the massive loudness of Dino, it was hard for BtS to establish a lower level for their intricate arrangements.  Unfortunately, the sound was a mess for the first two or three songs, which is a shame because the first two songs on the record are absolutely fantastic.  And the long breaks to tune between songs were pretty annoying and broke up the pacing of the set.  What is it with these guys?  I like to make sure that I am in tune, but I don't understand what is wrong with their gear if they are getting so far out of tune after one song that they need five minutes to tune up again.  It was very frustrating as there was a lot of waffling about on stage when the show should have moved forward.  On this front, the whole indie rock amateur hour aesthetic really gets on your nerves.  After the first song, one of the guitarists broke a string.  Instead of just switching to a back-up guitar, he started to fix it one stage while we all sat there bored.  Halfway through this, he decided to get his back-up.  I mean, you guys are supposedly professionals.  Have a clue.  This isn't playing in a basement in Idaho.

Ultimately, the sound got better and the band slotted into a groove with shorter breaks between songs.  By the encore, they had achieved some really gorgeous sounds and the audience of hard core fans was entranced in a beam of very positive energy.

Sadly, the band then squandered that moment with an excruciatingly long noise jam at the end where members of the Meat Puppets came on stage to swap instruments and join in the mayhem.  It's the kind of thing that probably seemed fun to the band, but after the beautiful songs that had come before, it was like stepping out into a cold winter day after having been sitting by the fireplace with a whiskey for an hour.  In a word, it sucked.  I really don't know why they did it.