New York – 9/30 – Webster Hall

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I could say J Mascis and Lou Barlow are god, but that would tarnish my current mid position of survive. I will say it is very easy to feel some charge in their presence when J takes us on solos that erase any dismelody within us, and when Lou trances us with his sweet and probing lyrics. Very easy.

It’s also easy to feel like you are filtered right through the amps and right back into your face and ears when hearing one of your favorite anthems played for the first time in years. And that’s just how I felt last month when Dinosaur played Feel The Pain at Webster Hall in New York.

I’ve loved that song ever since opening that crisp packaging of cellophane (which is getting harder and harder for us quadruple thumbed to open) and popping the cassette into my walk man. It immediately triggered and registered back to times when I’d say I always thought my whole life was flashing before me eyes. It wasn’t in panic state, it was more of a stop sign generated by decades of scrutiny and paranoia. Of course, in the end I could always blame my antisocial behavior on Murph. The spacing of this emotion J displays, I feel the pain, I feel nothing. It strangely mocks my belief that I want to care about how you are, and I want to care about what you say, but it’s my insides that are tied to reckless isolation and nervous pandering on the plank outside. The song sticks out with it’s irregular timing and schizophrenic guitar lines in those middle spaces, and hooks that lead you on to believe that you aren’t doing enough in your life, or that you just have not lived up to expectations. The melody of this song would probably be more comforting to 99% of the fans, but it delivers a more brutal force to me when it was me in this position and me who fit that description. I hear the lyrics and remember what I forget to say to people. If one of those old cable boxes was a timeline of life, I’d always be the one flipping to channel two just to hear the ratchet clicks. Retractor beam de-activated.

I went nut solly prized electric during the solos. The whole crowd was in a stunned contemplation of the note driven linear waves. Sometimes J went abscessing into peaks far beyond the hold of gravity, so much as it had been like some miracle forefather had stamped down on young foreheads and patented Mascis beaked toucans all over the dry and grey floor. The final solo of the song must have lasted about 10 minutes, and the band never got lost staying tight as a Cobain in a Turtleneck on a four-way holiday. Sometimes I wish guitar strings could speak, and call your name out, and in some good deed erase away a bored, drippy monotone existence with a slide of smooth, strange transgression. (and not the way dexy’s midnite runners did it). Of course, it’s just a guitar string, until some lucky generation breaks a fingernail on it.

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