MMW at the McDonald Theater, Eugene OR on Sat 11/15 (Daniel Temmesfeld photo, CC 2008)
The musical group Medeski Martin and Wood has caused upheaval in Kieskagato; their influence has been both a driving force in our movement away from pop music and a real-time tutorial in the fundamentals of blues and jazz improvisation. After the whole band went to see last year’s show in Portland with John Scofield, bassist Adam Schultz’ reaction was ‘you can do that, you can just play anything?’ It was a eureka moment and soon he was deeply immersed in theory-heavy bass lessons. Drummer Bryan Fairfield dove into Billy Martin’s catalog, which contains an array of diverse projects besides MMW, from Afro Cuban to Gamelan. The band has never been the same since.
This time around, for MMW’s Radiolarians 3 Tour, Bryan and Dave decided to see both the Portland and the Eugene shows. The Portland show, Friday 11/14 at the Aladdin Theater, was a pretty typical concert for MMW. The crowd was full of musicians and gearheads, lots of settled down former hippies, and a few hardcore jazz fans. The band was very engaging, but the encore was the really interesting point in the show because drummer Billy Martin announced that one of his heros, Jimi Hendrix Experience drummer Mitch Mitchell had just passed away in a Portland hotel (The Benson). His emotion was evident as he led the band into a heartfelt version of the Hendrix classic Crosstown Traffic. Following the show, Bryan and Gwen stood in line and met the band, getting a chance to personally discuss Billy Martin’s drum lesson book, which Bryan swears by.
The next day, Dave and Bryan drove south through the Willamette Valley to Eugene. Eugene is an enigmatic city in the sense that it is home to both a huge, well respected college and a huge illicit drug industry. Like many Portland bands, Kieskagato once assumed that since it was full of stoned hippies, Eugene would be a great place to play music. So, we started booking shows and making the drive down every month or two. Our big mistake, we conceded later, was not acknowledging the fact that the kind of hippies that live in Eugene can’t go out to bar shows because they feel the need to guard their pot plants with shotguns. Whether they would have liked our music or not we’ll never know; the only people that ever heard us were the other major Eugene contingent: the tweakers. Show after show, we’d play to a sparse room full of methamphetamine-addled twenty-somethings that looked like fifty-somethings, drinking Sparks while they played video poker. The really amazing thing was that the bookers at the bars didn’t seem to care that their rooms were empty. They’d always invite us back, promising to book us with a really popular local band but never quite getting that bill together. In the end, Kieskagato made a decision not to play Eugene anymore.
Early for the concert, we walked around Eugene’s downtown looking for a place to have a beer. This was where our past caught up with us: while we’d mentally condensed our Eugene experiences into a few miserable shows, we started seeing bar after bar that we’d played multiple shows at. Sitting in The Black Forest over pints and watching the lonely alcoholics watch the Ducks win, the memories seeped back into our heads. We took inventory and realized that Kieskagato had played Sam Bond’s Garage, The Samurai Duck (many times), Cafe Paradiso (many times), The Black Forest (a regular monthly gig), and a house show. That means we made the 220 mile round trip at least 10 times in a few years time and had shut the whole experience out! What a lot of wasted time and gas!
The show itself was fantastic. We were right up front, leaning on the stage, and were not only treated to some incredible music (which we were better able to follow having heard it the night before), but also to the tremendous amusement of watching the band members react to the absolutely freakish crowd behaviors and attires. Some notable examples: an elderly man with some sort of military parade jacket and a long, wispy Merlin-like beard who was floating about the room like a ring of smoke; a man of probably 40 who looked like he was playing Jesus in a community theater production; a younger hippy in a crushed velvet hat sporting an acid-dealer beard, resting his elbows on the stage with his eyes closed and reacting to the music as though he were in an F16 simulator (this drew many concerned looks from Keyboard player John Medeski); a college age dread-locked kid that was jumping around like a man possessed and throwing what we’d assume to have been Suburban White-Kid Gang symbols on approximately every downbeat; and a big, tall, fat, ragged, pot grower-guy wearing a sweatsuit and all of his hair in a ponytail located directly on the crown of his head, cascading greasily in whichever direction the wind (of pot smoke and body odor) happened to blow.
We in Kieskagato can only hope that someday we too will have a fiercely devoted community of ‘alternative’ people attending our shows and providing us with windows from the stage into their lives.
