Thursday, May 25, 2006

The Fall in Hollywood, May 23 2006




The Fall @ Knitting Factory Los Angeles, May 23 2006


SMITH BROS. COUGH DROPS PRESENTS AN INTERVIEW WITH ROB BARBATO'S BEARD!

Q: People seem to be very excited by your presence. Do you have any idea why?

A: Haha, one guy in England called me the Unabomber! Ah, I don't know; hair stirs people up maybe.

Q: What's it like working with Mark E. Smith?

A: Maybe you should ask Rob that. Technically I work for Rob, he works for Mark. But I'll say this, he has a bad reputation, but that's mostly off the mark. Nice man. He likes to tug on me.

Q: Tug on you?

A: Yeah. Like before the shows he'll give a tug. Smile half-cocked and say, you know, go get em beardy, or this will be a close shave, lads, stuff like that.

Q: Tell us something about Rob.

A: Ah. Me and Rob have been together since...I think he was three. Yep, three years old.

Q: Rob had a beard when he was three?!?

A: He had me. A great big me. Some people would call it a disadvantage, but not Rob. He'd always say "making friends is easy...when you have all this stuff on your face." And it's true! Rob has a lot of friends. The mouth has something to do with that too, I bet. You should talk to the mouth, and the teeth, the teeth part of the mouth. You see Rob, he's walking around with that ridiculous hat, and the big beard...me, I mean, hanging off his face. And he's a big fella. But his mouth is giant! And the teeth! Check it out, the teeth. Rob turns that on like a light switch.

bling

Q: Can we talk to the mouth?

A: No, not right now.


--next on E! True Hollywood Story: The Fall, Tim Presley buys new pants and Orpheo McCord's adam's apple sparks raging controversy within the band.--

GOOD EVENING I/WE ARE/IS MARK E. FALLSMITH(s)

The Knitting Factory is sweaty and packed and loud. Curses, that reads awkward. It was a dark and stormy night. I'm sweating and my ears hurt. And people keep bumping me. And I'm scared and my pants are kind of little.

The Fall come out, like they usually do, and start banging away at a new song. Yep, a new song. It sounds sort of like ZZ Top fell into a vat full of melted Kratfwerk computers. It's called "Formation F.D.," I discover later, though the F.D. part could stand for anything. Fall Deploy! Forward Destroy! Fallfan Dave! Fop, Dandy! There are no lyrics! No one knows anything! It's like living in Japan all the time!

Smth comes out snarling, two fisting black gloved hands: "Good evening I am Mark E. Smith! (AND I AM ABOUT TO TAKE THE PISS OUT OF THE LOCAL DJ BOY WHO DARES TO INTRODUCE ME! WHO DARES INTRODUCE MARK E. SMITH? EEEEEDIOT!) thank you for the great introduction...from the MC from nowhere, down the long Cheshire Hills." (tip o' the pin to BigCrashingBeat).

I imagined this part: "By the way, the 'E' stands for 'Ey, somebody tell that fucker Coonce I yam sober as an angry nun at a Yanni concert!"

Then the song ends. Show over.

Not really! It's "Bo Demmick"! Smith is acting kind of pissed off! And then it's "Pacifying Joint"! And the band is really, really, really good tonight, completely setting new form; that week in the studio obviosuly didn't hurt any.

Quickly through "Sparta," MES whipping the band through paces. Barbato watches Smith carefully whenever he has to sing his parts, almost like he's afraid of getting pantsed. Tim Presley up in the spotlight more than the last few shows, or at least he's lit better. Orpheo wearing an ugly green shirt that makes me think about third grade a little too much.

Tuffskins. Burgundy tuffskins. It was not a good time to be me.

Now into "Wrong Place, Right Time," which has almost fully returned to the "classic" version. No more spaz out freak my shit right out noises from Presley. Maybe a few. They do the da-da-da-duh da-da-da-duh bridge from the album version, very Oranjy, second show in a row.

Did I mention that the band is T-I-T-E tight like loctite Tupperware hammered down with titanium nails? Did I mention that? It's true.

Smith is not happy, though, and spends almost the entire 10 or so minutes of "Systematic Abuse" systematically abusing his band. Saunters up to the mic a minute in, indifferently mouths the first two lines of the song, then proceeds to fuck up everything he can get his hands on. AMPS. Check! KEYBOARD. Check! DRUM MIC. Check! ROB'S BASS. Check! THE CORD THAT CONNECTS ROB'S BASS TO ROB'S AMP. Check! DID I FUCK WITH ORPHEO AGAIN YET? Check! It's like watching Jerry Lewis in the 23rd hour of his telethon.

They get through it, that's the thing. Smith doesn't walk off, the guys don't blink. They just. keep. playing.

Peck's Bad Boy disappears into the night. The next song is a near flawless run-through of "Mountain Energei," the band completely in sync, and Smith seems happy with his group now, waltzing around and snapping his fingers to the beat. The band is locked together at the molecular level now, bass and guitar in particular melded so closely together it would take a forensic scientist to discern where one ends and the other begins.

The crowd is either mesmerized or deeply dull. This is Hollywood, remember. And by the way, when did all you wimmenfolk start coming out for Fall shows? There's so much Teen Spirit clone fruity perfumy smells and nubile flesh in the place that I am worried, for a split second, that I fell down and broke my head and ended up at a Franz Ferdinand show by mistake.

Did the Fall just get a lot sexier?

["The new guitarist has got some cool pants on," reports Salford's own Gareth Partington, who is furiously hammering Morse code through a pair of tin cans connected by kite twine strung across the Atlantic.]

When they next launch into "What About Us?" I am fully expecting the lollapalooza long version...the one with the poem about drinking deeply the gathering gloom, etc. But the band tries to wrap it up about six or seven minutes in. Lots of confusion for a second, Orpheo's grin goes a deeper shade of goofy, Smith winds them up like an orchestra conductor, and they spin it back up again to full throttle. Wonderful version, too, MES riffing on crap I can't even half keep up with, and then it hits me all at once: the last three songs have lasted a combined half hour.

It's like a Phish concert you can really get into. Except not like that.

A short "Grass" bucks the trend and winds the show down. Smith keeps motioning for Barbato to sing the chorus parts, and Ron and his beard keep pretending not to notice, until right at the end when Rob finally starts singing the part of the song where you need someone to sing so you don't hear Smith so much, which is the preferable thing that you want, and that the old band did really well. Why must they keep doing this song? Caveats, exceptions, blah blah: can't fault the band.

Encore. Ears are ringing so badly that the shrieks and whistles for more sound like weird coyotes howling outside my tent. Wait, I'm not in a tent. Where the hell am I? Where are those coyotes coming from?

bomp bah bompabah Blindness. Starts out slow and groovy, never heard it played so slowly. It's like winding a clock, the tension goes into the spring; the spring keeps winding; when's it gonna break?

Gradually (from Hollywood Blvd, it CAME) the pace of the thing quickens, stomping along at 5 and then 10 mph and now we're cruising along just under the speed limit. And keeps coming, like a pissed off Batman.

Waves of oscillation churn out into the audience; a black hole gradually forms exactly five and one half feet above Orpheo McCord's head, sucking everything back into it that came out of it; not even light can escape it. Not even Rob Barbato's beard. Not even Mark Edward Smith. When it finally ends, everyone still standing sort of slumps forward like a deflated sex doll.

I limp out of there, drained of all energy but that needed for the trek to vehicle, and every particle of sense (and probably objectivity) that ever lived inside my skull. Clearly I am p0wned. How I wrote The Fall made me their bitch in just under seventy minutes.

Last time I'll ever see this band.

I don't know if I'm ok with that.

3 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

My middle name is Edward too. Does that make you like me more?

Marc E Roper

8:10 PM  
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