It is a small suburban home. Stone steps surrounded by shrubs curve up to the front door. Inside, it is kitschy and bright, but obviously a family home. Each room is painted a different color (I would later see the paint cans stacked in the basement), old food and drink advertisements are framed on the walls, and a retro salt and pepper shaker collection is displayed throughout the house. The kitchen table and chairs are a sparkly red vinyl, and the bathroom has an aquatic theme. Pictures of grandparents and children line the back hallway. One of these children, a son, emerges with a friend. He wears a soccer uniform and later will be sent to the friend’s house for the night.
There are two tables of food—one with snacks and with desserts. All are vegetarian. A bucket with a sign signaling donations for traveling bands sits on the table of snacks. I am told that, at the last party, the dessert table had a cosmic section. This time, though, the far end contains liquor bottles, the array and dustiness of which reminds me of my mother’s collection, in formation since her wedding and stored under the armoire until parties when they form a neat arrangement on her server. The party is an odd mix of college house party and ones my parents throw. The setup is very parental—more, and more elaborate, finger-foods than would ever be set out at a college—but while some people pick, others bring equipment to the basement and there’s the knowledge that the party isn’t just this food.
The host looks like a character out of “The Big Lebowski,”—his belly protrudes, his hair is stringy and long, and he smokes pot in a back room. The crowd is mostly men over thirty-five. The only women, at first, are a few wives—moms refilling chip bowls and cutting slices of pizza in half—and their single friend who wanders the house holding a perpetually half-empty glass of rosé, and who is one of the few who speaks directly to me. (She asks if she should break into the untouched seven-layer dip. I tell her yes.) Later, a few hipsters will show up. They’re the kind who attend a small liberal arts school in the woods, and therefore do not realize what they are. Some will stumble, openly drunk off the host’s beer and they will talk in loud voices about the “mad food” here, but for now, it’s only the parents.
I make my way through the house and I pass the son sitting on a small couch and watching the Disney channel. A small crowd has gathered on the back porch. I eavesdrop on people talking about changing neighborhoods and recent movies. One conversation shifts seamlessly from guitars to golf. I hear the family’s dogs barking in the garage, where I assume they’ll be locked until the party’s over.
We are all called into the basement for the show to begin. The basement is unfinished with a cement floor, cinderblock walls, tool racks, and a washer and dryer. A few tea candles and a large plastic jack-o-lantern light the room. I look at the people around me. Just about every person here is markedly different than everyone else. It’s a crowd in which I do not fit, but no one does. The only thing that seems to unite everyone is that they all spend a significant amount of time defining the term psychedelic as it relates to sound.
The first band to play has seven members—six men and one woman—all over forty. There are two drummers and five guitar players, though one man occasionally abandons his guitar to curl up on the floor and groan into a microphone he cups around his mouth. When I take my seat in the basement the band is only one drummer and two guitarists and, though they are playing, I assume that they are warming up. But slowly, the other members make their way to their instruments and start playing. Most of them have a beer, and they’ll stop occasionally to sip from it. One man sets his bong on an amp and draws from it regularly. Another sets up a patio chair in which he sits while he plays—his guitar resting atop his expansive belly. They are plugged into a wall of amps and I can physically feel this music. I have also, accidentally, sat beneath a drum, so this adds to the vibrations. With my earplugs, the music sounds loud though not obnoxiously so, but if I open my mouth it gets noticeably louder, and when I remove one plug for one second the volume is overwhelming and it takes my ear too long to recover. The seven members play what they want when they want—they each take little breaks and when they decide they are finished, they simply unplug and leave. They play, continuously, for about twenty minutes, and while I like listening to them, it definitely feels like I am watching them practice. They each play their own things, held together exclusively by their influences. The whole thing sounds like a twenty-minute breakdown in a Doors’ song, which is certainly fun but not really anything special, either. I imagine what led them here—the failed dreams of becoming the Stones, and the desire to keep playing with other people. It seems to me that none of them are particularly interested in noise music as an art form, they just want to play their instruments and don’t want to play specific songs. This strikes me as sad at first, but then I realize that it’s wonderful—to stop playing would be sad, but to have house parties with friends and food and music is pretty great.
The second band consists of two dads—men with big bellies and balding heads. They are seated on the far side of the room, and each plays a guitar. They play two songs, both noisy and atonal and improvised, but also very soft and delicate. One guitar has the sound of a sitar, and one man sings actual words, quietly. Between songs, he apologizes for putting everyone to sleep. “Don’t worry, we’ll wake up later,” one girl sitting in the front says. I do not know if that is just a statement or an insult. These men surprise me with the tenderness of their set. It is unexpected but not harsh.
Next up is an Italian duo. They look like they could be brother and sister (both slender and pale and both with straight brown hair to their hips) but I do not ask. As they set up, I understand a little of what they say. I hear them say, “playing in a house,” and “we’ll see,” both of which seem like appropriate statements. He plays the drums, she predominately plays the saxophone but at various moments employs bells (including a cowbell), a whistle, and a melodica. At one point she yells what I can only assume to be an Italian interpretation of a Native American ghost cry. The drummer’s mouth, though constantly open, changes shape each time he hits his drums, as if to personally emulate the sounds they’re producing. There is something impressive about their playing, but their parts do not fit with each other. I realize that this is the point, and that, I suppose, there is something impressive about being able to totally ignore each other, but throughout their set, I cannot help thinking that they need something else—another person, a computer, even—if not to tie them together at least to add a deeper texture to their sounds. They are at their best when they play together, though. Her solos look and sound like a painful test to see how high she can go, and at times it appears she is sucking air out of her sax rather than blowing into it; his sound like what they are—a boy playing drums in a basement.
After the Italians play, and the lights go up, the host and a few men who look like they should be teaching middle-schoolers art or phys-ed, or instructing customers on types of hammers at Home Depot, form a circle in the corner and pass around a joint.
The final band to play is a collaboration between two men: one young, dressed entirely in black and paunchier than he would like to be, on guitar and pedals; the other, an older fellow with long white hair and beard, on the saxophone. He reminds me of a sax-playing Santa (the ones on the streets at Christmastime) who has taken to the bottle. He plays his saxophone by slapping it. The young man lays his guitar across his lap and pokes at it with a variety of tools at though he were playing a frantic game of Operation. About halfway through his set, I realize that his head is moving more than his hands. They sound noisy, as their genre implies. They are the headliners and they are more atonal and harder to listen to listen to than the previous bands, and the audience seems to love it. A girl sitting on the floor by my feet sways her head dramatically. At first I cannot tell if it’s because she’s really feeling the music or because she looks to weigh eighty pounds and has had more than just a few beers, but when she folds her legs up to her chest and rests her head on her knees, I assume it’s mostly the latter. A large woman stands beside my chair and keeps stepping back until she is essentially on top of me. She turns around, takes a hold of my elbow, and yells over the noise that she’s sorry for stepping all over me. I yell back that it’s okay. Throughout the set, whenever she bumps me, she reaches around and rubs my arm. When the young man stages a particularly exuberant attack on his guitar, the woman raises her fist to her face and blows a kiss.
After their first eight-minute song, the Italian girl grabs her sax and joins in. She and the older man engage in a series of endurance tests. They both blow until they sweat. His stance shifts forward, she leans back. At one point, I imagine them as small children, screeching into their new instruments before encouraging parents. He wins every time. The man on guitar pauses to allow for this little competition, and then he raises his arm and waits, for what I do not know, but at a very specific moment he slams his hand onto a pedal and begins playing again. The crowd cheers. When they finish this song, met with ecstatic applause, he asks if there’s time for one more. The people around me laugh—as though they would ever deny him the opportunity. They play again, a song much like the previous but about half as long. When they finish, all three are out of breath, and the entire basement claps louder and longer than they did for the other bands.
Later, upstairs, as I wait on the couch with Stanley, one of the family’s cats (who materializes only after the noise is over), I watch an unexpected number of people purchase albums from these men. “I have to warn you,” the younger one tells a potential customer who inquires about the price of a record. “That’s a one-sider. It’s twenty, but the label’s selling it for thirty, so, you know.” The transaction is completed. I have been to many shows with bands that perform composed (and interesting) songs and pack the merch tables with their five-dollar cds and three-buck cassettes, and rarely does anyone buy as much as they do here. One of the album covers features a photo of a naked woman sprawled on a bed. A lanky man with white hair stands a few feet away and talks with the Santa saxophonist. The lanky one breaks away and approaches the table. He spots the photo of the woman, laughs, claps his hands and turns back to his friend. “Who is it?” he asks. They remind me of excited adolescent boys. “I don’t know. It’s a secret. Well, he knows.” I assume he is referencing the guitar player. I imagine being the unnamed naked woman, being gawked at by men young and old, on an album of improvised sound and it makes me feel more uncomfortable than any of the night’s music has.
