Last week I experienced what I hope will be the loudest thing I ever hear in my life.  I saw My Bloody Valentine in concert.

This may not seem teribly exciting to you, particularly when I tell you that I drove 10 hours to see them, from Portland to San Francisco (which is further than you might think), but it was to me, my girlfriend and legions of rock fans.  See, MBV hadn’t played a show in the United States in 16 years.

In terms of “important” bands, MBV stands in one of the upper categories. Not as influential as say the Beatles or the Velvet Underground, they nevertheless were the band that most people generally credit with shoegazer music. The name comes from the fact that bands in this genre played distortion-heavy music, mostly staring at their feet rather than looking at the audience (drugs may/ did have a lot to do with this).

My Bloody Valentine started out as a middling goth band in the 80’s, but eventually shed its preening original lead singer and began to move in a more experimental direction. They released Isn’t Anything in 1988 to critical acclaim, and the album essentially started the shoegazer trend. The band labored for another three years and nearly bankrupted their label, Creation Records, in the recording of their 1991 album Loveless.

Loveless stands as not only the best album from My Bloody Valentine or the shoegazers, but as one the best and most influential of all time. My favorite song on the album is the lead-off track:

My Bloody Valentine “Only Shallow”

(be warned, it’s loud)

Everyone waited to hear what they would follow up the album with. And they got… nothing.

17 years pass.

Now, back to me. I had already set my plans in motion to move from Chicago to Portland. The truck is rented, I’ve got a plane ticket to fly out and find a place to live. One night T. and I were out somewhere, returning home around 3am and a bit intoxicated. I check my email before going to bed, and I have a notification from Facebook.

“My Bloody Valentine has posted a concert near you.”

Huh?

The haven’t played a show in years. I thought it must be a mistake, so I double check. Sure enough, they’re playing a show in Chicago…three months after I move. They’re only playing six or 7 shows in the US at all (they’re from Dublin), and none of them is in the Pacific Northwest, but there is one in San Francisco.

That’s not far away from Portland, right? Er… well… Who cares? MY BLOODY VALENTINE is playing live! So I buy two tickets. We’ll figure out the rest later.

Flash forward to last week. We rent a car and drive down, and here we are at the show. We know how loud it’s going to be, and so we wear earplugs.

It was louder than you can imagine. The volume nearly overwhelmed the earplugs. I actually covered my ears at one point. It was as loud as I imagine an exploding jet engine would sound. The hair on my arms was vibrating. My clothes were vibrating. I noticed that the sound guy put on a pair of headphones like you would wear at a construction site and just walked away from the board during their 20 minute noise freakout. A blogger for the Guardian wrote:

The entire hall was vibrating, my clothes were flapping and I kept having to check that my hair wasn’t standing on end. Had I been wearing a rug, it would have made its own way home.

(I just checked up on who the blogger is… it is John Moore from the Jesus and Mary Chain, a band that was pretty loud in their own right. A commenter at the blog post wrote: “I have to say it was quite unlike anything I’ve ever heard — like an odd combination of being in an air raid and being lulled to sleep at the same time.”)

Here what they looked like during the freakout during a performance in London. Note that the mic on the camera can’t handle the noise level:

For slightly (slightly) better sound quality, here’s another clip:

It was a great show. The band was in fine form, and I can’t wait until they get around to releasing another album, if that ever happens.

I’m glad I wore earplugs, though. I checked up on exactly who is the loudest band of all time. Guinness discontinued the category of Loudest Rock Band Ever in order to discourage reckless noise and hearing damage, but the record stands with the Who at 126 dB. A commenter at the Guardian’s blog post wrote:

“…At one point, the sound measured 132db at the mixing desk - as loud as a jet engine at a distance of 100m. The sound techs had to wear ear defenders throughout.”

In other words, pretty loud.

(to purchase Only Shallow, you can check out Amazon or other purveyors)

I was checking out some of the videos I posted on You Tube…most aren’t particularly good, but this one has always made me laugh. It was written by and stars the members of Chicago comedy troupe Schadenfreude …I shot and edited it with help from Cieslak. It was made for an anti-Giuliani website called Rudy Married His Cousin, which incidentally is true.

Enjoy!

I’ve spent just about my entire life as a Midwesterner, most of it in Illinois and the remainder in Ohio. The midwest is a fine place to grow up. The people are friendly, it has a lot of history, and most of all a shared sense of camraderie due to the horrible, horrible weather.

I moved away, far away from Chicago two months ago, nearly as far west as I could go in the continental US, to Portland, Oregon.

Why Portland? I had only visited here once, for five days in December. Hell, my only other west coast experience was a trip to San Francisco when I was 14.

There’s a few concrete reasons:

• I’m a liberal
• I’m a vegetarian
• I’m pretty green, for what that’s worth
• I like old cars
• I like to camp

Portland seemed like the right place to me.  I had read an article in the AP about it entitled The Chi of Portland: High Weirdness in Nirvana which includes the following passage:

The city is “one organism, one body, one very complex, independent system.”

Not to mention eccentric.

Ubiquitous bumper stickers proclaim “Keep Portland Weird.” They were meant to support small local businesses to keep Portland from being big-boxed out of its identity.

But they’ve become a focal point for what might be a counterculture elsewhere.

Portland has been called The People’s Republic of Portland (land-use rules irk some developers) Beervana, (it’s loaded with microbreweries), the Rose City (they are nearly worshipped here) and Sin City, a salute, of sorts, to its frontier past and recent bouts of permissiveness that some people find a bit much. Others just shrug. That’s Portland.

The first President Bush called it “Little Beirut” for the hostile receptions he could rely on, and his son hasn’t fared any better.

Now that’s the town for me!

So, here I am, sitting on a lawn chair borrowed from my girlfriend’s parents (she not only moving/ moving in with me but making the entire move possible, they being residents of nearby Beaverton), typing into thie computer, about to take a nap to prepare myself for a drive down to San Francisco for a concert (that’s a ten hour drive, but it’s to see My Bloody Valentine) which will entail a stop at a state park and a night spent in a yurt.

That’s just the way people live here. When I mentioed sleeping in a yurt to my boss, she asked where. “Don’t know, how many parks with yurts can there be in Oregon?” I asked.

“Tons,” she replied.

By the way, a yurt looks like this.

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Another note: This town is full of hipsters. They are everywhere, in all levels of society. The first pizza I had delivered was by a hipster. The electrician who just fixed a light at my house was a hipster too.

But everyone is very nice. There isn’t a lot of the too-cool-for-school attitude that was so prevelant in Chicago. It is as if everyone is congratulating everyone else for making it out here, and damn, isn’t it great?

It is.

I know, I know, there are currently only two (well, three with this).  But since I recently moved, I haven’t had a great deal of time to be writing, but I promise that there will be posts coming very, very soon.

Some people can’t get enough of humidity. These are the same people that think that spending an hour in a sauna or a week in Orlando is also a cracking good time.

I’m going to go out on a limb and make the assumption that these people don’t have curly hair. They also more than likely don’t sweat.

It’s not like I’ve got a great deal of hair left on my head (though it is/was curly), or that I am a sodden mess when the temperature rises above 60. Well, that second point may not be far off, but that doesn’t change the fact that feeling like you are firmly lodged in someone’s armpit for days on end is far from what I would deem an ideal weather situation.

Chicago is notorious for its cold winters. People from other cities like to joke that they’ll visit when it’s warm out, but they’d never want to live there. Please allow me to offer the following advice: Don’t come here in summer or early fall. It is not unusual for a day to be like today: 80 degrees and disgustingly humid. You can almost see the moisture in the air. It’s like walking through a curtain of perspiration, and if that seems like it may be entertaining to you, let me assure you that it is far from it.

But then again, you probably like saunas.

(image from here)

On a scale of 1 to 10, how rude is talking in a movie theater? Compared to groping a newly married bride during a wedding reception or using the peanut butter knife in the jelly jar, it may seem slight, but in the humble opinion of the author, it ranks near an 8.

Please, take a moment and think to yourself about it . The theater is dark, you and your lady or fellow are sitting side by side, sharing a bucket of twenty-dollar popcorn, and behind you someone is opining, “Oh look! They’re going to fall in love!”

“She’s not going to throw that away!”

“That looks dangerous!”

Without even turning around, it was apparent that this woman was the type that more than likely moves her lips when reading. I would like to note that her child, who sounded to be about six or seven years old, also talked throughout the movie, but I’m inclined to forgive a child, especially one that has probably only been pooping in the toilet for a couple of years.

Both myself and my lady companion asked the woman, rather politely under the circumstances if you ask me, to please keep it down. Either she could not hear us under the explosions or the sound of her own voice, or she was ignoring us, because she continued throughout the duration of the film.

Following the conclusion of the film, I speculated about the possibility of carrying around a little squirt bottle, like the type you use to water plants, or more to the point the type you squirt a cat that has jumped up on the counter for the umpteenth time. Someone begins talking loudly during a movie?

Squirt!

Someone talking loudly on their cell phone at the next table while you are trying to enjoy a quiet dinner in a restaurant?

Squirt!

After presenting this option to my girlfriend, I thought perhaps using mace instead of water, and asked of the aggressiveness factor. 1 to 10, how appropriate would the water bottle be? She thought for a moment, and decided on a 7. But the mace? Not only was it a 4, but she mentioned that it would most likely get me arrested.

But the real reason she opposed the use of mace was due to the fact that would get mace all over the theater, ruining the movie for everyone else.

And that’s really the important thing, isn’t it?

Not getting arrested.

(photo by Diane Arbus)