David and I had yet to meet Rhys or Glenn Branca or any of the other downtown musicians with whom we would soon become closely involved, and who would help define the musical climate of the post New-Wave explosion in New York. The music which would evolve, via bands like DNA (with Arto Lindsay and Ikue Mori), Teenage Jesus and the Jerks (with Lydia Lunch), Branca’s Theoretical Girls (with Jeffrey Lohn) and The Static (with Barbara Ess), Mars, Ut, Red Transistor (with Rudolph Grey), Rhys’ own Arsenal and countless others which came and went, would define the ‘No-Wave’. These noiseicians reduced ‘rock’ to it’s most elemental state—a primitive beat and a forceful emotion. Rhythm. Volume. There were no ‘indie labels’ to speak of at the time, no real way for this music to pass beyond the shores of Manhattan, and therefore this music has never been given it’s proper due as the amazing, ground breaking stuff it was. Basically, if you weren’t there to experience it, you missed it.

The bands spawned a group of musicians who desired to reach further and more seriously as composers, using rock music as their source material. At the time Rhys Chatham, Glenn Branca, Jeffrey Lohn and others were working directly alongside more ‘serious’ composers like Reich and Phillip Glass in creating a popular, minimalist art music, often employing complex textures or massive volume.

My group with David—The Fluks—would soon play Max’s and CBGB’s ourselves and connect with a whole coterie of interesting younger musicians following in the immediate wake of the No-Wave, including, among others Thurston Moore’s band at the time, The Coachmen, who were playing the same circuit we were, trying to get noticed. Although at the time Max’s was past it’s heyday, when the Velvets and Warhol, artist Robert Rauschenberg, Iggy Pop and Janis Joplin could be found upstairs in it’s back room partying side by side—we were keen to hang out in it’s dingy ambience. ‘Meltdown’ sounded too good to pass up.

The curtains opened and three men with electric guitars stood in a row across the stage. Behind them, center stage, a ‘drummer’ stood erect with a lone high-hat cymbal. These were, we later discovered: on the right, clean cut guitarist David Rosenbloom, whose band Chinese Puzzle was part of the downtown art/rock scene. To his left was downtown stalwart Wharton Tiers, manning the hi-hat. Wharton was a member of A Band with Paul McMahon, and he’d played in Theoretical Girls as well with the guy prowling the shadows on the left—tattered army fatigue jacket collar upturned like a punk Elvis in a rags, holding his guitar like a weapon: Glenn Branca.

Rhys himself stood center stage. He had these weird Roger McGuinn-style granny sunglasses on his nose, leather vest, lips pursed, a determined look on his face, perhaps standing a little unsteadily. That is, until the music started. Rhys began stumming downstrokes on his low E string (we later found out it was a specific tuning of the guitars, not conventional EADGBE jive at all). Soon Glenn and David joined suit, one after the other, with Wharton beating out eighth notes on the hat. That was it for percussion—he was getting a lot out of opening and closing it for accent purposes. The sound grew as the guitars slowly introduced the other strings, each in succession, creating a complex chord. No one ever touched the fretboard once; just this open ringing de-tuned tuning that built to an incredible din (indeed The Din was the name of one of Rhys’ later ensembles). Occasionally Rhys would give the others cues for changes in section or intensity, his whole torso nodding the last 4 counts, his mouth miming ‘one, two, three, four…’

Something was going on inside the music that I couldn’t put my finger on. Although the players seemed to be simply downstroking with flat picks across the length of the strings, amazing things were happening in the sound field above our heads. Overtones danced all around the notes, getting more animated, turning into first gamelan orchestras, then later a choir of voices, and finally a complete maelstrom of crushing sonic complexity, ping ponging over the minimalist low notes of the rocking chord.

Rhys was definitely more than a little high (“I was on Quaaludes and speed that night, yikes!” he later told me). As the music reached full tilt he started weaving into the crowd, down the long narrow center aisle between the rows of tables running up to the stage. Beer glasses were rattling from the decibels. Seating was sort of communal along the rows, and as Rhys walked he began swinging his guitar absentmindedly, hitting people in the head and knocking over drinks and stuff. People scrambled to get out of his way, but he seemed so absorbed in the music that he didn’t notice the commotion at all. He slowly made it back up to the stage and the musicians dropped strings one after another until they were all back on just the low note, gamelans subsiding but still dancing, and then it was back to just Rhys for awhile, with that insistent rhythm on the low string. Finally, after what was about 25 or 30 minutes, but that felt like a glorious forever, he let the last note ring.

The crowd sat stunned at first, and then broke into wild applause! A roomful of people were amazed at what they’d just heard! After the applause died down, Rhys announced with an exuberant slur in his voice that the band was going to perform ‘another number’, which was a bit of a surprise considering that they had essentially played one chord for a full half hour! Rhys began drumming on the low string once more, and the group proceeded to careen right back into the exact same thing again, for another half-hour! THE SAME EXACT THING! Fantastic! At this point some of the ‘less committed’ in the audience ran for the exit!

This second time, though, a series of grainy black-and-white slides of ambiguous, film-noir-ish scenes were projected on a screen behind the band. A famous shot of the old Pennsylvania Station with the huge beams of sunlight beaming down, a Pacific Island beach with low flying (Japanese?) fighter planes. The brilliant whites in all the images had a transcendental vibe that seemed to connect them to each other. One at a time an image would appear, long slow fade in then hold a long time then long slow fade out. There were only about 5 slides over the half-hour, moving in glacial time. Turns out these were the work of fellow musician and up and coming ‘art star’ Robert Longo, and their use during the second ‘half’ of the performance became an integral part of the piece.

I had some sort of ecstatic experience there, listening to this strange music and watching these images. I say strange because on the one hand it was upbeat, rocking out and familiar. But it had this other quality to it as well; something else was going on there. This was ‘Art’ too. The piece was Rhys Chatham’s Guitar Trio, and it was our entry into an amazing new world of music being created below 14^th Street in lower Manhattan. I had never heard anything like it before, yet that night I felt it was something I’d been hearing in my head forever. Here it was, in front of me in the flesh, finally in real life. And it was beautiful.

This piece has been previously published in slightly altered form...

Max’s advert excerpt in the Village Voice:

3 pix, photog unknown, all I’ve got:

With maybe 30 minutes to go before the sky phenomena was to start, we pulled into the little town of Evant, TX (pop 426). A perfect one-stoplight town. There were a few dozen people sitting around outside between the diner and the parking lot, glasses at the ready. The place was buzzing. But we wanted to be by ourselves and out in nature for the experience, in order to feel the light change and hear and see wildlife reactions, so we traced a small county road out of town (following the maps!) then down a local gravel road and pulled off in front of a beautiful piece of property for sale. Through an iron fence, Texas scrub trees and rolling hill country. Across the road, an immense field of purple flowers with goats grazing in the distance under far trees, trying to stay out of the sun.

At last the sky was a perfect blue - no clouds! Perfect skies all thru totality - which was almost an out of body experience. When the light changed – it got dimmer and dimmer – it was magical. The shift in light across the landscape all thru totality was astounding, We didn’t really detect the light dimming until the moon was maybe 80 or 85 percent of the way across the sun – so, only near the very end, even after such a large portion of the sun was already covered, did it start to dim. Shows just how bright the sun is. But then suddenly it was eerie twilight and the goats were bleating and the birds cawing. We could then pull the eclipse glasses off and stare directly at the corona, blazing in the darkened sky. It looked unreal, like science fiction. We had The landscape turned pale red sunset all around, 360 degrees of sunset, an eclipse phenomena I’d read about. As the darkness took hold, crickets started up a chorus – they thought night had descended, and kept it up for quite awhile after the light came back. We saw the beads just before totality, and the diamond ring briefly just before the sun flamed back on and it was ending. As the moon drifted off the face of the sun some cloud cover finally rolled in, but we were able to watch all the way thru the moon’s exit, just the three of us, out in nature, with no one around. Couldn’t have been more perfect. What a time! Very moving.

Afterwards, more road trip enroute back to Austin: Storms Drive-In, Lampasas, Texas, a drive thru restaurant straight outta the 50s. Fried pickles, fried cheese-stuffed jalapeños, malted milkshakes, burgers, whoopee!. Wall sign said ‘Elvis ate here’.

Stopped to pick wildflowers on a gravel road. Plenty of steers, goats, cows, horses, and also emu, llamas, and armadillos (most roadkill). Further along, Texas roadside junk-shop-of-our-dreams. Rusty old tools and giant saws, wirework sculptures, cow skulls and so much other rural bric-a-brac, Texas-style. Also serving pulled pork sandwiches which left Sage in heaven. Run by a woman from Australia, of all places, out here in the hills of Texas. We had a nice conversation with her – and with so many people today. So odd that there was an earthquake in NYC while we were out there in Texas - I never knew there were earthquakes on the East Coast…

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The news of Bob Weir’s death sorta finally seals the coffin on the original band, though Billy and Mickey will no doubt soldier on. I believe a lot of their repertoire will live on. It will become a real kind of folk music, played and interpreted by all manner of stylists, some faithful, some not so much. Bob was only 78 and seemed to lead a pretty healthy lifestyle, but there’s no telling when the knock comes on your door. I spent the 1970s immersed in the Dead’s universe – I saw them and their individual projects alot thru about 1980, including at Watkins Glen in 1973 and Barton Hall 1977, and was trading reel-to-reel bootleg tapes long before cassettes came in. Once New Wave and Punk hit I moved quite far away from them for a long, long time, as I immersed in and became a part of so much exciting new music.

Sometime in the early 2000’s I was asked to review a new concert movie they’d released, Sunshine Daydream. Sitting in that theatre, surrounded by the faithful, their importance in my musical life began seeping back in. It felt like coming home, so sweet. So many of the tunes and performances were ingrained in my head. This music is in the American canon, these are our modern folk songs every bit as certainly as The Basement Tapes are. I loved the interplay between Bob, Jerry and Phil. Folks keep referring to Bob as a ‘rhythm’ player, but I never saw it as such. He and Jerry both played lead and both played rhythm. They twined between them in a dance of interlocking parts.

I saw a through-line, in their being a band who could play real songs and also get real out-there into improvisational extrapolations, a through-line from a band like them to, say, Television, where Tom Verlaine (also recently departed, he was a friend and one-time collaborator) and Richard Lloyd could do something like that. To my ears Sonic Youth evinced that same interplay, any one of the three of us up front potentially playing the lead, or holding down the rhythm, of a song. I think we also straddled the poles between song and sound well. We never sounded like the Dead, but there was a similar spirit in our openness to both that always felt like kinship to me.

I learned so much from Bob’s playing - his rock moves onstage too - and take inspiration from his subtle touch and harmonic sense to this day. How does one voice a chord? There are some very standard positions you’ve heard a million times. And then there was Bob, finding impossible inversions and voicings and extensions of his own design. He really had absorbed McCoy Tyner’s left-hand voicings and complex rhythms - entwined w Garcia in a magic dance on the best nights, with Phil’s lower depths holding them both from spiraling off. His playing, his phrasing, was so unique – I think just about every assessment I’ve read has mentioned it – and the rest of us guitar pickers could only look on in amazement. I spent about 6 weeks getting Weather Report Suite down on acoustic guitar. Such a beautiful and unexpected number at the time. As we in Sonic Youth moved further and further into our explorations of alternate tunings, it became all about finding interesting inversions and chords, and I often had Bob in the back of my mind as we worked out parts together in one dumb basement after another.

Bobby carried on his own Never Ending Tour, when you think about it. Never happier than with a guitar in hand, singing for the crowd. Both Bob’s and Jerry’s voices took on further gravitas as they aged, giving additional weight to the lyrics and emotions behind them. They were both ballad singers of great skill, and their voices harmonized together so well. Jerry would Sing Us Back Home, and Bob would advise us it Looked Like Rain. Their harmonies were part of the backbone of the Dead’s music. On the masterful Jack Straw - recorded live in Europe and one of Bob’s – and the band’s - supreme achievements - the two were characters conversing inside their own outlaw western story. Singing about a lost west, their band personified a similar modern take on the outlaw existence. Highway riders.

Bob was often the rocker in the Dead, he was One More Saturday Night in Chuck Berry tribute, and Mexicali Blues and Greatest Story Ever Told in Marty-El Paso-Robbins genuflection. So many moods to Bobby’s songs, but no matter what, he was always happiest just Playing In The Band. And that he did, right until the end. In John Barlow Bob found a sympathetic compadre, like-minded partner in crime, to match the Hunter and Garcia partnership.

Jerry was the face of the band for so many, and Bob often seemed to defer to him as figurehead, but onstage, in their best days onstage together, he was never less than a perfect partner, driving each other to greater and further-out heights. For all the years I’ve been absorbing Bob’s craft, I never really felt I had him figured out. He managed to maintain a certain air of mystery, a certain opacity, a kind of hippified mischievousness behind his eyes; he often answered questions with aphorisms, his speech peppered with modern-day ‘cowboy wisdom’, yet for all his openness I think he kept quite a private side as well, following his own path in or out of the spotlight. As he aged he talked about death as being “the last and best reward for a life well-lived.” He died with dignity, saying something about looking forward to see where the journey took him next. Roll on Bob.