Dreams

 

And by that I mean the thing which happens when we sleep, not the figurative sense of unfulfilled plans or ambitions, e.g. “Dreams I’ll Never See”…

My most recent memorable dream kind of melted the Pentagon with NYC for a strong 9/11 flavor, the Pentagon leading out to the ground/swamp underneath the New Jersey Turnpike – you know where it splits up just south of NYC and rises over the swamps by Meadowlands.  It was like the dream was playing fast and loose with NYC and Northern Virginia.  I can’t remember the plot, except the Turnpike somehow morphed into a two lane road.  Too bad we can’t record our dreams.

I’ve been blessed with a decent sleeping ability; I rarely get insomnia.  In fact, I rarely get jet lag, as my last few foreign trips were Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (EST + 2) and Bucharest, Romania (EST + 7) – which I conquered by simply staying up until bedtime local time.  As for insomnia, somehow I don’t have trouble sleeping when stressed out, even before a big trial, but every now and then it happens.  A shot of Jagermeister almost always gets the job done. 

When I was a kid, with a far more active imagination than I have now, I had nightmares.  Not all the time, but far more common than now, which is almost never.  The most recent nightmare I can recall, a few years ago, was that somehow I pushed my brother off a high ledge on a building, by accident, and he fell directly on his head, killing him instantly.  That was so messed up I woke up immediately.  My childhood nightmares usually involved ghosts and other supernatural creatures.  Axe murderers and such were not even on my radar of apprehension.  As an adult, my nightmares, rare as they are and noticeable by their rarity, generally involve close friends and relatives dying.  Back in school, the most common topic was missing or failing exams, and as a practicing lawyer it was missing deadlines or trials (“I know I’m supposed to be somewhere today….OOPS!”).

To make matters worse, on at least one occasion – when I was very young - I had a high fever and went delirious, which means hallucinating while wide awake – a nightmare you can’t escape just by waking up.  Thus the classic Universal logo from the 50s or 60s still hits me when I see it, as it had something to do with that unforgettable experience.  Bar none, that was the worst experience in that regard, because unlike a nightmare while you’re sleeping, you’re wide awake.  Years later, experiencing LSD and mushrooms voluntarily were a way of confronting this, and I’d describe the psychedelic experiences as effectively dreaming while you’re wide awake.  On lower doses you can simply close your eyes and vanish into a vast fantasy world which seems to last for years, and if you don’t like it, just open your eyes and you’re back in reality – although with some seriously distorted visual effects to liven things up. 

I’ve had a few erotically charged dreams, but not nearly as many as I might prefer.  A more recent one involved a former GF, so finally I had a dream about one of them.   “The names have been changed…to protect the guilty.”

When people I do know appear in my dreams, it’s like a random appearance, and they don’t necessarily act in character. In one particular dream, someone was injured, and my father (deceased for almost 20 years now but making a guest appearance in my dream) undertook to drive the victim to the hospital, but couldn’t find the place and just gave up, dumping the injured party on the sidewalk with the advice, “good luck”.  Highly out of character for my Dad, who would have called 911 at the very least, but most likely would have successfully delivered the patient to the ER.  This dream alone convinced me that the appearance of people we know is not meaningful or prophetic, but merely random. 

As such, I dream every night, most being fairly nonmemorable.  These dreams never come true, and I can imagine why.  That brings me to my theory, which I’ve yet to hear echoed by any doctor or psychiatrist.

If dreams seem random and nonsensical, it’s because they are nothing more than the brain’s way of washing itself while we sleep, clearing its cache of short term memory. after a day of stress, work, and having to think clearly from waking to sleeping.  It jumbles around our memories at random, concocting a series of events which have no plot or reason and bear superficial resemblance to our actual experiences.  None of this is even remotely prophetic or supernatural, nor is there any reason to believe it would be. – aside from wishful thinking.  I don’t relive past encounters, or see the future.  Most of the women I meet in dreams are women I’ve never met before, although some ex-GFs do make guest appearances from time to time as noted above, mostly at random.  Again, dreams are the mind’s way of washing itself.  If you can’t sleep, you can’t dream, and your mind starts to deteriorate.

There was an experiment done years ago, in which they kept the subjects awake for several days straight.  Before the experiment they tested the subjects on mental skills – adding and subtracting – and motor skills, shooting baskets.  This initial test acted as the baseline, the subjects were repeatedly tested over the next few days without sleep, and then given a full night’s rest, and tested again.  They found the motor skills didn’t suffer appreciably during the days without sleep, but the math test results showed a strong downturn.  And after the subjects could sleep again – 8 hours – they were back up to normal again.

Getting back to the LSD issue.  Albert Hofmann, who invented LSD, noticed after his first trip, that the day after, he had immense peace of mind and clarity of thought.  LSD effectively acts not only as “dreaming while wide awake”, but also several nights’ worth of dreaming all at once, depending on the dosage.  The connection between the two is much stronger than I believe is realized.   Note this this also applies to psilocybin, the active ingredient of psychedelic mushrooms, e.g. psilocybe cubensis.

Well, we study the subject every night, don’t we? 

DesertFest NYC 2019

As noted earlier, it’s not my policy to blog about literally every concert I attend, unless I feel it’s somehow noteworthy.  A three day stoner rock festival in Brooklyn, New York may well qualify.  So here goes.

I’d been meaning to see a band called Elder, from Boston, Massachusetts, which has 4 albums out.   They come off as an intriguing mix of prog and stoner, with 9-12 minute songs which jam out a little.   Finally, the opportunity came:  DesertFest NYC, to occur on April 26 (Friday) through April 28 (Sunday).  The Friday show was at the Saint Vitus Bar in northwest Brooklyn, the Saturday and Sunday shows at The Well, also in Brooklyn, close to the Montrose St. station on the L line.  It’s a large enough venue with a large outdoor area, the immediate area in front of the stage protected by a canopy.  This neighborhood is industrial, due east of Williamsburg.

Before I go further: thank you to Dave and Loni for making this adventure possible, each in their own way.  Thank you.

Anyhow.  For reasons most plausibly related to the desert jams out in California with which KYUSS is most closely related, many of these stoner rock festivals invoke “DESERT” in their name even if the locale, downtown Brooklyn, is thousands of miles away from any desert.  Like DC, the NYC area is more like a swamp than a desert.   It was never a desert and if mankind vanishes from the city letting nature retake it, things will probably be flooded and swampy until the Sun expands into a red giant billions of years from now and we’re all long gone (except for Keith Richards).     

For logistical reasons I did not catch Friday night’s lineup, in reverse order from headliner to “who the hell are these guys?”:  Black Cobra, Here Lies Man, High Tone, Son of a Bitch, Heavy Temple.  I think I have some Black Cobra CDs, vaguely recalling them as stoner rock.  The rest I don’t recognize.  In any case I wasn’t there.

Saturday & Sunday had alternate stages full of bands which I ignored. 

Saturday (again, reverse order): Windhand, Weedeater, The Skull, Danava, Electric Citizen (main stage), Steak, Mirror Queen, Worshipper, Tower (second stage).    My prime concerns were The Skull, Eric Wagner’s post-Trouble band, and Danava, who I had never seen before. 

Electric Citizen have a female singer and a worried looking lead guitarist who reminds me of William H. Macy.  They’re not bad, but not particularly memorable, and may well be doomed to perpetual opening band status.  We’ll see. 

Danava are from Portland, Oregon, and have three albums:  self-titled, UnonoU, and Hemisphere of Shadows.  They’re another band that seems to take Black Sabbath as a starting point and change it up with a modest dose of weirdness. 

The Skull gave us the same awesome riffage we might expect from Trouble, for obvious reasons.  Mr. Wagner was in high spirits and shared that energy and enthusiasm with the crowd.  I got to shake his hand twice.  I’ve seen Trouble once with him on vocals (years ago) and saw The Skull more recently at Café 611 in Frederick, Maryland.  While the big four of Metallica, Megadeth, Slayer and Anthrax got most of the attention from thrash fans back in the 80s and 90s, a few lesser known but quality thrash bands were putting out albums if you had the good fortune to know about them.  Trouble added some 60’s psychedelic vibe to distinguish themselves from the others, Manic Frustration (1992) being my favorite album.  Dave Grohl is also a big fan, and said that for him, buying Psalm 9 (the first album) was like buying Sgt. Pepper.    If you’re into Trouble, by all means check out this band, who have two albums of their own: For Those Which Are Asleep, and The Endless Road Turns Dark. 

Weedeater gave me too much of a NASCAR-METH vibe and their cover of Skynyrd’s “Gimme Back My Bullets” was unrecognizable.   Another band with decent tuneage marred by abysmal vocals, thanks to bassist/vocalist Dave “Dixie” Collins.  I have their most recent album, Goliathan, and listened to the prior four albums, all of which sound pretty much the same.  Maybe they should just follow Karma To Burn, whose songs are 80% instrumentals, though confusingly named by number.    

Having seen Windhand in DC in January, I left after Weedeater.  Like The Sword, Windhand are a band with decent enough studio material but live, seem to believe that simply getting up on stage and playing the material is sufficient.  Sadly, neither band has appreciable stage presence.   

Back again for more the next day!

Sunday’s lineup:  Elder, Monolord, ASG, Ruby the Hatchet, Fatso Jetson (main stage); Mick’s Jaguar, Duel, Green Milk From the Planet Orange, Sun Voyager (second stage).   Sun Voyager had a cool dugout/onehitter for sale, but as I had ignored all the second stage bands, and had a King Buffalo one already, I had to pass.

I missed Fatso Jetson and ignored Ruby the Hatchet, another band with a chick singer, in their case a woman who looks like a metal version of Britney Spears.  Like Electric Citizen they’re ok, just not particularly different or memorable, and may well share the same fate of perpetual opening band.  Intriguing that the promoters saw fit to put them on different days. 

ASG.  I had Survive Sunrise and Blood Drive (newest and second newest albums) both of which I liked.  When I saw them on the bill, it was another incentive to catch this show.  Lead guitarist Jonah Citty plays something I’ve never seen, a left-handed Gibson Flying V.   I can’t describe their difference from the baseline of Black Sabbath, but it was enough to discern if not to articulate.  Not bad.

Monolord.  I had seen them a few months back.  They’re from Gothenburg, Sweden, and the guitarist/singer Thomas Jager plays a Greco Flying V.   He has a BOC cross tattooed on his arm.  Slow and drudgy, a bit repetitive, you have to be in the mood for “Into the Void” or “Under the Sun” type songs.  Hell, he was tuned to C, down from E, so he had to retune between each song.   I have all their albums!  In reverse order, Rust, Vaenir, Empress Rising, and Lord of Suffering/Die in Haze. 

Elder.  Finally.  This band is led by Nick DiSalvo, who plays a weird guitar I don’t recognize – usually he’s shown playing an SG.   I had actually purchased their first album, Elder, soon after it came out, followed by Dead Roots Stirring, Lore, and now Reflections of a Floating World, but hadn’t been able to see them live until now.  They start off with a riff, then plunge into an intense jam, and come back again.  Now repeat that for the next four songs in the set….and you have Elder, who blend stoner rock with some prog and jam band elements for an alluring mix. 

Overall an excellent show, which I’m glad I made the effort to visit the NYC area again to attend.   My next out-of-the-area shows are TOOL at Hampton Coliseum in southeast Virginia, May 10, followed by the third Earth Rocker festival in northeastern West Virginia, on July 13, the main attraction being Maryland band Clutch. 

The Vest.  I’m noticing more rock fans showing up with vests adorned with patches.  Usually there’s a large back patch, the rule seeming to be that the patch size is inversely proportional to the fame and fortune of the band.  A band I like, REZN, whose recent stop at the Sidebar in downtown Baltimore was sparsely attended (fortunately myself included) is selling large back patches on its website.   I snagged two smaller patches.  In fact, I’ve accumulated enough patches to start a vest, but at this point I can’t help considering it an affectation.  I still have a denim jacket from Paris around, which dates from my high school days.  The large, central back patch on that is Black Sabbath. 

Oddly, the merchandise options at the Desertfest were fairly modest.  Bands seem to vary in how diligent they are in offering such things, ranging from the basic t-shirts all the way to things like patches – Sleep are the best at that – and grinders or onehitters, again Sleep being the best as well.  Sadly, many of us fans would gladly open our wallets and buy these things.  At the very least you would imagine a band would release tour t-shirts with the current tour’s dates on the back, but I’m seeing that to be the exception and not the rule.  Not my problem, of course, but word to the wise…..

Sleep

I’m trying to avoid simply recounting concerts or bands, but in this case I can’t resist.  Although I’ve referred to stoner rock bands countless times already, I haven’t blogged about Sleep in particular, and they are a particularly important band in that genre.

Current lineup:  Matt Pike (guitar), Al Cisneros (bass/vocals), Jason Roeder (drums).   Cisneros was also in a band called OM, which is heavy dronelike s**t.  Five albums: Variations on a Theme, Conference of the Birds, Pilgrimage, God is Good, and Adviatic Songs.  The singing sounds like it’s in Byzantine or some foreign language.  It reminds me of SunnO))).  To make matters even more stonerish, Cisneros was also in a one-off band called Shrinebuilder, somewhat of a stoner rock supergroup with only one (awesome) self-titled album, featuring Dale Crover on drums (the Melvins), Scott Kelly (Neurosis) on bass, and the ever-popular Scott “Wino” Weinrich (Saint Vitus & the Obsessed, among others) on guitar and vocals.  Note that current Sleep drummer, Jason Roeder, was with Neurosis, making two members of that band Al Cisneros has worked with. 

Discography:  Volume 1, Holy Mountain, Jerusalem/Dopesmoker, The Sciences.  With the exception of J/D (see below) these four albums have multiple songs with lyrics.

Along with Kyuss, Sleep can be considered one of the premiere stoner rock bands.  They began around 1991 and continued to 1998, at which point they broke up when the record label refused to release their album, Jerusalem, also known as Dopesmoker, a continuous 52 minute song (later released on a different label).  While most of their songs can be enjoyed without herbal enhancement, the latter album almost requires it to be listenable, and I imagine the record company weren’t 4:20 friendly enough to make that work.   

Doom with a Groove.  As noted earlier, a frequent complaint of stoner rock is that too much of it sounds the same, mostly bands incessantly copying not only Black Sabbath but also each other.  A subset of stoner rock is doom, which seems to take Black Sabbath, particularly “Into the Void”, the last song on Master of Reality and tuned down to C#, and make it even slower, heavier and doomier.  Electric Wizard really come to mind on this, but SunnO))) and Sleep do this as well.  And after awhile that really gets dull and tiresome.  Are you trying to lull everyone to sleep?  [WARNING:  DO NOT USE INDICA].  So the challenge with this is keeping it lively when you’re tuned down low – thus the GROOVE.  I could hear a definite groove with Pike & the boys that night, and certainly on The Sciences.  I did not fall asleep during this show. 

Pike tends to play Les Pauls through multiple Orange amps – I counted three heads and six 4x12” cabinets – and heavily detuned.  He doesn’t wear a shirt.  Cisneros handles the vocals and Rickenbacker bass, through no less than 4 full stacks of Sunn amps.  The music drones but (as noted) has a definite groove which breaks up what might otherwise be monotonous and dull.  Both shows (see below) were highly enjoyable. 

In 2000, Pike formed High On Fire, more of a thrash metal band, and continued with that for awhile, putting out 8 albums between 2000 and now.  I actually saw them open for Opeth in Baltimore in 2008, but for some reason they didn’t impress me.  I tried listening to their stuff on Spotify and it went in one ear and out the other.  Like a fair amount of thrash metal, it does a poor job of distinguishing itself from angry white noise.  Fortunately Sleep are much different.

In 2009 Sleep reformed and began touring again.  Recently they released a new album of awesome s**t, called The Sciences.  [Technically it seems High on Fire is on hiatus and not disbanded.]  

Here is a particularly good (and of course, positive) review of the new album which addresses much of the circumstances surrounding its long-awaited arrival: https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sleep-the-sciences/

Now I’ve seen them twice, both at the new 9:30 Club in DC.

2016 set list.     Dragonaut, Holy Mountain, Dopesmoker (excerpt), The Clarity, Sonic Titan, Aquarian, From Beyond, Cultivator/Improved Morris.

2018 setlist.       Marijuanaut’s Theme, Holy Mountain, The Clarity, Sonic Titan, Giza Butler, Leagues Beneath, The Botanist, Dragonaut, encore: Dopesmoker (excerpt).   Remarkably, the following night they played another show, a different setlist featuring most of Holy Mountain.   Hopefully Pike was using a new guitar cable. 

As you might imagine, this is a band not quite shy about declaring their love of marijuana consumption.  In addition to the names, and much bud-like imagery on the album covers and t-shirts, the concession stand at the recent show featured lighters, credit card-style grinders, and at a premium, metal grinders – i.e. MJ paraphernalia.  Other bands are doing the same these days, so it’s only a matter of time before band-emblazoned bongs, pipes, rolling papers, etc., become available.  Hell, Willie Nelson and Snoop Dogg have proprietary weed strains, so as legalization spreads, perhaps we’ll see that from stoner rock bands as well – hell, concert venues would be well advised to double as legal dispensaries (dare we hope).  DC, where the concert took place, has legalized possession, but not sale, of MJ.  Stay tuned.  In the meantime, enjoy SLEEP.  

Colour Haze

I subscribe to Classic Rock magazine, and sometimes buy the PROG version of the same.  Each issue comes with a free CD sampler of music.  Unfortunately, most of the music turns out to be “Best new bands” that invariably sound almost exactly like established bands.  In other words, the new bands haven’t yet outgrown their influences.  So listening to the sampler becomes a tedious affair of “which band are they ripping off”?  The Classic Rock team loves giving us incessant clones of Guns N’Roses and the Rolling Stones, while PROG gives us more Yes copycats.  With regard to prog it’s even more egregious:  how are you “prog” if you’re simply copying Pink Floyd, Yes, King Crimson, etc. without adding anything new of your own?  They’re practically de facto tribute bands.  Anyhow.

In this case, the band Colour Haze from Munich, Germany, I had the opposite problem.  They have enough of a unique sound that trying to figure out who they sound like was a real challenge. 

The label “stoner rock” definitely applies, and some may consider them Germany’s premier stoner rock band.  They have 11 studio albums from 1995 (Chopping Machine) to 2014 (To The Highest Gods We Know), and a live album from 2009 (Burg Herzberg Festival).  The current lineup is Stefan Koglek (guitar, vocals), Philipp Rasthofer (bass), and Manfred Merwald (drums). 

I do hear Orange Goblin, Grateful Dead, and Blue Cheer – but by that I mean Blue Cheer (self-titled fourth album) and The Original Human Being.  Often there’s a fairly clean guitar tone, but unlike Jerry Garcia, Koglek knows what distortion is, and although they jam heavily, there are plenty of modest-length songs, so I’ve yet to get bored by them.  Much of their music has an airy, drone-like quality, though not as slow, sludgy or doomy as Sleep or Electric Wizard.  They seem to like single-word song titles.  On ALL, which at this point is my favorite (although I still don’t have all their albums), the song titles almost seem to form a sentence.  It’s reached the point where I prefer them to Kyuss, a band the stoner rock crowd seems to consider the best. 

For now they only seem to tour Europe – the same deal as Hawkwind and the other German psychedelic bands.  If they come to the US I’ll happily go.  In the meantime, I have five albums left to acquire and digest before they find their way here.