An Open Apology To Alex Body

I have no idea who Alex Body is, but I owe the guy an apology.

I take that back, I have an idea of who Alex Body is, and I know there is more that one of them. Google told me so. But I’m talking about the Alex Body who’s here in Iowa, who is a local musician, and who had the unfortunate distinction of opening for Mono on Sunday night, thereby receiving the wrath of my anger for reasons that weren’t entirely his.

A brief account of the events leading up to Mr. Body is found here, but this is the story of what happened after Gabe’s decided to let the paying patrons to Sunday evening’s show into the venue, about 90 minutes after they were scheduled to open.

There weren’t that many people, but my anger swelled to the strength of 10 men as I walked up the familiar stairs of Gabe’s and found an easy seat while some dude began to set up a table and various forms of electronic equipment just off center stage.

The man was wearing a cut-off sleeve shirt, which was strange as the night was chilly and Gabe’s has instituted a “no light” policy, which means the heat from any illuminated source will fail to generate any amount of substantial sweat.

This is the guy from Mono, and some wires.

Either the young man sported several tattoos, one of which may have been a knife or maybe it was just the Lorzepam and mixed ginger ale talkin’.

Suddenly, Mr. Body introduced a microphone. Beats started. Musical loops followed. And then Alex Body began to sing.

His voice was riddled with reverb and distortion-it seemed to be his intent-and he struggled over the perfectly manufactured music that he built from his electronics. I wouldn’t refer to them as instruments, as Alex didn’t actually play them. He would just push buttons to make them start, turn a button to add a certain effect, and then push the button to make it stop.

I began talking to myself. Uttering mean things. Ready to scream.

A song ended, and then Alex began speaking. His voice was still overpowered with reverb, so you couldn’t understand a thing.

“Go away!” I yelled, but the noise was loud enough that nobody heard me.

“What?!” I screamed whenever he started speaking, trying to clue him in that he was lost in understanding because he didn’t have the good sense to turn off the fucking reverb. I’m sure there was a button for that.

More noise.

I began to get angrier, knowing very well that it would be at least Midnight before I got out of Gabe’s, making for a very painful Monday at work.

Here I was, miserable at the notion that Alex Body was part of the problem. After all, if he would only stop what he was doing, then we could move on to the second act, Chris Brokaw, and then we could see the headliner, Mono.

And then we could all get to bed at a reasonable hour.

At that moment, Alex Body was preventing all of this for me. I though about walking behind him to mock dance, but I was getting too sleepy to move. I checked my phone incessantly, watching the minutes pass, wishing that I was home in bed with my wife, tucked warm under the sheets.

Then, the music stopped.

Like a man with tourettes, I yelled “O.K.! That’s enough!”

At this moment, Gabe’s became silent. Alex looked up from his electronic devices and said, without the aid of his microphone, “What? Who said that?”

I knew that I couldn’t just heckle and then be a pussy about it, so I clarified with “We’re good! We’ve got it!”

I don’t normally heckle any artist. I don’t want to be “that guy” and more importantly, it takes a lot of guts to get up on stage-or get in front of the stage, in Alex’s case-and perform your art.

But in the heat of the moment, I wasn’t buying this as art. I was viewing Alex Body with contempt because he was just pushing buttons, singing incoherently and preventing Mono from getting on stage in a timely manner.

Mr. Body brought the microphone back up to his lips, which meant that any response directed at me came out as “Mmmffffooooecho, mmmfroommmmmayyeeeeowowowo!” I didn’t feel like much of an asshole at that moment, I just felt that Alex Body was fucking with me and my sleep patterns with his pretend art and music that sounded poorly mixed and barely rehearsed.

Finally realizing that things were only going to get worse for me, I got up and went outside where my car was sitting in its most awesome spot directly in front of the club.

I hopped inside and contemplated leaving. But it was the $12 cover that made me stay, that and the fact that I started to nod off in the front seat. I woke up in time to make the last two songs of Chris Brokaw’s solo set, but I didn’t see Mr. Body for the rest of the night.

I don’t know if I would have apologized then, because I was still pretty pissed about the whole thing. It wasn’t until the next day as I sleepwalked through work, a bike ride, and a surprise visit from my Mother-In-Law when I began feeling bad for taking such a mouthbreather approach.

So Alex, if you’re reading this, I’m sorry. Your performance that night still sucked, but you did not deserve to be hassled about it. You became the lightening rod for something that wasn’t your fault and it was wrong of me to call you out. I will listen to the first Suicide album in your honor (I’m guessing you’re familiar with their work) and I promise not to disrupt another one of your shows while you’re pushing buttons.

It wasn’t you that was pushing my buttons on Sunday evening. It was just another example that I may be getting too old for this shit, or that my taste in venues is discovering that old haunts simply don’t have the same allure to them when they struggle to find decent artists to book for what seems to be diminishing returns.

 Here's a video of another Alex Body performance, or you can buy his shit over at Bandcamp.

Mono - Live In Iowa City

Now with the band's newest member, a can of Miller High Life

On the way down to see Mono in Iowa City on Sunday night, I returned a call to my parents. They were leaving Iowa for several weeks to fly down to their home in Arizona, where the majority of my immediate family has begun to establish roots.

They told me that one of their cats died unexpectedly on Friday. My Mom is a big cat lover, but now three of her four cats have died in as many years and she gets distraught about things like that.

The point of all this-as if there is one-was to bring up a conversation with my father while we talked on the phone. I explained that I was driving to Iowa City to check out the band Mono. This lead to telling him who the band “Mono” was, and this inevitably led to a discussion of their country of origin (Japan).

Then came the “What kind of music do they play?” question, to which I began to tell my Dad, a man who just turned 66 a few weeks ago, all about the “post-rock” genre and how the most notable of those bands ended up scoring the music to the television show Friday Night Lights.

I could have reminded him that they are similar to a band I saw a few years ago called Godspeed You Black Emperor!, but that would be as pointless as him trying to tell me how good Neil Diamond’s Beautiful Noise album was.

Finally, I left it as “It’s not very often that a rock band from Japan ends up playing in Iowa” and he seemed pretty satisfied with that explanation, leaving my discussion of the entire “post-rock” genre as a piece of ancient history.

I’ll spare you the discussion too, even though this is probably a more appropriate venue for it, but let me quickly set up the night as a much-needed stress-relief evening where Mono were supposed to come into town and beat all of my real-world dramas into sonic submission.

And the great thing about it was that the doors opened at 7:00pm.

Yes, early shows are the way to go for working stiffs with a family like yours truly, but I have a feeling that the real reason was the exact opposite: it was a method into tapping into the “19-21” crowd, thereby bringing the patron total up a bit for this early evening, Sunday night show.

I arrive a little later, we’ll call it 7:15pm, where I buy my ticket and people watch until they let the dozen or so devotees upstairs to the stage area. The ticket guy tells me they’re still finishing up soundcheck, of which I can hear the sounds of layered guitars making its way down the stairs along with an unmistakable sound of a timpani.

How this Japanese quartet lugged up a timpani up those stairs in back is beyond me, but I’m excited at the prospect and casually eavesdrop on some of the conversations surrounding me.

There’s the chick in the Mono shirt who incredulously asks another “So you’ve never seen them live?” There’s the dude who drove four hours by himself to see the band, I believe from Illinois. There’s the boyfriend who asks his girlfriend, “Are you ready to get your mind blown?”

Then there’s me who wonders “When the fuck are they going to let us in?”  It’s obvious that there won’t be a big crowd for the show, so who really cares if we get to see the man (and woman) behind the curtain? We’re already hearing it, so let us in!

The story goes that the band arrived late, to which I don’t understand in the days when GPS devices are as common as a smart phone and the fact that Iowa City isn’t that big of a town.

One couple, the one where the Mono t-shirt wearing chick is a part of, tells the story of how they came early, went upstairs because there was no one working the door, only to find the band bringing in their gear while a staff member shoo’ed them back downstairs.

Maybe it was a problem with the van, but all I know was that it was at least an hour before they finally let the crowd of a dozen or so up the stairs so that we could endure a pair of opening sets by Alex Body and Chris Brokaw. I had no idea who Alex Body was, but Brokaw I recognized through the bands Come and the totally underrated Consonant, the project with Clint Conley created before Mission of Burma got started again.

Regardless, this “early show” was turning into a “much later show,” and the idea of going to work the next day exhausted was not sitting well with me. The stage was already full of gear, so imagine my surprise when someone starts setting up a table full of electronic equipment directly in front of the stage.

Ladies and gentlemen, this must be our opener, Alex Body.

I’ll write more about him later, but I have experienced this same kind of set up in previous gigs and all of them have had nothing but dismal results. Why Gabe’s does this is beyond me, but it’s amateurish and a complete momentum killer. I don’t want to see some last minute local act if you’re not going to provide them with some respect so that they have some time to set up beforehand and to at least allow them to perform on stage like a real artist. If it doesn’t fit, then don’t book it.

My blood began to boil. I wanted a refund. I wanted to go home. I went out to my car and took a quick nap.

Take that, Alex Body!

When I returned, Chris Brokaw was finishing his set, but at least I was calm and rested for the headliners. Brokaw was on stage with only an electric guitar and a microphone, which I’m guessing is his bag now, so I can’t say that I was really that bummed that I missed his set.

I grabbed another ginger ale, which they totally make at the bar at Gabe’s, and began hearing entrance music. This was strange as the attendees now numbered only around a few dozen, so it was without any effort that I cozied up to the stage for an immediate view.

Off to the side of the stage is a dark hallway that leads to an outside door. This is where the bands load their gear in, but as the music on the p.a. continued to play, I saw four Japanese people standing together at the end of the hall by the doorway.

It was Mono, silently waiting for the obligatory moment in their opening music to walk up the stage. It was a bit off-putting, watching them stand in silence and in the dark, only to begin to briskly walk behind the crowd so that they could walk up to the stage, when all they really needed to do was to walk in front of me and a couple of other runts just to reach the stage quicker.

But whatever; within moments the gentle strums of guitars and the slow-paced drums signaled another lesson in dynamics as things were about to go from soft to loud for the rest of the night.

Guitarists Takaakira Goto and Hideki “Yoda” Suematsu kept things ebbing and flowing all night, coming up with some memorable endings that sometimes found Goto wailing his guitar strings and lying on the floor, fucking with the myriad of pedals he had in front of them.

Bassist Tamaki Kunishi played a bitchin’ Gibson bass and occasionally headed over to some keyboards for the evening’s more delicate moments. Drummer Yasunori Takada had a Ludwig kit and a big fucking gong for the evening’s less delicate moments.

Was it all worth the wait? Probably, but thanks to an incredible amount of anger, generated by something beyond my control in a venue that I should have come to expect, my experience was less than ideal. Mono played no part in it (except for the being late part, Christ, they were only in Minneapolis the night before) and in fact, they made the late evening somewhat worthwhile.

Good night, Iowa Citay!!

Yes, I was exhausted the next day and yes I will continue to have second doubts about any future Gabe’s show as it’s turned into this shithole of amateur excuses and you wonder if they could even pull off a big show if it fell into their lap.

You’re competing for bands that hit other venues now, but more discouraging, you’re competing for the attention of the fickle youth who have tons of other things to capture their attention.

And it’s immediate too, so if you’re scheduling an early evening show, you’d better be prepared to make sure it’s on schedule, or be prepared to cut out an opener to get back within the time designated.

Because you know what happens when you make old people like me wait.

We get cranky, post-anything.

Mono - Hymn To The Immortal Wind

I now have a few records on the Temporary Residence label and every one of them sounds similar in some respects-with the roster’s love of dynamics and the label’s love of anything with a post-rock moniker.

Mono, despite possessing one of the greatest “Duh, Why didn’t I think of that?” names of all time, create music that’s perfect for the T.R. label, but they do it so exquisitely that it probably deserves a better title than the pretentious “post-rock” moniker.

Let’s call it what it really is: progressive instrumental rock music. And while they take their own sweet time gearing up to the glacial collapse that seems to come with every ending, we need to acknowledge that they’ve put a lot of blood, sweat, and violins into that epic earthquake.

Hymn To The Immortal Wind is exactly that, because it provides guitarists Takaakira Goto and Yoda Suematsu work together as if they’re sharing one guitar cord, creating beautiful countermelodies before they smash on another pedal lying on the floor like they’re hitting a detonation box.

And then there’s those aforementioned strings which pop up throughout Hymn, taking the album beyond the soundtrack motif that Explosions In The Sky now seem to have a monopoly on. Instead, there’s a clear intent that Mono have created this record out of the love of their craft.

The chamber orchestra is something else, but it’s Steve Albini’s documentation of these instruments that makes it all work. This might be the most beautiful record he has ever recorded, so bully to the band itself for allowing that distinction to fall upon his studio.