Scene

The scene here, marked - for the last three or so years - by the maturation and ample accessibility of two exemplary acts - has become an almost unmanageable commitment. Transcendent performances are a monthly, sometimes weekly occurrence. It’s the kind of lifestyle where you get to see any and all shit-sandwiches your daily existence might be force feeding you, magically transformed into 12-course musical feasts of soul-scouring potency every few weeks. You know it! It’s a guarantee. Week after week, Providence locals find ourselves either just coming off, or just getting our babysitters, buzzes, and cash-flow in order to withstand another, ultra hi-leverage rock and roll throw-down. It’s a confluence of unlikely events with an uncanny ability to set things right, like a great golden psyche-reset button. Available here, now - cheap - with an almost intimidating frequency.

During the fifteen years between 1985 and 2000, I was convinced that that truly great rock bands needed to be either the inventor(s) of something, it’s logical creative end-point, or the greatest current example of the form (ex: Springsteen is the logical creative end-point for a kind of conscious folk invented by Woody Guthrie and perfected by Bob Dylan, Janes Addiction is the logical creative end-point in trio + front-person acts featuring dudes with high voices invented and perfected by Led Zeppelin). But all the great bands of the last decade have been acts that mix and blend, citing influences the way a great writer references the masters. This is especially true of Deer Tick, who started out as one dude named John McCauley with an obvious talent for mixing and blending the best features of the bands he loved. Nirvana, Springsteen, and Dylan are the most obvious, probably because McCauley name-checks those three in almost every interview he‘s ever sat for, but there is a lot of history beyond just the obvious classic rock in the guy’s bag. What’s more, his reverence for the greats seems as limitless as his work ethic. He gets cross country, does John McCauley, as a one man show, even, and for a very long time, back and forth through the heartlands and festivals. No band, no show really, just him, and guitars (acoustic and electric), and these nasty fucking songs. Now, as the anti-leader of a sharp touring band composed of guys as talented as he himself is, McCauley has spent the last three years honing the other absolutely necessary skill of the modern, relevant rock act: the ability blow up spots, with extreme prejudice in multiple locales night after whiskey-stinking night.

And how. The shows at the Met - a midweek twofer celebrating the release of DT’s latest “Divine Providence” exhibited a band of young guys who know a lot more than most old guys. They played Dylan. They played standards. They stopped one show to pull down projection screens, turn up the television sets, and grok out to the Letterman performance they put down earlier that day. At one point they broke loose with note-faithful (+snazzy key-droning) cover of Nirvana’s “On a Plain” and a mosh pit kicked up. A violent one too: I saw a big girl get blown the fuck up by a bigger guy, and then helped up by another big dude who wiped a spot of bloody shit of her face and gave her a little noogie-nelson before tousling her hair and releasing her back into the wild. I made that last part up I think, but it’s possible I did not. That’s how this band makes things for the two-plus hours they usually carry on: rowdy, violently exultant, not afraid to surrender, at times, to alcohol-fogged confusion and pure, raw volume.

That was Deer Tick three weeks ago. Sometime during the two night stand, they booked another Provy outing, this one a month down the road at a bigger venue closer to downtown. Now that shit is coming up next week, two nights before Thanksgiving, at the 2000-seat Providence Performing Art Center. Another impending Deer Tick catharsis would definitely be the ONLY non-family/kid thing on my mind until the performance itself, if it weren’t for the act taking another downtown stage the very next night: Max Creek is pulling into Lupo’s November 23, the night after Deer Tick, and the night before Thanksgiving.

***

Two years ago, I finally worked up the motivation to go check out Max Creek again. I’d moved back to Providence from New Jersey almost six years before that, and Creek - I knew - had been a near constant musical presence in Providence since well before I ever left. When I was 15, Creek’s weekly shows at the Living Room (Not old-polka hall Living Room, this was the factory-converted-to-loft space living room with the giant plexi-glass bubble) served as a sacramental preparatory happenings where you could buy - and test drive - the drugs you’d bought for the weekend in the relatively safe confines of a Wednesday night. Creek was the first club-set I ever watched, and I remember being alarmed that the first sets at the Living Room usually ended after I was supposed to be home. I also remember the payoff being well-worth the two-week grounding that would result from staying for the second frame.

Then life moved on, and - like most things I loved in High School - Creek just sort of melted out of my life. I told a lot of college buddies about them, made some time to check them out for a few years in the early 90’s and then…Flatline. I honestly cannot remember so much as thinking the words “Max Creek” for the entire decade between 1993 and 2006. I didn’t spend a lot of time in New England, and that’s where that band was, almost all the time. Two years ago I finally got a chance to see Max Creek again, after a decade plus of no consideration at all, and left in unqualified amazement. Creek, almost 30 years into it when we last crossed paths, had apparently used the years between to forge an empathy perhaps unmatched in all of rock history: 40 years of getting better and better and better.. 40 years deep into the honing of blended phrasing, ensemble improvising, and on-a-dime dynamic turns. 40 years of weekly, high-volume harmonic / psychic convergences.

***

It took Creek about 20 seconds of a “Love Makes You Loose Your Mind” opener to force an immediate change of strategy, and here we are a month later and I’m still talking about the Creek show. I’d love to screed on and on about it. So crazily expert and intense was this performance that I could probably go like moment-to-moment, breaking down each whiplash one and surgically deft two like an anthropologist logging dung-beetles. Appreciating and celebrating each and every intricacy and invention with word upon word and sentence upon sentence until…Well until Max Creek takes the stage again next week, right after Deer Tick and just before Thanksgiving.

I won’t. For one thing, the show is available (like many Creek performances) on Archive, so you can go grab it and dissect it on your own time. The real reason is, there’s no fucking time. Little more than a week now before all this happens again, and there’s babysitters and cash-flow considerations in need of attention. The great golden psyche-reset button is about to be pushed again, and my affairs need to be in order.