THE JO-TEL … illegal blog downfield

Okay, it looks like i forgot my iPod at the sound stage. Can someone bring that up here? It’s a blue iPod Nano tied to a banana.

-Dan Deacon

Even before seeing Dan Deacon live yesterday, I felt like his new album (Spiderman of the Rings) was a mere album-length facsimile of a three-dimensional live fiesta. I was correct. Dan Deacon’s songs — which are good, if not pretty darn superficial — are the necessary pretex for the emergence of his personality. Which is to say, more simply, the dude is really funny. Deacon located himself on floor level in order, I assume, to foster a more communal concert environment, bereft of the all-too-typical uninvigorated stage-gazing of your average indie concert goer. He was sitting behind a folding card table with his computer stuff. At one point, the crowd pressing the table toward the stage, he admitted, “I don’t know about you, but this table is kicking the shit out of me.”

He began the concert with a weird/hilarious invocation involving chanting back from “35″ to “25″ and then in through a door in your chest to a world covered in hair. And then right into “Crystal Cat”, which, like most of the songs, induced a delightful mosh pit. A happy pit, if you will. The only thing that brought down the dancefloor for me was when this tall dude squeezed in front of me toward the middle of the show. He didn’t create the usual problem that tall people create at shows, namely, blocking your view. Dan Deacon was basically unseeable. No, the problem was that this particular tall dude was wearing a huge leather jacket and my sweaty arms and face kept rubbed up and sticking against his ridiculous jacket. Who wears a leather jacket into a mosh pit?! But this was not Dan Deacon’s fault.

Despite allowing leather-jacket boy to watch the show unmolested, Dan Deacon had an almost preternatural control of the crowd. His universally obeyed command that everyone hold hands and recite this chant about human skin, made me hold hands with a hot chick [FN1], which is alway nice. To sum up, you get an impression of a guy that’s sad like the rest of us, but chooses to turn his instincts into a sweaty statement of happiness echoing throughout a colorful escaptist summer camp. It is fun. It is art.

FN1: Not as hot as my girlfriend ;)

You ever done Spiderman of the Rings FOR FREE??!!!

-Shark