someday in your cul de sac you'll realize what it meant
Maybe it's weird to be starstruck by Will Rigby but i haven't had that much fun watching someone play drums in a long time. My first dB's records were cassettes purchased from Second-Hand Tunes on 53rd St. in Chicago; I started with Repercussion and worked my way backwards one record, having already figured out that "Spy in the House of Love", heard seemingly nightly on WXRT, the local Adult Album Alternative-format station, was really just a confusing entree into two of the most perfect records I would know. The tapes were used, and I think they were chrome — full of treble and hiss, in a way well-suited to the range Peter Holsapple could then hit. That pyramid and ball graphic on the cover of Repercussion still vexes me to this day.
So imagine my surprise when 16-some-odd years later, having never really been, you know, old enough to see them play, I am standing in Maxwell's in Hoboken at a Yo La Tengo Hanukkah show wondering why people are not pressed up against the stage like sardines, getting ribs cracked by the crush, the club management needing to call in beefy security guys to control the fracas, etc.
Their loss — I'm up close for a mini-set of handsful of things I wanted to hear, combining years of memorization with the confusing reality of looking at people play in person for the first time. That Holsapple wasn't mop-topped but rather shaved-and-moustache-and-earringed shook my ability to cognitively dissociate for awhile, but then I realized that I was really there to watch Will Rigby drum, and that for all the perfect songwriting and strange guitar and pleasures of watching Chris Stamey screw up his face in a scowl whenever he played something wrong — it was the strange mixture of grace and assault and skill and goofiness going on behind the guitars that I couldn't get over. I feel like such a dumbass for just now realizing, as I said to a friend that it's was never actually a choice of Holsapple versus Stamey, but that Rigby was the star all along.
My friend replied, "duh."
And the thing about the dB's is that for all their pop's almost-innocence it's still a little strange (frenzied and directed, elementary and yet cryptic) and the way they go about things — like the need to make "Amplifier" jazzy-jammy —is in so many ways not the thing I would predict. It is not always where I hope it will land, but in some ways it's that odd precarity that makes hitting the mark so blinding. They can play the guitar on "Neverland" better now than on the record! Who knew!
The sixteen-year-old me would not have expected any of my life to have happened the way it did between now and then, but she also would've been pretty happy to know that in 2007 I'd be shoving a dB's setlist in my back pocket and demanding to shake Will Rigby's hand. You never know what the world will bring.
( more pix here )