World Contact Day

Detroit’s finest, Outrageous Cherry, generated massive amounts of psychic energy at their concert at the Hemlock Tavern in San Francisco last night, resulting in poltergeist activity, UFO sightings, and pretty girls going insane all along the dimensional bandwidth.

For a band with a sound so cosmic in scale, Outrageous Cherry themselves are all-too-human in appearance. Leader Matthew Smith, in an orange and purple striped pullover, frets over monitors and pedals, tossing out Eastern-tinged lines on his Stratocaster during the sound check. Gaunt lead guitarist Larry Ray, looking like he had a serious run-in with “LDS in the sixties,” faces  the brick wall on his left, doing a magnificent impression of someone who's not there, while simultaneously playing his soul out. Armed with only two toms for percussion, Carey Gustafson hypnotizes with a tribal stomp. She's Moe Tucker at a boxing gym. Courtney Sheedy burns cool on her bass, leaning up against the side of the stage, poking out for back up vocals. Visually, they have to be one of the weirdest looking bands out there. It shouldn’t come together as a unit, but sonically it does. Perhaps because, as any good student of Crowley could tell you, power comes from the balancing of opposites, in this case, male-female, young-old.

It’s the aural equivalent of a magik ritual held by the Archies in the auditorium of Riverdale High. The critics call it psychedelic, thus branding it “retro,” and leave it at that. But this ignores that the search for altered states of consciousness via music, goes all the way back to the roots of our mushroom chomping caveman brains. Far from being a faddish product of the sixties, psychedelica is really a search for the possibilities of the present. Smith explains that Outrageous Cherry's sound came from “experimenting with reverb, compression, using every knob I’ve got.”

But before you begin to suspect that Outrageous Cherry are a bunch of over-earnest witches and warlocks, keep in mind that their worldview was assembled from what Alan Moore calls the ‘trash strata’: Thrift store record collections, sci-fi paperbacks, and drive-in theater documentaries about “The Amazing World of Psychic Phenomena.” And yet it’s here, at the lowest level of junk culture that genuine flashes of insight can be found.

Which is why I stood in the front row singing along with every song I could.

They only played for a little over an hour, which was far too short for my level of fanaticism. I took the set list off the stage after they were done. For the sake of posterity (and Carl Horn), here it is…

The Astral Transit Authority
You’re Not a Nice Girl
Pretty Girls Go Insane
Georgie Don’t You Know
Saturday Afternoon
Supernatural Equinox
Unless
Our Love Will Change the World
Girl, You Have Magic Inside You
Nice to Be Here (AKA Spectral Sunrise)
What Have You Invented Today
Desperate XS
If You Want Me
A Song For Someone Sometimes
See You Next Time

Afterwards, mutual friend Ian Robertson gave me an introduction to Matthew Smith, who formed Outrageous Cherry in 1992. He explained that, after a series of records, "we found the sound with (1999’s) Out There in the Dark. Then it became a matter of how to expand on it." The mind-blowing double LP that followed, The Book of Spectral Projections, was “the fastest thing I’d ever done. The songs were writing themselves. The band was learning, like, five new songs a day, and we’d record them at night. It’s also my favorite thing we’ve done. There’s kind of a narrative to the whole thing, but it’s not so clear what it is, even to me. I was waking up and writing in this notebook and I kept seeing the same words over and over again: like ‘invisible’ and ‘frequency.’ There was something going on with that record.”

The song When You Emerge was tucked deep inside Spectral Projections when it was released in June 2001. But three months later, it's lyrics like "When you emerge like the ghost of a hero, walking away across ground zero” took on a new meaning. Smith: “A people mentioned that it seemed like the song predicted 9/11. It was really strange.”

After Spectral Projections, Outrageous Cherry began to rotate back to delivering concise pop songs. Smith’s more explorative side now has a home in his THTX (for Twenty-three Hour Technicolor Xorcism) side-project, which ventures into epic acid jazz and prog-rock territory. He’s also active in alt-country band The Volebeats and deeply involved in Detroit’s famed music scene as a producer.

Meanwhile, back at the show, the band is making room for the up and coming headliners, Gris Gris. To be honest, it was clear that most of the crowd came to see them instead of the still-unknown Outrageous Cherry.

On her way off the stage tugging an amp almost as big as she was, Courtney stopped and told one particularly sweaty fan, “I love it when someone sings along with us. It’s so great. Every time I smiled it was because of that.” Guilty as charged, and delirious from my brief tour of the astral plane, I replied, “Hey, you make the music. I just receive it.”

I suggest that you turn on your receivers now.

Outrageous Cherry homepage (with MP3 samples)

THTX homepage (with MP3 samples)

Comments

[Carl Horn]

I had thought before about those lyrics from "When You Emerge." I certainly wish I could have been at show with you and Ian—thanks for the witness.

I very much liked your remarks about psychedelia, which can be a mental, emotional, spiritual or artistic direction. I've often written on anime using the language of psychedelics. Richard Condon (whom, I've discovered, seems to have done a dozen other good novels besides THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE) said in his 1966 ANY GOD WILL DO that "self-delusion is at once the most dangerous and most valuable attribute of the human animal." Because the base reality state of the human animal, of course, is just an animal—the human part has come from the ability to conceive of things as they aren't, thinking about unreality. I should say that 2005 might seem retro from the perspective of 1966. This eMac has considerably more power than every computer NASA had back then; yet they used theirs to round the moon. The difference is a culture of imagination.

Besides the obvious inspiration of the album name for the party, listening to it (my favorite track is "You've Been Unkind") has inspired me to a re-design of the event poster...

http://img240.echo.cx/my.php?image=bigchange8hj.jpg

...and hopefully that link will work. The playlist will be:

Fun Lovin' Criminals /// Fun Lovin’ Criminal
The Strawberry Smell /// Zensong #9
Faithless /// Mass Destruction (George W. Remix)
Luna /// Season Of The Witch
Ice-T /// You Played Yourself
Johnny Cash /// The Man Comes Around
The Telepathic Butterflies /// Narcissus
Eric B. & Rakim /// Know The Ledge
Mad Season /// River of Deceit
Mover /// Courthouse Blues
Jurassic 5 /// Remember His Name
Pop Will Eat Itself /// X, Y, & Zee
The Kinks /// Waterloo Sunset
Geto Boys /// I Tried
The Asteroid No. 4 /// Mercenary Man
The Modern Lovers /// Modern World
Grandaddy /// I’m On Standby
3rd Bass /// Triple Stage Darkness
Sidonie /// Let It Flow
Nirvana /// Here She Comes Now
The Jessica Fletchers /// Bloody Seventies Love
Beastie Boys /// An Open Letter To NYC
Outrageous Cherry /// You’ve Been Unkind
Pink Floyd /// Set The Controls For The Heart Of The Sun
Ambulance LTD /// Ophelia
The Brian Jonestown Massacre /// If Love Is The Drug, Then I Want To O.D.
Public Enemy /// Bedlam 13:13
Yo La Tengo /// Demons
Louis Armstrong /// We Have All The Time In The World

[Daniel Zelter]

So One Missed Call's playing at my local indie theater Friday. Should I catch it?

[Daniel Zelter]

I just took a dump. Should I wipe?

[Daniel Zelter]

....Someone spoofed me on that last post.

[Carl Horn]

One more observation about the Portland show: before one number, a local girl whispered something in Matthew Smith's ear. It seemed she asked him if she could get up on stage and play her tambourine during the next piece, because that's what she did. Afterwards Courtney turned to her and said, "Don't steal all my thunder, baby."

[Carl Horn]

One more observation about the Portland show: before one number, a local girl whispered something in Matthew Smith's ear. It seemed she asked him if she could get up on stage and play her tambourine during the next piece, because that's what she did. Afterwards Courtney turned to her and said, "Don't steal all my thunder, baby."