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The Dirty Three Play Lee's Palace April 6, 2003 Getting Down & Dirty Three Went out to Lee's Palace on a Sunday nite, of all nites... my buddy Pipes said some wacky auzzie group, called the Dirty Three, were playing... he had one of their cds, said it was drums, guitar and violin, so I figured what the hell? Pipes picked me up at 8:30 and we drove down to Bloor, looking for a bar where we're gonna meet one of his buddies, CeeDee, a guy I've met once before. Right off we've got trouble as Pipes is vague on the bar's name, but it's near Lee's, so we find a suitable parking spot and Pipes goes aha! and points to a bar called Osmosis... in we go, nobody there. The exceedingly cute bar(tender)ess hasn't seen anybody, so Pipes tries a few bar names on her while I look across the street. Amnesia? I suggest... Yes, says Pipes, that's it. Where? Right there, man I say... and out we go to struggle through the mounds of icy snow as we jaywalk across a fairly deserted Bloor Street. Amnesia... fitting, no? I needle Pipes as we enter. CeeDee is there, and he's brought 2 friends... Muzak and Earwax. The first thing you notice is they're young... never heard of Boz Scaggs young... love Jeff Buckley but have never heard Tim young... but then again, I've never heard of the Dirty Three, either. We get our drinks and do the smalltalk intros, sizing up the depths around us. I decide to stay open to possibilities. After some minutes of babble Pipes looks at his watch. It says 9:30... OK, let's drink up and go, he says. Go where? asks Muzak. Lee's. Dirty Cubed starts at ten. That's when CeeDee casually told Pipes that the warm-up act started at 10, with Dirty Three starting at 11:15. Pipes freaks out... he has to fly to Minneapolis the next day, so he thinks for awhile and then surprises me not when he announces he can't stay up that late. He has a couple more pops and buggers off, leaving me alone with these three aliens. Oh well, when in doubt, have another pop. Muzak and Earwax tell a bemused CeeDee about the warm-up act at a concert they recently attended. It was crazy, man, the band played and this chick and this guy just screamed into their mikes, Earwax enthused. It was so terrible, Muzak agreed. They all nodded in agreement. Finally we wandered over to Lee's around 11ish, and caught the abysmal openers just as they're finishing their last song... such good timing deserves a drink! I've driven and walked by Lee's Palace many a time, man, and it's an icon in the Toronto music scene. But I've never been in it, so I'm a tad up for the experience. You funnel in. Ticket ripped. Hand stamped. Then you're herded into a cheezy, dingily-lit bar area. Everything's painted black. Over the bar is a geometric shape of lighting -- cheap plastic balls, red/yellow red/yellow. Too bad. It's a dump, built for the tunnelvision of boozers and the substance abuse crowd... I check out my fellow denizens... half the cats have those tight woollen caps; the chicks are either gorgeous or greasy... however, they all seem anticipatory... I get the vibe this band has a cult following... or it's cool to know them... or whatever... by this time I've decided to ditch my dirty quarter-dozen, cause all they want to do is hang at the bar in the back... but I've got my sony recorder with me -- and ya can't boot from the bar at the back, so I wander off and find a good spot, front & centre between overhead speakers... During the lull in the action as the stage is set, I check out the digs: Upside: it's a place built for music Downside: nowhere to really sit Bonus: full smoking allowed (I smelled lots of grass) Audience: university kids, street urchins... I had to be the oldest cat there... didn't matter -- the crowd made no connection to itself during the concert... it was like looking around in a movie theatre after the flick has started... everyone was staring at the stage... I was the invisible man... And The Dirty Three? They're a wacky instrumental trio from Melbourne with avante-classical chops. Led by violin-sawing, madcap Warren Ellis, tended by guitarist Mick Turner and beat upon by percussionist Jim White, these sorta-artsy cats serve up a strange blend of hypno-drone in various guises... did I detect some arabic? The evening quickly resolved into a repeating pattern of music and comedy: (MUSIC) pretty well all the Dirty Three songs start sort of scratchy and itchy, light and nimble, and then with ponderous steps lead inexorably to a stunning crescendo of rippling noise, with White literally beating the crap out of the drum kit, guitarist Turner almost invisible, finger picking chords to no apparent end, and Ellis, his back to the audience, doubled over, long hair flowing, right leg often flailing wildly behind him, sawing pulse-like over the rhythm while extensive electronics induce Steve Reich-like sonic overlaps that meld, alter, split and repeat in an almost fractal progression of raw, killer decibels of doom... I look around... the audience is swaying to the primal rhythm... is that trance? hypno? whoknow? After endless loopy swoops, Ellis rather clumsily flicks some of his floorpad-controlled digifilters by bending over and doing it manually, rather than tapping at the buttons with his foot, and then we all wait for a moment before he launches into the mandatory air leap to signal the big dramatic ending, with appropriate loss of lights. (COMEDY) Ellis loves to engage in long, droll raps between songs, spoken slowly in a very careful, yet seemingly drug-induced manner. The raps are designed to offer insight into the meaning of the next song, but, of course, after a long and surreal verbal meander the subsequent enigmatic title usually reveals little more than an ironic connection to the prior rap. However, as all the songs are instrumentals, these intros could also be understood as "lyrics", rapped prior to the music. For example the song, Some Summers, They're Dropping Like Flies was preceeded by a long rap about coming home to find all your old friends have died from drug overdoses. When it hits you that Ellis was a member of The Bad Seeds, the very dead Nick Cave's backup band, it all starts making more sense. Or That Baby Has No Strings, which was preceeded by a rap about Ellis seeing James Brown in an airport and how JB's suit on its own was cooler than any of us. Click here to catch his wicked intro to One Thousand Miles. Of course I booted it... here's my snazzy cover art... and, oddly enuff, it sounds better coming out of my stereo than in the hall, where I was deafened by the huge speakers... in fact, now that I've listened to the concert a few times, I find these guys interesting, if a tad repetitive... I can report one thing with certainty: they ain't commercial. Check out their website: http://www.dirtythree.com Next stop: Brian Auger & Oblivion Express on the 19th... apparently at a very small club... heard his kid, Karma, is now playing drums for him... Karma Auger? Jeez, did he hate him? Report #1 Toronto, Ontario April 8, 2003
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