“One thing about Gonerfest,” remarked an old friend who’s seen many of them in his day, “it always brings great drummers to town.” We were bobbing our heads to Nashville’s Snooper at the time, and their drummer was indeed distinctive, helping to elevate the crowd’s dancing to a climax last night.
That could be said of the whole band, of course. Imagine the Flying Lizards with Keith Moon guesting on drums, all buzzed on caffeine, and you’ll get close to the feel of Snooper. Pigtailed lead singer Blair Tramel hit the stage bouncing and leaping from the start, inspiring the audience to surge toward the stage as the mosh pit reached a boil.
Yet the band was anything but standard-issue hardcore, instead combining that genre’s breakneck tempos and shouted choruses with an eerie sonic onslaught of two noise-weaving guitars, undergirded by a rhythm section akin to rolling thunder, topped by the warble of Tramel’s slightly processed voice and her occasional synth blasts. It was a sound at once trippy and energizing, as the band, largely dressed in workout windbreakers, matched Tramel’s energy leap for leap.
The tweaked reality of the band’s sound was augmented by the unheralded appearance of larger than life papier-mâché figures shuffling through the crowd. While not quite feeling theatrical, it was a subtle bit of world-building by the band, as they knocked our conventional world askew and replaced it with a more inspired reality of giant human flies and much more leaping.
And yet Snooper weren’t even the closers. Instead, the final band was a beautiful puzzle that inspired swaying, twisting, and head tilting more than any mosh pit. Fred Lane and His Disheveled Monkeybiters brought a bold new approach to the classic Gonerfest closing set, bringing swing rhythms and alt-jazz chops to the festival for the first time. Ultimately, the bizarre left turn the evening took at the hands of Lane et al. was refreshingly unpredictable.
While the crowd eased up from the front of the stage a bit, the Disheveled Monkeybiters turned heads around the grounds of Railgarten, and got many up front moving, as the band alternated from tightly arranged swing stompers with riffs by the three horns, to the honks and growls of freakish free jazz. Presiding over it all with a kind of anti-charisma was Fred Lane, whose Dada-ist mutterings, non sequiturs, and scat singing ranged from the fiercely animated to the awkwardly reserved.
“In my ineptitude/I don’t really deserve to be alive,” crooned Lane, neatly summing up the dark self loathing lurking in his absurdist rants. It did not make for the classic barn-burning show closer that so many festivals offer. As if to extinguish such expectations, the tenor sax player stepped up to the mic and announced, “This is art!” And those of us who listened deeply to the chaos knew what he meant.
It was a set of extreme dynamics, most apparent in the closing moments of the show, when each band member mimicked their own death as they played shrieks of noise and rhythmic fusillades. How to follow that with an encore? Have Lane perform the a capella “Oatmeal,” of course. “I sailed the China seas/In my pajamas on a raft,” he sang whimsically. “I drift into the sewers/In a miner’s hat,” and then a few perfunctory squawks and honks from the band broke the quiet.
“Oh, what a glorious feeling/Oh, what a marvelous plight/To be numb beyond feeling/Senseless, without sight,” Lane’s voice returned, almost sotto voce, echoing in the glorious emptiness. It put a fine point on the group’s darkly humorous ethos, still oddly compelling over four decades after it was cooked up by Surrealist-friendly proto-punks in Tuscaloosa’s fringe art scene.
Incredibly, those two closing set weren’t even the highlight of the day for some Goner-goers. Many were still reeling from on-point afternoon performances by local favorites like Aquarian Blood or Sweet Knives. But the day’s local hero trophy must surely go to A Weirdo From Memphis (AWFM), whose set offered one surprise after another, always topping itself. Starting with the very diggable surprise of AWFM’s live backing band, showcasing the deep ranks of musical talent in the Unapologetic collective, the set accelerated when colleague PreauXX jumped onstage. It all culminated in AWFM’s use of a series of ladders to scale the box car-based stage structure, as he sang and spit rhymes from atop the venue’s giant retro sign, Roller SKATE For Health, towering over the ecstatic crowd.
After that, Sydney, Australia’s Gee Tee gave the fans a rush of amped-up, old school punk with a tweaked edge, as if the young Clash had found a Casio in the dumpster. Their catchy set caused a dramatic upsurge in Gee Tee T-shirts as the night progressed. Then, seeming to go through the history of alternative music, Austin/Melbourne/New York-based Spray Paint took us into post-punk territory, as their twin guitars seemed to redefine harmony and dissonance, matched by the urgent shouts and wails of the singer. And, throughout the day, an added perk of a Railgarten-based Gonerfest became apparent. Through all the textures of guitar riffs, synths, and impassioned vocals, another sonic element was occasionally woven: the blare of the train horn, and the visceral rumble of heavy steel wheels on the rails. That screeching guitar feedback, those gut-rattling beats, all were coming home to the urban wall of noise from which they were born. Memphis AF, y’all.
