Merry Lexington Mass
Posted: Fri Dec 03, 2021 12:31 am
So i wanted to launch my inaugural post in CA in conjunction with a friend and I's collaboration to bring the Lexington video to everyone. I wrote for a whole day and lost the post as i was automatically logged out. But here is a new write up. It's so wonderful to be a part of this whole tapestry.
I had been on the numinous trail of the dragon, whose every scale is a tableaux, one of great vividness and fright. Liquid tarot cards fluorescing strange colors on a moonlit night. That winged serpent was the mythological band Animal Collective. A band of rebel light children flailing in the foliage, enchanting the faeries and salamanders into full jubilant tarantella. There was a forest king with a jack-o-lantern head. I was on the trail of the Light Children. We all were.
The amount of strange coincidences, synchronicities, and other paranormal resonances that assailed me on the journey were incalculable. But I will do my best to bottle the quintessence of what made it magickal for me.
It’s uncanny what happens when you take a step in the direction of your truest will, of your most vivid desire. Every interaction was imbued with the vigor of dreamsong. The waitress at a waffle house sparkled with the effulgence of an oracle; I drove streets like Demeter and Jupiter that would make Joseph Campbell go mad; an itinerant in Asheville was humming the same song I was listening to on the highway moments before…I suspect that when you answer the call of Destiny the texture and sensorium surrounding you get pushed to a high fractalline resonance of harmony with your soul. I’m sure to onlookers you are bathed in a weird oasis-like halo. It disturbs the atmosphere, warps physics. At least this describes some of the high jinx that occurred while I was on my Sojourn to see the boys play a run of shows in Kentucky, North Carolina, Ohio, and later in Chicago.
But this tidbit refers to the legendary show at Lexingtons Burl.
In a seemingly industrial part of town, brick facades, a somewhat weatherbeaten water tower. You cross some railroad tracks. And then the venue is on your left side. I parked in a middle class suburb just past the venue, then skip-walked giddily to the line that was forming. A friend of mine, whom followed the dead for years, once told me something that I never forgot:
“You know acid was really important, revered even at a dead show. But there was one night that I will never forget because of how it changed the way that I approached shows. I hadn’t taken anything. The first set was great, they played a lot of the up-jump fast boogie stuff, you know Bobby doing his cowboy thing. And after set break, I suddenly found myself all the way at the front. And when Jerry came out he sang Stella Blue, and It was the most mind blowing and transformative nights of my entire life. From then on I was on an express mission to get to the front. That’s where it was.”
Something like that. It lasered it’s message indelibly in my neuronal landscape. And after Being completely at the front for the wondrous Fountain Square show, of which they opened up with On a Highway, one of my favorite songs, I felt like it was my urgent mission to do the same. My friend looks a little like Santa Clause and Jerry Garcia mixed together.
The ticket takers at the Burl were very friendly, and especially familial with one another, which was endearing. Friendly banter, chiding, rosy cheeked from grog, and shiny eyed with playful chiding. You can tell they cared. It made me feel easful going through the rigmarole of getting my vax card, id, and ticket checked.
The Burl seemed unremarkable at first, if charming. Being that it was an asphalt lot in between a wood facaded a framed stage and a bar cum arcade. (Barcade?) I strode right to the rail upon filtering in, keeping my head on a swivel for the merch line if there was one. I found myself adjacent to two friendly kids Brady and John, from boston. (Another John figures very significantly in this story. So we’ll just call this one Boston for short.) Boston Brady and I shared fledgling coming of age stories, how we’d come to the show, what shows on the tour we were planning on catching, etc. It was important to share story when you were among friends. Fellow participants on the trail of the Light Children. We were following the sounds of the light harp, its playful percussive playing to the beat of the rhythm sticks, into the phosphene laden bog of Pan’s forest. It somehow led us here. Brilliant.
I promised myself after I’d been baptized in the dinosaur like screams and ethereal chimes of a UFO landing through guitars and and Rhythm boxes at Desert Daze, where my DNA was overwhelmingly resequenced, that I would do anything it took to see every show that Animal Collective put on. Which is what led me from California to take planes, rent cars, and hurl myself at the staggering rate of synchronicity that it took to have chance on your side. Never gonna win a game if you don’t roll the dice. I commend everyone willing to risk. Whatever it takes. The flutes of Pan enchant us so, to stride right, to the rail of light, at the Lexington show.
Jeremy opened wonderfully. Weaving a lattice of rhythmic synthesizer propelled dream ambiance that was engineered tastefully. He was focused like a clockworker. But working with very beautiful clocks that exuded hypnotic portals of synth and drum.
Trailing away from the stage was a walkway, handrailed, parapet like, that led to the left a bit. Doors were at the end. I remember gazing upon the stage and this long railing, and suddenly being engulfed by the uncanny. I had dreamt this entire vista, not figuratively, but literally, down to the smallest minutiae of overheard subliminal conversation, the lighting, the way Jeremy had exited the stage after giving a stoic head nod of thanks at the end of his set, everything. In the constellation of precognition, déjà vu, synchronicity, presaging something through a dream, only to remember it vividly in the moment that it reoccurs, there should be a word for that. I’m sure there is one in German. I just always hail it as a harbinger of miracles, or a nod from the Cosmic juggler that I am in the right place at the right time. There I was. And there we were. Were we not what we sought too?..
Twin nords like sets of black and white crocodile teeth flanked the stage, one for Geologist and one for Deakin. The percussive heart of Panda’s drums gleamed at the back of the stage. A bass, guitar with fluorescent pink and purple globules painted on it, olympic white stratocaster, and a panel of sampling and groovebox equipment adjacent to them: Avey’s works. The unnerving swell of precognition and presentiment only burgeoned in the moments leading up to them filtering onto the stage. Maybe I’d ingested some mycelium laced chocolate—but that didn’t explain the actual memory of the dream I dreamed one early morning in some lambent day of the past. The chocolate was a molecular assistant for enhanced precision, rather than inebriant. Then they dawned, much like the overture of 2001, the atmosphere a softening pastel miasma, everything swirling into a velvety froth. I was nakedly in the moment, my focus heightened to a quartz like clarity.
The dawn of life: it was like watching flagellum turn into a proto amphibian crawl onto land and sprout appendages, shed its tail, its scales vanish into hirsute flesh, and by some miracle of cinematic sleight of hand, the entire picture came into focus. The Light Children had taken the stage. I won’t go too scrupulously into what assailed me, flesh and spirit, during the talismanic raising of power that ensued, for my friend John and I have alchemized a special treat for you to feast your soul and senses upon. But if you know anyone who was there, pay close attention to the glee that creeps on their face while they remember back on that night, the timbre of their voice as they recount in silvery glyphic script what was printed across our DNA, the transmissions, and in hallowed tones, how the specialness of that evening is recounted.
I bestowed bottle water on those surrounding me that were kind enough to hold space with me. In the nacreous fires of the Animal Collective, we danced. We howled and yelped! Wildly. Dionysus, Halloween carnivals at midnight, and Maev and the faeries are all kindled to my heart as I remember the penumbra of Abby’s beautiful light show swimming over everyone's faces. King’s Walk was like a choral benediction, the harmonized glossolalia of prelinguistic civilizations praising the very root of primordial existence itself: vibration as a self enacted revelation and encomium to life itself—also vibration.
After being whorled into a protoplasmic pit for Fickle Cycle in Fountain Square, I was eager to see the rite performed again. There was a blonde girl behind me, and after the thundering chug of the drums had been set into motion, she began reciting the invocation word for word!!! I felt in that moment a glinting of recognition at how special the night would be based on those seconds of hearing her—no it was a psychic harbinger of the numinosity that was overflowing the chalice of the Burl as the song blasted into pounding resonance!:
Tykes who feast but do not pray!
Sun dried cheeks and sun dyed grains
Every body pogo’d up and down to the cadence of the unstoppable drums set to gallop in the hands of Panda’s rhythm sticks. When the song breaks into melodic weeeee ooooooeeee ooooo ooeeee oooot ooo weoooooo, every person in the audience converged into one organism pulsing to the drum and screaming melodically for the catharsis of every being in existence.
Defeat mystified, ensorcelled, and brought catharsis to the entirety of those in attendance. The song, the journey of 20 minutes, plunged us deep beneath the mystic empyrean of everything meaningful: life, death, love. We set off into stygian parts of the soul, and our vessel was bucked and rocked by the depth and granularity of the songs microscopic probings into everything that is. Everything that will be. Buttressed by the refrain, the heart emboldening and tear galvanizing:
GRAB SOMETHING TAKE HOOOOOOOOOOOOOLD
THE ONLY THING YOU’LL KNOOOOOOOWWWW
I could see every maxillofacial contortion and and spasm as Avey poured his very undying essence into every sound that escaped his expressive face. Could feel the riveting commitment to every sound and sentiment, the allegiance to the ineffable that every finger in every word pointed too. We faced the chasm of the unknown. We all inevitably do. But it urged us to grasp something beautiful. This is it. It whispered. And we felt it was because, it was! I’ve cried many times listening to this song on boots. And I’m failing to convey the unabashedly inspired and wondrous rendition we got that night. This is for everyone who was there and ever will be there, at this show or the next, it’s the only thing we’ll know.
Purple bottle, my third in succession on that tour, completely baffled me and shocked me to the filament of my being. I didn’t think it was possible because the previous two iterations had rocked me to and through some stargates of possibility. But it was like a psychedelic rapture/epileptic fit/complete and utterly beautiful rending of everything heavy in your life to reveal and revel in maybe the most genuine love song ever written. I still don’t believe I was there. But I write this to tell you to the best of my ability some of the glinting sparks of eternity that we received that night.
We milled about like abductees set down after a massive UFO landing, euphoric, exalted by the resonance and revelation of it all. I met a wonderfully happy and gregarious guy named John and we fell into an inspired lockstep about everything Animal Collective; John had been recording shows for a few years, and had recorded the miracle we had just bore witness to. It was a ripple in the river of nacreous time that we would meet.
Later John and I coalesced once more to discuss the fluttering synchronicities and passions that had piloted our vessels to Lexington that night. I’d gone to the stage earlier while the boys were packing up and gave the most unadorned and genuine thank you I have ever given a band. And It wasn’t what I said as much as the conviction with which I spoke I think that gave reality and genuineness to the exchange. For I was only returning what had been given by them during their performance. The understanding was tacit.
Later John introduced me to Ben, and like kids who had known each other since 4th grade, once we all congregated outside the barcade at the Burl, spoke with glee and a flickering of transtemporal campfire light, the stories of the timeless, of the fey, and of the light children in us all that come a drumming and a strumming to wake up the cosmic spark that keeps us wondering, curious, and happily skipping into the sylvan hinterlands of our deepest spiritual alcoves.
That night marked a volta in my life. Something I thought I was only capable of having in my early 20’s. But I can honestly admit, that now there was another temporal partition in my life. Before Lexington, and After Lexington. If you weren’t there do not self flagellate. Let these sometimes grandiose, sometimes psychedelic, prose and recollections be an impetus for you to take up the helm like I did after seeing the band at Desert Daze. Make a vow. To see as many shows as freaking possible.
This is a product of all the unspeakable miracles that came to bare to bring me to Lexington in the first place, a seed that was sewn by John and I, and through collaboration and friendship and John’s post production wizardry, we can all enjoy a glimpse into the Forest Children's toybox. And find ourselves, with glowing hands outstretched, the seekers and keepers of the secrets. To you. The Light Children.
https://youtu.be/NwmDxDmsBI0
Randy/Tangerine/Captain Sunshine
I had been on the numinous trail of the dragon, whose every scale is a tableaux, one of great vividness and fright. Liquid tarot cards fluorescing strange colors on a moonlit night. That winged serpent was the mythological band Animal Collective. A band of rebel light children flailing in the foliage, enchanting the faeries and salamanders into full jubilant tarantella. There was a forest king with a jack-o-lantern head. I was on the trail of the Light Children. We all were.
The amount of strange coincidences, synchronicities, and other paranormal resonances that assailed me on the journey were incalculable. But I will do my best to bottle the quintessence of what made it magickal for me.
It’s uncanny what happens when you take a step in the direction of your truest will, of your most vivid desire. Every interaction was imbued with the vigor of dreamsong. The waitress at a waffle house sparkled with the effulgence of an oracle; I drove streets like Demeter and Jupiter that would make Joseph Campbell go mad; an itinerant in Asheville was humming the same song I was listening to on the highway moments before…I suspect that when you answer the call of Destiny the texture and sensorium surrounding you get pushed to a high fractalline resonance of harmony with your soul. I’m sure to onlookers you are bathed in a weird oasis-like halo. It disturbs the atmosphere, warps physics. At least this describes some of the high jinx that occurred while I was on my Sojourn to see the boys play a run of shows in Kentucky, North Carolina, Ohio, and later in Chicago.
But this tidbit refers to the legendary show at Lexingtons Burl.
In a seemingly industrial part of town, brick facades, a somewhat weatherbeaten water tower. You cross some railroad tracks. And then the venue is on your left side. I parked in a middle class suburb just past the venue, then skip-walked giddily to the line that was forming. A friend of mine, whom followed the dead for years, once told me something that I never forgot:
“You know acid was really important, revered even at a dead show. But there was one night that I will never forget because of how it changed the way that I approached shows. I hadn’t taken anything. The first set was great, they played a lot of the up-jump fast boogie stuff, you know Bobby doing his cowboy thing. And after set break, I suddenly found myself all the way at the front. And when Jerry came out he sang Stella Blue, and It was the most mind blowing and transformative nights of my entire life. From then on I was on an express mission to get to the front. That’s where it was.”
Something like that. It lasered it’s message indelibly in my neuronal landscape. And after Being completely at the front for the wondrous Fountain Square show, of which they opened up with On a Highway, one of my favorite songs, I felt like it was my urgent mission to do the same. My friend looks a little like Santa Clause and Jerry Garcia mixed together.
The ticket takers at the Burl were very friendly, and especially familial with one another, which was endearing. Friendly banter, chiding, rosy cheeked from grog, and shiny eyed with playful chiding. You can tell they cared. It made me feel easful going through the rigmarole of getting my vax card, id, and ticket checked.
The Burl seemed unremarkable at first, if charming. Being that it was an asphalt lot in between a wood facaded a framed stage and a bar cum arcade. (Barcade?) I strode right to the rail upon filtering in, keeping my head on a swivel for the merch line if there was one. I found myself adjacent to two friendly kids Brady and John, from boston. (Another John figures very significantly in this story. So we’ll just call this one Boston for short.) Boston Brady and I shared fledgling coming of age stories, how we’d come to the show, what shows on the tour we were planning on catching, etc. It was important to share story when you were among friends. Fellow participants on the trail of the Light Children. We were following the sounds of the light harp, its playful percussive playing to the beat of the rhythm sticks, into the phosphene laden bog of Pan’s forest. It somehow led us here. Brilliant.
I promised myself after I’d been baptized in the dinosaur like screams and ethereal chimes of a UFO landing through guitars and and Rhythm boxes at Desert Daze, where my DNA was overwhelmingly resequenced, that I would do anything it took to see every show that Animal Collective put on. Which is what led me from California to take planes, rent cars, and hurl myself at the staggering rate of synchronicity that it took to have chance on your side. Never gonna win a game if you don’t roll the dice. I commend everyone willing to risk. Whatever it takes. The flutes of Pan enchant us so, to stride right, to the rail of light, at the Lexington show.
Jeremy opened wonderfully. Weaving a lattice of rhythmic synthesizer propelled dream ambiance that was engineered tastefully. He was focused like a clockworker. But working with very beautiful clocks that exuded hypnotic portals of synth and drum.
Trailing away from the stage was a walkway, handrailed, parapet like, that led to the left a bit. Doors were at the end. I remember gazing upon the stage and this long railing, and suddenly being engulfed by the uncanny. I had dreamt this entire vista, not figuratively, but literally, down to the smallest minutiae of overheard subliminal conversation, the lighting, the way Jeremy had exited the stage after giving a stoic head nod of thanks at the end of his set, everything. In the constellation of precognition, déjà vu, synchronicity, presaging something through a dream, only to remember it vividly in the moment that it reoccurs, there should be a word for that. I’m sure there is one in German. I just always hail it as a harbinger of miracles, or a nod from the Cosmic juggler that I am in the right place at the right time. There I was. And there we were. Were we not what we sought too?..
Twin nords like sets of black and white crocodile teeth flanked the stage, one for Geologist and one for Deakin. The percussive heart of Panda’s drums gleamed at the back of the stage. A bass, guitar with fluorescent pink and purple globules painted on it, olympic white stratocaster, and a panel of sampling and groovebox equipment adjacent to them: Avey’s works. The unnerving swell of precognition and presentiment only burgeoned in the moments leading up to them filtering onto the stage. Maybe I’d ingested some mycelium laced chocolate—but that didn’t explain the actual memory of the dream I dreamed one early morning in some lambent day of the past. The chocolate was a molecular assistant for enhanced precision, rather than inebriant. Then they dawned, much like the overture of 2001, the atmosphere a softening pastel miasma, everything swirling into a velvety froth. I was nakedly in the moment, my focus heightened to a quartz like clarity.
The dawn of life: it was like watching flagellum turn into a proto amphibian crawl onto land and sprout appendages, shed its tail, its scales vanish into hirsute flesh, and by some miracle of cinematic sleight of hand, the entire picture came into focus. The Light Children had taken the stage. I won’t go too scrupulously into what assailed me, flesh and spirit, during the talismanic raising of power that ensued, for my friend John and I have alchemized a special treat for you to feast your soul and senses upon. But if you know anyone who was there, pay close attention to the glee that creeps on their face while they remember back on that night, the timbre of their voice as they recount in silvery glyphic script what was printed across our DNA, the transmissions, and in hallowed tones, how the specialness of that evening is recounted.
I bestowed bottle water on those surrounding me that were kind enough to hold space with me. In the nacreous fires of the Animal Collective, we danced. We howled and yelped! Wildly. Dionysus, Halloween carnivals at midnight, and Maev and the faeries are all kindled to my heart as I remember the penumbra of Abby’s beautiful light show swimming over everyone's faces. King’s Walk was like a choral benediction, the harmonized glossolalia of prelinguistic civilizations praising the very root of primordial existence itself: vibration as a self enacted revelation and encomium to life itself—also vibration.
After being whorled into a protoplasmic pit for Fickle Cycle in Fountain Square, I was eager to see the rite performed again. There was a blonde girl behind me, and after the thundering chug of the drums had been set into motion, she began reciting the invocation word for word!!! I felt in that moment a glinting of recognition at how special the night would be based on those seconds of hearing her—no it was a psychic harbinger of the numinosity that was overflowing the chalice of the Burl as the song blasted into pounding resonance!:
Tykes who feast but do not pray!
Sun dried cheeks and sun dyed grains
Every body pogo’d up and down to the cadence of the unstoppable drums set to gallop in the hands of Panda’s rhythm sticks. When the song breaks into melodic weeeee ooooooeeee ooooo ooeeee oooot ooo weoooooo, every person in the audience converged into one organism pulsing to the drum and screaming melodically for the catharsis of every being in existence.
Defeat mystified, ensorcelled, and brought catharsis to the entirety of those in attendance. The song, the journey of 20 minutes, plunged us deep beneath the mystic empyrean of everything meaningful: life, death, love. We set off into stygian parts of the soul, and our vessel was bucked and rocked by the depth and granularity of the songs microscopic probings into everything that is. Everything that will be. Buttressed by the refrain, the heart emboldening and tear galvanizing:
GRAB SOMETHING TAKE HOOOOOOOOOOOOOLD
THE ONLY THING YOU’LL KNOOOOOOOWWWW
I could see every maxillofacial contortion and and spasm as Avey poured his very undying essence into every sound that escaped his expressive face. Could feel the riveting commitment to every sound and sentiment, the allegiance to the ineffable that every finger in every word pointed too. We faced the chasm of the unknown. We all inevitably do. But it urged us to grasp something beautiful. This is it. It whispered. And we felt it was because, it was! I’ve cried many times listening to this song on boots. And I’m failing to convey the unabashedly inspired and wondrous rendition we got that night. This is for everyone who was there and ever will be there, at this show or the next, it’s the only thing we’ll know.
Purple bottle, my third in succession on that tour, completely baffled me and shocked me to the filament of my being. I didn’t think it was possible because the previous two iterations had rocked me to and through some stargates of possibility. But it was like a psychedelic rapture/epileptic fit/complete and utterly beautiful rending of everything heavy in your life to reveal and revel in maybe the most genuine love song ever written. I still don’t believe I was there. But I write this to tell you to the best of my ability some of the glinting sparks of eternity that we received that night.
We milled about like abductees set down after a massive UFO landing, euphoric, exalted by the resonance and revelation of it all. I met a wonderfully happy and gregarious guy named John and we fell into an inspired lockstep about everything Animal Collective; John had been recording shows for a few years, and had recorded the miracle we had just bore witness to. It was a ripple in the river of nacreous time that we would meet.
Later John and I coalesced once more to discuss the fluttering synchronicities and passions that had piloted our vessels to Lexington that night. I’d gone to the stage earlier while the boys were packing up and gave the most unadorned and genuine thank you I have ever given a band. And It wasn’t what I said as much as the conviction with which I spoke I think that gave reality and genuineness to the exchange. For I was only returning what had been given by them during their performance. The understanding was tacit.
Later John introduced me to Ben, and like kids who had known each other since 4th grade, once we all congregated outside the barcade at the Burl, spoke with glee and a flickering of transtemporal campfire light, the stories of the timeless, of the fey, and of the light children in us all that come a drumming and a strumming to wake up the cosmic spark that keeps us wondering, curious, and happily skipping into the sylvan hinterlands of our deepest spiritual alcoves.
That night marked a volta in my life. Something I thought I was only capable of having in my early 20’s. But I can honestly admit, that now there was another temporal partition in my life. Before Lexington, and After Lexington. If you weren’t there do not self flagellate. Let these sometimes grandiose, sometimes psychedelic, prose and recollections be an impetus for you to take up the helm like I did after seeing the band at Desert Daze. Make a vow. To see as many shows as freaking possible.
This is a product of all the unspeakable miracles that came to bare to bring me to Lexington in the first place, a seed that was sewn by John and I, and through collaboration and friendship and John’s post production wizardry, we can all enjoy a glimpse into the Forest Children's toybox. And find ourselves, with glowing hands outstretched, the seekers and keepers of the secrets. To you. The Light Children.
https://youtu.be/NwmDxDmsBI0
Randy/Tangerine/Captain Sunshine
