Brian Chippendale at Redrum, Providence, November 2004. Photo by Simon Hegarty.

In a recent podcast, Stand-up comedian Patton Oswalt and ESPN columnist Bill Simmons went into detail about how superstardom can often be the death knell of a comedian’s ability to develop strong material. The problem is that once a comedian has already won over the audience, almost any joke that comes out of his or her mouth will be met with a rapturous response–regardless of its quality. If the audience approaches a performance expecting the funniest night of their lives, they’ll always do their best to ensure that this expectation is met; they are paying good money for it, after all.

As a result of this overreactive tendency, Steve Martin retired early from stand-up because he could no longer fine-tune his material. The audience would laugh so hard at his set-ups that often the punch-lines would be inaudible over the overenthusiastic crowd response. Even the words “Hi! I’m Steve Martin” would be met, not only with cheering, but with rolling waves of laughter. Dave Chappelle, who faces the same problem, has a tendency to deliver unannounced four-hour marathon sets where he browbeats the audience into giving him an honest response, weeding out the dilettantes and keeping only the discerning connoisseurs at attention. While overly positive responses may be fine for hack star comedians like Dane Cook and Carlos Mencia who are not funny to begin with and need all the help they can get, too much unfiltered love for a comedian’s new material is often a curse.

Unfortunately, it looks like the perennial Providence two-piece Lightning Bolt might be falling into the noise-rock equivalent of the same trap. Their recent performances have been marred by a plethora of excessive and distracting audience interactions that have hampered their ability to actually finish playing any of their songs. The question when going to a Lightning Bolt show in 2009 is no longer about how awesome the band will be, but how obnoxiously disruptive the crowd will be. Bassist Brian Gibson stepping on his distortion pedal has become an act analogous to Steve Martin introducing himself: a simple action that inspires a ridiculous frenzy long before it actually honestly earns it. It seems as if some people aren’t coming to watch them play because they want to hear an awesome band, but because they want to bug the fuck out and shove and punch everyone around them without fear of reprisal.

At a recent show, I overheard some kids referring to them as “legends” and saying how they had been waiting to see the duo for years after seeing some clips of them on YouTube. This is the most popular YouTube video–with over 120,000 views–of a Lightning Bolt performance. It comes from the famed Halloween 2003 show in Providence, RI. Full disclosure: I am a white blob in the audience in this video.

Now, the crowd is bugging out pretty hardcore here, with the obvious highlight of insanity being when a dude swings down onto the crowd from the pipes overhead. It was an isolated incident; a few minutes after this, everybody was forced to stand about ten feet back from the band as a result of the floor beneath our feet threatening to give in (a support beam had cracked and we all literally could have died). Here’s the aftermath:

It was an awesome show. But I fear that its myth-making qualities–from the swing-a-thon to the floor almost caving in–have sent the wrong ideas to today’s crop of Pitchfork-literate kiddie bops. If you can’t swing from the pipes or knock out the floor, you gotta try something else, and that usually results in knocking over the band themselves. The focus is no longer on how awesome the band is and how the music moves you, but on how much chaos the crowd can create.

After their abortive gig at this year’s FYF Fest, I was appalled to see people on Twitter bragging about how great the show was because the Fire Marshal had to stop them from playing three whole times: OMG LB was so crazy they had to shut it down three times!!!!!

I’m sorry, but having the band stop playing three times because of the Fire Marshal actually made it a sub-par gig–not an awesome one. The band wasn’t shut down for being too loud or too crazy, but because the audience was acting like a bunch of assholes. Is it more fun when you’re masturbating if your mom walks in on you three times? Maybe it is for some of you Oedipus-complex-having-motherfuckers, but I prefer it when I can finish what I started without having to cover myself up with a blanket and quickly close internet windows. The Halloween 2003 show wasn’t an awesome show because we all almost got swallowed into the floorboards, but because Lightning Bolt played a killer 30 minute set before having to push everyone back and then they played another killer 20 minute set. Most importantly, people actually listened after the band members insisted that they back up and stay put.

When I used to go see them play regularly at various now long-gone squats and dive bars in Providence (RIP Safari Lounge), the biggest threats to their shows were either the faulty wiring in their amps causing a power outage or the noise outside leading the police to bust up the joint (Fuck you, Mayor Cicilline!). Now it is kids who read about the band on the internet and watch YouTube videos of their CRAAAAZZZZEEEE shows and then arrive ready to live out their own super-crazy aggro fantasies.

The dictums of decorum say that you need three examples to establish a trend. The last three Lightning Bolt shows I have been to have established a disruptive and irritating trend in which an over-aggressive audience continually prevents the band from actually playing their music. This isn’t anything entirely new; in the past, there was always the risk of getting your ass knocked into the band if you were up front. The shows that I spent at the front line of Brian Chippendale’s drum kit often consisted of me pushing back against the crowd with all the might that my 6’4” 160 pound frame could muster. I can proudly say that I never personally knocked over Brian Chippendale’s kit, but I certainly stood next to people who did and it was rarely their own fault but that of some jackass from behind them shoving too hard.

Lightning Bolt at Redrum, Providence, November 2004. Photo by Simon Hegarty.

However, these pushy douchebags were often a tiny minority in the past. Now, as their audiences continue to swell, they are an unpleasantly loud minority. When you’re playing in front of a couple hundred people, it’s not that big a deal if there are a handful of psychopaths making it difficult for others to enjoy themselves. But when you’re playing for several thousand people, a hundred nutjobs can certainly make their presence felt quite obnoxiously and distractingly.

I, as always, blame the children. As the token Pitchfork-approved crazy crowd band, Lightning Bolt’s rep appears to have penetrated into our nation’s high schools pretty thoroughly. At an LB show in Oakland in early 2007, I was surprised to find myself, a 23-year-old, among the oldest people in attendance. With the Bay Area being the type of place where drugged out and disaffected kids pride themselves on their awareness of hot new old things, the crowd was mostly high schoolers (On a school night! How rebellious!). This, coupled with the fact that the show was cheap (7 bucks) and in a bouncer-less warehouse where no one could tell them not to drink or smoke weed led to a lethal cocktail of set interruptus. After the now requisite lecture from the drummer at the top of the show about everybody needing to step back, the band was disrupted in almost every song by someone knocking over either their amps, their drums, or their bassist. Every time the band would start to really get cooking, a teenager would come flying over the crowd up front and knock something over. I didn’t realize that knocking over a drum kit was something to feel proud of, but it seems like a new rite of passage for the modern-day youthful LB fan.

The most egregious example of this trend came when I saw them play an early September outdoor gig in Bushwick in 2008. The event was organized by Todd P, whose neon-shirted teenaged minions must have blanketed NYU with flyers for it because the crowd constituency was greatly of the “Froshies’ first underground rock show variety.” After a lacerating and largely-ignored set from Mick Barr’s black metal troupe Krallice, I was excited to see Lightning Bolt play. But once again, the internet-bred kiddies made anything resembling a complete performance of a song–any song–an impossibility. I wound up leaving halfway through their set because after over 20 minutes, they hadn’t been able to play for more than a couple minutes at a time without having to toss some kid off their equipment and start over.

Lighting Bolt at FYF, Los Angeles, September 2009. Photo by Matt Kruglinski.

A little over a week ago, I went to see them play at Los Angeles’ horribly mismanaged FYF Fest. In a compromise between their usual low-level performance style and the logistical demands of a festival with thousands of paying attendees, Lightning Bolt performed on the smallest of the three stages at the outdoor event. Somewhat disastrously, they drew the largest crowd of the day as seemingly nearly all of the five to ten thousand patrons descended upon the tiny stage with an aggressive and violent sense of urgency.

Before they even started playing, the crowd was pushing against the barricade between the audience and the stage so forcefully that some old guy took to the mic and spent the next few minutes continually urging everyone to take two steps back. Nobody listened at first, of course, but after a couple minutes of constant berating, the people up front finally heeded and slinked back a little bit. The second the band started playing, however, even before the bass could kick in, the old dude was back on the mic scolding the audience for pushing too hard and demanding that everyone step back a couple feet and stay there. In all, the first 10 to 15 minutes of their set was marred by this back and forth, wasting almost half of their 40-minute festival slot. They were eventually able to slink into a pretty decent groove about 20 minutes in as a violent mosh pit of tackling and punching swirled around ten feet away from the stage. It wasn’t all bad though. I was pleased to see that this one guy who elbowed me hard in the side got tackled and knocked to the ground by a filthy hairy bro-dude the instant he stepped into the angry zone. Another goofy crowd highlight was the kid who flagrantly ignored the “No Crowdsurfing” signs by bringing a boogie board, briefly riding atop the crowd down front before falling to the floor in a spectacular fashion. Ultimately, it was just very disappointing to see so much of their brief 40 minute set time wasted on substitute teacher-esque disciplinary lecturing and unsatisfying starts and stops.

Perhaps in response to the aborted riffage issue, Lightning Bolt’s material has evolved in a looser and proggier direction over the past few years. This problem almost always comes to a head whenever Brian Gibson, the stoic bassist, steps on the distortion pedal and really starts riffing the fuck out. As a result, when trying to help mellow everyone down from these moshy extremities, he often indulges in looser, protracted bass noodling. This tendency reached a head in the four-year gap between 2005’s Hypermagic Mountain and this year’s Earthly Delights, when persistent rumors of the imminent release of an all-improv LP called Frenzy suggested that they would hone in on their jazzier, proggier tendencies. Sadly, this release never came to fruition. But it might be for the best. As much as I can enjoy LB getting their Yes on in between flights of riffasaurion fancy, it often comes across live like the romantic scenes in a big budget action movie, merely taking up space and delaying the gratification of the big money set pieces. Frenzy sounds like it might have been LB’s own version of Spinal Tap Mach II: the free jazz improvisation that they performed because they were short a guitarist after a puppet show at a theme park.

Before LB either retire or start playing the theme park circuit, I hope that they can somehow find a way to thwart these show-ruining no-good-niks. Playing on a stage, although somewhat contradictory to the whole ethos of the band’s live performance style, might be a step in the right direction. Although this choice made for a mini-disaster at the FYF Fest—mostly due to the pernicious meddling of the boogieman-ish Fire Marshal–at least no one knocked over the dude’s cymbals. Oh well, I guess we always will have YouTubes of better days.

I’m the doofy looking guy on the right with a hoodie wrapped around my waist. Maybe I’ll just watch this 20 times in a row instead of seeing them play next time they come to town. It’ll probably be a lot more rewarding. Ah, nostalgia, you’ll always be there for me.

Words: Matt Kruglinski

Tags: Brian Chippendale, Brian Gibson, Earthly Delights, Fire Marshall, Fuck Yeah Fest, FYF, Halloween 2003, Hypermagic Mountain, Krallice, Lightning Bolt, Providence, Safari Lounge, Todd P

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 16th, 2009 at 4:43 pm and is filed under ENGLISH, Horizons, Sightings, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.