Editor’s Note: On August 14, Lexington, Kentucky band Kind Skies released a new album entitled Echo. You can read more about the release in our album preview.
The band’s guitarist, who simply goes by Mitch, penned an essay describing an extraordinary concert experience he had seeing the Pixies and more.
The venue was surely new. It had hard concrete floors that I noticed as they compacted my almost half-a-century old spine into an even more compact form. Claustrophobic balconies dripping beer on the general admissioners arched overhead at distorted geometries, and a beer line moves along at a pace that rivaled most flumes. The exposed metal girders and unoffensive paint scheme made it look like the offspring of every coffee shop that had opened since 2010. It was unadorned and optimized.
The long never-lost cousin of the Brooklyn Bridge provided a path to the venue, and it spilled out onto a concrete staging area with temporary fencing that created areas where you would move through the evening—drinking, waiting, smoking, looking, vogueing, queuing, etc. There were collections of millennials who had found Miles Davis, old people who were telling each other about how they had first heard Pixies, and casually coiffed real-estate agenteers.
I had walked across Brooklyn Bridge’s cousin after having eaten amazing Asian food in Covington and taking a loophole. Inside the venue, Franz Ferdinand hacked through their set. Maybe if I was 15 years younger, I would have been as into some song as much as the guy who was jumping up and down to some unidentifiable FF song, wagging his finger, ‘no no no no no no no’ in time to Mr. Ferdinand. The dancer had cleared a neat buffer around himself of about three paces; no one in this impendingly geriatric crowd wanted to cross the line; they preferred to have their broken limbs be delayed ever into the future. Maybe I would start one of the joke bands with a stupid name—Young Neil? Com Truise? Taken. Would naming us France Ferdiband summon a crowd? Even once? We could say ‘Thanks, we’re Franz Ferdinand’ after every song if we never admitted to it. What’s that bustle in your hedgerow? My god… it’s full of plausible deniability.
After the WWI-themed band ended their set, I nudged myself forward into the mosaic of fans until I reached crowd supersaturation. Having attended alone, I became too self-aware as the proximity of everyone. The techs began to transition to Pixies’ equipment. I looked around, and I locked in on the person in front of me. Polo shirt. Nice hair, muscular, attractive girlfriend. Partner. Wife. Mother. Daughter. Trans daughter. Neice. Coldplay. Best Friend. Who knows… A person stood beside him, and they looked intimately familiar with each other. In a nice way.
He turned 146 degrees around and caught my eye. Shit! Did he see me zoning out at them? As a coverup, I turned 138 degrees on a horizontal plane and then 30 degrees vertically, looking up at the balcony for 5 seconds in an outward display of, “Oh, is that someone I know?”—my brow furrowed, indicating to whomever was looking at me that I was indeed looking for someone familiar in a crowd of 1000.
I hadn’t focused on anyone. Could they see my iris remaining unfocused as I scanned the crowd? Did they realize it was all an act? I looked back toward the stage. The couple were two rows ahead of me, pressing into crowdspace parameters that collapsed the usually effective bubble of personal space into a dimension so small that at most it was inches from anyone, though hair and the occasional article of loose clothing was allowed to cross. Someone in front of me accidentally disappeared completely as people returning from the beer flume tried to squeeze their way “back to their friends” in the front row—friends who could not possibly have saved their space as the viscous crowdfluid collapsed all voids.
The person who was not tricked by my brow-furrowing competence was, I realized, my twin. His right arm was behind his back, forearm perpendicular to the ground, pulling on his left elbow.
He was trying to make his shoulder feel better.
I was rubbing mine, stretching my arm in a different, slightly more effective way… should I tell him? I looked up at the third-tier balcony in the room, taking in the general feel rather than looking at anything specific. He turned his head. His brow furrowed slightly indicating he was looking in the same direction for a similar reason, though his iris lacked focus. His brow would unfurrow once he encountered what his unfocus was searching for; it never would.
My mirror ganger.
I turned my head. He turned his.
I unfurled my brow. His unfurled.
I looked around trying to catch anyone else’s eyes. Where they seeing this? Could someone corroborate this? Was someone about to come up to us and ask if we were brothers?
…Any second now.
Should I ask my brother what his last name is? Would that be weird? If it was, could I get it out in a way that wasn’t weird? “Hi! I’ve been standing right behind you for 10 minutes, and gosh, your arms are the same and we both looked up at the balcony and much my blood-related family is unknown to me… Are you my good twin? Am I from the mirror world? Hi hi! Ho Ho!”
A long-headed short blond-haired roadie turns up a gold guitar—Santiago’s—for sound check. A hush falls over 20% of the audience. To further alienate myself from ExiGenZed, I imagine them thinking, “Is that Kim Gordon?” I noticed the Guitar wasn’t the one that had a Bell sticker on it. Bell was a manufacturer of cheap bike equipment. Maybe a helmet saved some guy named Joe’s life? Maybe a bike pump was converted into a turkey baster for the soul?
I’ve got it! I can ask mirror guy if he shares any of my family names. “Pardon me, but are you a Daffowill?” That way I’m not a freak. Not such a freak, at any rate.
Against my better judgment, I prepare to ask. My heartbeat quickens like a highlander (sci-fi, not Scottish… but, both I guess). My lips part, I draw a shallow breath…
Frank Black walks in from stage left with glasses that would have made Layne Staley proud, were he not so un-Layne Staley-like these days.
Pixies
It’s too quick! They are hurtling into the first track off Bossanova as Santa must on the first city of the evening (Korvatunturi???). David Lovering is a drummer, and he does not look like a well man, in the way that all old men in the seat of a role we’re told a young butt should fill does not look well. He starts off too fast. The young, fresh out of the clone-tank, Kim Deal does not look happy in a way that, if it were Kim Deal, would have made a lesser horse shit their bun-bag. She looks happy, but you can tell she is not. Later she will wave to the crowd. It is all the communication we need. But now she is glowering. Smiling. Then glowering. Frank Black turns around and cartoonishly hammers on his guitar to mark time for Lovering, who rights himself as he remembers just who the fuck he is and what the fuck he must do.
Two songs in, Frank Black goes full SNL-vis Costello, waving his arms, ‘no no no no no’ after a new track is Casey. Two chords in and Black tackles the baseball metaphor, and he course corrects and starts anew, head on into Head On. A prematurely tipped hand: they know: the new stuff doesn’t carry any weight. It hasn’t accredited its baggage. It hasn’t been electroplated with a thirty-year-old cultural patina. It doesn’t look like a photograph from the liner notes of Doolittle.
I am 12 years old. My friend has turned on U-Mass on a stereo that is too large for any home. I can imagine a Pixies show when I’m 12. Better yet, maybe high school in the 90s during the kestrel-like descent of lumberjack fashion into Kentucky. It would have been nerds, future alcoholics, people who looked like Franz Ferdiband’s singer. I looked around the modern black—dark brown?—venue. If I had to guess, and I don’t, I’d say it was about 92% real-estate agents/Airbnb managers, with about 10% Gen-Y with their parents, and a 4% lean mix of hairdressers, barber-ists, and tatters. Another descent of west coast madness into Liminal, KY.
I refocus my attention on stage. Pixies command sound. They are axiomatic. It is primal. Frank Black is maybe the last star who will not be manufactured in the way we now knee-jerk well. I missed the chance to introduce myself to my doppelbock. Maybe at the next show. Maybe he’ll be at Franz Ferdiband’s third show before they are ceased and desisted out of existence and into eternity.
Mitch from Kind Skies
Contributor
Mitch is guitarist for Lexington, Kentucky indie-rock band Kind Skies
