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17 July 2005
Animal Liberation Orchestra
Last night -- or early this morning depending on your point of view -- Jessica, Amanda, Pete, June, Travis, Laura and I headed over to the Fais Do-Do club to listen to the Animal Liberation Orchestra. The Animal Liberation Orchestra, or ALO is a "jamband" and "one of the most popular ones on the West Coast". Throughout the concert, I heard many references and connections to Jack Johnson and how closely affiliated ALO is to him which seemed to have recommended the group to quite a few of its fans.Fais Do-Do is a small club in downtown Los Angeles on West Adams Boulevard. At 12 in the night -- which is when we arrived to listen to the group -- that street wore a rather deserted look but not too different from, say Ahmedabad at curfew time -- all the streetlights are on, but there is not a soul in sight and the shutters are down. Obviously the club has its very own cult following because it chooses to be as discreet and obscurely tucked away as possible with the exception of a small neon-light signboard hoisted atop the building. The club also includes a restaurant and they serve California Cajun cuisine which, for want of purpose and quieter surroundings, none of us was too obliging to sample.
Through the little inlet we were let in, with paper-wristbands to mark paid customers and distinguish them from freeloaders loitering around the patio of the club. The opening group was still on call on the dais and they were blaring out some very loud music -- so loud that it did not matter that the bass guitar was a stringed instrument because every time its strings were strummed the floor under me would grumble and shockwaves from resounding back and forth twenty feet of separated walls countlessly many times would buffet my feet. But in all fairness, they did have quite a measure of the crowd and since jamming, live music and inexorable dancing all through the night were soon going to be the order of the day they set the ball rolling, if you will pardon the pun.
In addition to a cult following of the band that follows them around and came from Santa Barbara, there was an inordinately large number of people who had all the trappings of -- for lack of a better word -- hippies. The women wore bandannas and long twin braids, they wore long cassocks and flowing robes some of which had many fashionable patches stitched together, they swayed their bodies from side to side up-down-up in textbook seventies vogue. The men wore large gruffy beards, had distended bellies from endless hours of beer-guzzling to match their general slothful demeanour and colossal proportions otherwise and wore large bearskins whose tails brushed and swatted their bulbous cheeks as they moved their six-and-a-half-foot frames jiggying with the music. There was a group of fans front-up that had little pills at their fingertips that they exchanged between each other and ingested whole into their mouths although I suspect this was very much wishful thinking -- the sensationalist in me expected people to be "doing" Ecstasy at what was a rather innocuous little jamming session further notwithstanding the fact that it was my first such outing.
ALO lost no time in working up a feverish beat and rhythm to which almost entirely everybody was shaking heads, swinging hands and gyrating hips. In the present party, I seemed to be the most reclusive for more reasons than one -- or perhaps there just was one and the others were mere concoctions of my mind -- firstly I could not get past the gentle foot-tapping in spite of many valiant efforts by my friends to help me "unhinge" myself, and secondly because I was not sure if the dancing itself was not disdainful of the artists. No doubt this rings hollow and it should because no music that pulsating ought to be devoid of dance, but I could not help pause and admire how much the performers were enjoying themselves, experimenting with the keyboard, synthesizer, bass guitar, lead guitar, drums and all kinds of oddities of sound-making gadgets including a little bullhorn, wind-pipes and the drums doing the vocals at some point. All that noise and all that music nicely interwoven with meaningful lyrics, mellow voices, expert precision on the guitars -- surely all that deserved a lot more than dancing. I did break through eventually and managed to perform with my knees intermittently.
Cigarette smoke wafted in the air, the smell of beer was lost in the odour of crowded human presence, new acquaintances made through five minutes of dancing, old ones renewed, love fortified, infatuation incensed and the band played on. They finally closed at three in the morning after paying a little tribute to their rock-star flamingo mascot.
