"DON'T LOOK BACK"
SONIC YOUTH performing "Daydream Nation"
THE SCIENTISTS performing "Blood Red River"
Enmore Theatre, Sydney
Tuesday, February 19, 2008

By THE BARMAN
Live video by STEVEN DANO

I promise not to use the term "angular" in connection with "guitars" at any point in this review.

It's a fine line between presence and pretension. Sonic Youth straddle it - no, they define it - like no-one else.

I remember first seeing SY at a Big Day Out in 1995 (preceded by a solo band Iggy) and wondering what the fuss was all about. I had came to this particular Lower East Side art-punk party relatively late ("Goo") after being underwhelmed by the earliest stuff with all its No Wave noise and serial killer allusions. Parts were OK but I certainly wasn't stopping long in Death Valley 69 and didn't need Lunch. Perhaps it was the outdoor venue with half the firestorm drifting off into the ether and being dissipated (these Big Day Out things are held in concrete-lined cesspools) or perhaps I was fucked up.

This show - a run-through from go to whoa of SY's most lauded album (a double, no less, from the days when black plastic was the standard measure) - was a dissonant cloud of barely controlled aural anger. Pathos and bathos in the space of a time change. More freaky tunings than a car dealership full of dodgy mechanics.

The band hadn't even plugged in and a deafening roar filled the Enmore. Such is the nature of SY fandom and they've probably spent more time in Australia in the last 15 years than most of Qantas' locally-based aircrew.

You read the Died Pretty review in the Sydney Morning Herald recently blathering on about gigs and their defining moments? Unusually for the SMH which usually regards rock and roll with a level of contempt you'd reserve for Gary Glitter, the reviewer was on the mark. It's very much in the ear and eye of the general admission area ticketholder, and for mine tonight had one of those portentous points a mere two songs into the set.

It was in the breakdown of "Silver Rocket". You could feel it if you were there but the visuals are easier to translate: There's Lee Renaldo flipping his guitar onto his back and picking up an effects pedal, gripping it tightly as he waves it around to produce swirls of noise. He looks like a pepper-and-salt thatched Gerard Mangala doing a whip dance out front of the Velvets, circa 1968. (Sure beats the shit outta the sight of a Big Day Out Iggy flopping out his Angry Anderson doll back in '95.)

Riding this controlled chaos, the guitarist turns himself into a human theremin while lanky Thurston Moore sways and knee-bends on the other side of the stage, a shaggy-mopped giraffe gripping a toy guitar and summoning equally unearthly sounds out of his own overdriven stack. Ageless, mini-skirted Kim Gordon rubs her bass up against a mic stand, giving the low-end register of the PA a work-out.

The whole thing extends over several minutes and is thrown into relief by a stark lightshow of strobes and white-background washes. (If Tony Greig was in the house he'd probably be on the floor worming in the throes of an epilepsy attack, they're so bright, but I'm probably just fantasizing about seeing co-commentator Ian Chappell trying to bring him to with a cricket bat to the head. Fuck me, that's a trippy thought, but I swear I was on the Hahn Light, occifer, cos I was driving.)

So why is "Daydream Nation" so revered? Probably because it had a Johnny Appleseed Effect, especially for would-be Riot Girrrrrls reveling in Ms Gordon's positivism. But it is a long listen, perhaps consumed in smaller portions. The original clocked in at just under 80 minutes and tonight's set (with extended versions and encore) crept past two-hours. That's a lot of assault in any eardrum's language and the whole package is a little overwhelming on a School Night after an early morning start. Am I complaining? No. Just saying. And I did do the bolt as "Kool Thing" started cranking. As a closer it's not as substantial as the banquet that preceded.

On this tack, the next day I was talking to a friend who's well into "Daydream Nation", but even he rarely plays the whole four sides back-to-back. The set circuit-breaker (the point where the band leaves the stage briefly, presumably for oxygen and vitamin shots after expending so much focussed energy) is "Providence". Failing another chance of having him here in person and being able to ply him with beers, I would have liked Mike Watt to have phoned in his answering machine vocal via cellphone but we had to do with a looped version. Me, I love this interlude of fuzzy piano where Watt scolds Thurston for mistakenly throwing a bunch of tapes into a dumpster after over-inhaling, and it does serve a purpose on the night.

If you know the album you know the setlist. Other than length, the other impression I've carried around in my head is that "Daydream Nation" tended to taper towards the end. Live exposure can often change opinions and I'll not see a more stunning finale than "Eliminator Jr", at the end of that closing Trilogy section. It's sharper than a pox doctor's clerk on payday with its precise explosions of brain-numbing guitar hammering away to violent effect.

A random thought: I'd hate to be Steve Shelley's chiropractor. He hunches over that kit, playing with a rare intensity that matches the squalls of savage noise swirling all around him, and it looks like he'd need a couple of gladiators in chariots drawn by 12 horses apiece to straighten him out, post-gig. The guy has to be one of the most under-mentioned drummers of his day. For mine, his joining SY made all the difference, way back when.

But back to the encore and the balance is drawn from "Really Ripped" with "Reena" the pick, with Kim dropping her guitar and bopping away at centrestage mic with Pavement's bass guy guesting in her stead. Alas, no "The Diamond Sea" - I would have been happy only with the 25-minute version of what might be their best song - but you would have been a hard one to please if you couldn't find something in this marathon event to jolt your senses.

Did anyone forget the opening band? Not likely. The Scientists squeezed out their 15-song reprise of "Blood Red River" (the Citadel compilation - not the six-track EP which I had pegged as the likely game plan, followed of course by most of the songs they played anyway.)

This music is lauded, of course, a template for large chunks of what was to follow. Much is made of Mudhoney and Co attributing Grunge to the Scientists, at least in the inspirational sense, but I have to say that this sells it short. Nirvana owed more to heavy metal. The Scientists came from a much darker place.

One-time RAM magazine writer JJ Adams was in the stalls and recalled living in Surry Hills in the early '80s when the almost same crew of Scientists (then-drummer Brett Rixon is no longer with us) moved into the neighbourhood from Perth. The star turn in their street was the couple on the terrace who had spectacular domestics. JJ gave a starving Boris Sudjovic 20 bucks when he wandered next door one day asking for recipes for flour and water, and her long-abiding memory is of a sweet bunch of scraggly urchins who looked extremely young. They were lucky lads and of course probably spent the money on wholemeal bread and lentils. If you believe that you'll convince yourself that Sydney trains run on time.

The Scientists are a damned sight hairier than the last time I sighted them, and if these occasional reformations parlay into anything more substantial (very unlikely), you'll do well to catch them at every opportunity. Latter-day drummer Leanne Chock more than copes with the tall order of anchoring the whole box and dice with precise, powerful backbeats. She's an absolute gem. Apple for the teacher. An older Sudjovic remains the King of the Two Note Bassline, under a shock of hair that'd do Alice Cooper proud.

Tony Thewlis is the clean-cut component of this crew and trades lines with a hirsuite Kim Salmon like South-East Asian surgeons swapping body parts on the illicit kidney market. Salmon's howl and the all-consuming patented Scientists drone are two commodities you can't replicate.

The Enmore toilets smell like a swamp after weeks of heavy Sydney rain so it's entirely appropriate.

I read a comment by someone in an online forum the next day and he was complaining it was all too simple and therefore a bore. More like all too perfect, numbskull.

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