To see a band change is quite a thing. To witness the evolution of Zen Guerrilla from a tolerable gathering of friends, eager to make music together but not quite yet onto anything particularly compelling, into one of the more formidable forces of sound and presence of their time is a beautiful experience.
Likewise, after seeing some early Jon Spencer Blues Explosion gigs I walked away underwhelmed. Then six months later I was in front of a stage watching them as though I were smack in the middle of the railroad tracks peacefully anticipating the impending crush of a locomotive. But the Blues Explosion were hardly “unsung,” and so I digress. No, Zen Guerrilla is the band I first saw at Silk City in Philadelphia in about 1994. They were friends of a friend and introductions were made as someone snapped pictures of them in the lobby wearing their matching rose-pink tuxedos.
Nice enough guys I thought, and their stage show ended up being mostly unremarkable, with vague traces–in the vodka-addled slide show of my memories–of fairly standard psychedelic rock with a protracted nod to Howlin’ Wolf, Elmore James and the like, and even a Beatles cover or two. What I mostly remember being bothered by–besides their ungainly name–was that the front man could really sing and yet he ran his vocals through a series of processors, amps, compressors and what-not, like a tube-powered version of a Gibby Haynes vocal cop-out. This dude was like six-foot-seven and spent the entire set bent over double, his back to the audience, trying to hide behind parts of the drum kit.
I ran into the fellows from the band from time to time but otherwise didn’t see them around all that much. Then I heard that these four guys who had met each other as students at the University of Delaware in the late Eighties, had moved the band to San Francisco.
Now, I don’t know when the transformation took place exactly, but the next time I remember seeing them play was about 4 years later, in Seattle. Same dudes, brand new band. They were now a sonic tsunami. They were physical. They were focused. And the front man, Marcus Durant, owned the audience. He was going at the crowd, drawing them in from under a crazy bush of hair, reaching his arms out as to offer his hand in guidance through an unnerving rock-n-roll journey.
The only problem with this new outfit was that my own band had to take the stage after them.
We did all right because I had a couple of pretty good players with me, but we were in no ways up to Zen level, and the conversation in our van on the drive to Portland the next day, where we had to follow them again the next night, was a serious one. It centered on pep talking each other as to how we weren’t going to allow these out-of-control give-a-fucks to shame us again. It was, alas, to little avail, because Zen Guerrilla mopped the floor with us again.
But it never made me feel that bad. I mean what were we gonna do against that? They were on fire and they loved it like few bands I’ve seen. They lapped up the giddiness and ludicrousness of every rock performance cliché and delivered them with none of the hammy, self-conscious irony that hampers lesser men. You could suck cognac from a brick baked in the desert sun easier than you could wring a drop of pretension or condescension toward the art of rock from any of the four of them. And they never for a forgivable instant took any of it seriously. They all understood that glory is fleeting, if not impossibly illusive.
Anyone I ever hipped to Zen came away changed, and henceforth a devoted disciple. That is why it was so vexing and confounding that even after they were on Sub Pop (who, granted, were not in their glory years at this point, but still…). Zen were, near as I could tell, all but ignored by the American music press and record-buying public.
At SXSW in 2000 I walked into Emo’s with some friends who had been theretofore uninitiated to their greatness–or even their name–as Zen broke into their perception-altering cover of David Bowie’s “Moonage Daydream.” We stood there dumbfounded at these four motherfuckers who were insightful enough to have noticed the jolting power in what Bowie could only get across as a jangly, tripster ditty. It brought to mind Stevie Wonder’s funked up demolition of the Beatles’ “We Can Work It Out.”
In 2002 I had the good fortune of doing a week-long UK tour with Zen. I was solo and fortunately I was the opener this time. Rich Millman (guitar), Carl Horne (bass), Andy Duvall (drums) and Durant shredded the room every night and they ridiculed and cajoled me all the day and whatever part of the night they weren’t pummeling the musical conscience of England.
One of my favorite Zen memories is from a gig in a cavernous little club in Newport, Wales with the thinnest turnout of the tour. There was some idiotically constructed 2 1/2″ lead piping running about ten inches off the stage floor that bordered the entire edge of the stage perimeter like the top rail of a midget chain-link fence. It was exposed to the audience on three sides, and Durant was leaned over it eliciting deep guttural howls into an SM58 and shoving his face down into the face of a stupefied fan. This kid was smallish and not physically distinctive in any visible way, and as Durant was bellowing away and the band was flailing around behind him, this kid took the nearly full 1.5 liter plastic bottle he was holding and squeezed it, shooting a geyser of icy water all over Marcus’ face, the mic, and the front of his body.
Durant is huge and I prayed for the kid’s soul. Durant stood there for moment, band still wailing. If he felt any physical or psychological shock–or even mild surprise at this flood of cold water, his face betrayed none of it. He just stared at the kid. Then, with both feet balanced on the stage-girding pipe, his forearm steadying him against the low ceiling, he sprung, circus canon-like through the air, and came down on top of this hapless water-squirting lad. When Durant rose again and stretched upward, fully erect, he had the kid’s neck cradled in the craw of his elbow and pulled snug, right up against his own throat. The kid’s feet dangled below Durant’s knees, a full foot off the floor. Then Durant pulled the kids face somehow tighter still against his own, shoved the mic into his own mouth and unleashed unearthly screams that seemed to disconnect the erstwhile spectator’s consciousness from his body. He had been shouted into apoplectic shock, as though by an aboriginal witch doctor. Then Durant let the kid drop and he flopped on the floor like he’d been slapped on the forehead by a faith healer.
I believe that tour was the last time I saw Zen play. I heard they might have done another tour in Europe, maybe even the States. An old Philly friend, who lives in London now, told me he saw Zen play at a festival in Spain to tens of thousands of people sometime in 2003. My friend said they came off the stage, the immense outdoor crowd going nuts behind them, and Millman laid his guitar down and said “I’m done.” “What?” my friend said. Millman looked him square in the eye and said, “That’s it.”
And as far as I know, it was.
Images ©1999-2001 Rob Erickson
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