The Music Of Battlestar Galactica, Live At The California Plaza, Los Angeles, 6/13/09
This started out as a clumsy, punch-drunk, stream of consciousness thing, scribbled in my notebook in Sue's car on the way back from Los Angeles. It still is a clumsy, punch-drunk, stream of consciousness thing, but I fleshed it out here and there as memories came back to me, aided by the videos being posted from the night by Films In Focus.
The Battlestar Orchestra plays like God moving over the face of the waters.
In an appropriately Caprican plaza in downtown Los Angeles, the various members of the band are running through a sound check. I am waiting for Sue to come down and join me. We have just driven six hours and checked into our hotel. I immediately changed out of my road trip clothes and came down to the plaza to see what I could see. It's hours to the show, but I grab a seat, and I wait. I do not know what I am in for.
There are a few individuals and groups of people already scattered throughout the plaza. A shallow pool fills the space between the angled seating areas and the stage. Concrete planters filled with flowers dot the pool like islands. Towers of nice, professional lights. The pleasant dissonance of instruments tuning. The sound guy calls instructions over the PA. Even in its halted, deconstructed state, the sounds emanating from the stage are unmistakable: this is the haunting and singular score of the late and revered Battlestar Galactica, composed by Bear McCreary.
I've been texting Sue updates, and she comes down from the room, lugging a fancy picnic and a fancier camera. She is just in time.
Paul Cartwright, madman violinist, has arrived. The string section sound checks, and I forget how to swallow food. The sound man announces over the PA that they will now be running through Black Market.
My memory here is hazy, and the order of events uncertain. Because the next thing I know, for all intents and purposes, the Battlestar concert is happening. To me, and maybe twenty-three other people. A band of conversing, tuning individual people coalesce into an entity that is beyond comprehension. Bear himself, slight and intense, is a magician when he is conducting, the ringmaster of this mad troupe of talented and passionate musicians.
Much of Bear's brilliance is in the space between the sounds, those pauses in his driving tribal rhythms that ache, that pull at your deepest systems, that make your mind contract into the base of your skull, anticipate, - and there. When the taiko drummers play, play then stop, arms high, in primal unison, that's where some of the simplest and rawest beauty can be heard. It would really all be too gorgeous for television, if it were for any other show than Battlestar Galactica.
Bear is a force, his hands precise, not frantic but at times jumping frenetically as the music rises, not conducting so much as conjuring. He plays the keyboard or harmonium standing sometimes, hair in his eyes, observing the crowd or off in a world of his own making.
Bear's fiancee, Raya Yarbrough, and his brother Brendan, voice of the Watchtower, sing together, a song I know as A Good Lighter but apparently it is called Wander My Friends. It is a bittersweet and hopeful theme, sung in Gaelic. The drums roll and sound like the end of a life well-lived. My heart swells and stops.
There are breaks in between the songs. The band checks things out, adjusts, goofs off. Brendan sees us and waves across the water. A lighting guy scales a rig like a rock-climber. The plaza starts to fill up.
Much how it evolved on the show itself, Watchtower sneaks up on us, in pieces. A chord progression, a jangly strum of guitar. Every time I recognize a small part of the whole, I jab Sue in the ribs with my elbow. This hardly qualifies as a sound check anymore. It is a gift and a privilege. I'm getting to hear all my favorite songs twice.
This version of All Along The Watchtower is different from the smaller, closer (but no less memorable) show Sue and I attended at the Anthology Club in San Diego last year. It is not merely the album track with added verve; no, first they run through the plaintive piano intro that Kara plays with Slick/Daniel/her angel in the final episodes of the series. (Later, we discover the reason behind this setup.)
The sound check to end all sound checks eventually ends, barely an hour before the show itself. Sue and I finish off our picnic, chat with old and new friends, take turns perusing the merchandise table. There are some amazing new posters with the Watchtower notes/Hera's drawing on them. We see Luciana Carro, who played the Viper pilot Kat in the series. The air is buzzing. It feels like it's going to be a big night.
It is an odd gray twilight time when musicians return to the stage. Brendan's Band plays first, rocks through a high-energy set of songs, including a bitchass Queen cover and his own When Will The Work Be Done, which was featured in the finale of the series.
And then the Orchestra reappears, and time loses pretty much all meaning for me here.
The strings slice the air like weapons. The woodwind wavers, sounds like a forest or a faerie ring, reminding us that oh yes, that sound is made by a human being and an instrument. Difficult to believe. These what, thirteen, fourteen people? Are far more than the human sum of their parts while they are onstage causing this magic and making this noise.
It grows dark. Spooky lights come on beneath the islands of flowers. A row of fountains comes to life back behind the stage, this perfect waterfall backdrop cascading down. Everything is reflected, dreamlike. The robotic lights rotate and shift colors as the sun goes down, and the stage is awash in devil-red.
Raya's ethereal voice and sinuous movements are a spell. They play Lords Of Kobol for the second time that day, but it's different in the dark, a true entreaty to the gods. We are in a wonderland, a fucking jewel-toned smoky tribal dreamscape, a shared hallucination. And it's really indescribable, no matter how many words I use to describe it. And yet - let's proceed.
They play seriously metal tracks, such as Prelude To War, battle anthems you can feel in your blood, but the feeling is no less intense when they play quiet, slower things. Roslin And Adama is a beautiful waltz which sounds like blossoms falling, a great slow love. Wander My Friends moves me even more the second time, Raya and Brendan's tandem Gaelic, the Irish whistle, the drums, like it's our last night on Earth and Heaven is just over the valley and everything is fine. My eyes blur with tears. Nobody looks at me funny. We are all in it.
Bear moves from piano to keyboards to conducting like a flash. The waterfall glows electric green then fire-orange. Everybody, musicians and audience both, is so into it, they are it, they are more than it. The brothers McCreary catch one another's eyes at times, feed of each other's energies. It is, since I can't avoid this word forever, pretty damn sexy. The drummers look to each other too, their sticks held aloft for perfect hovering moments. The strings make their own spectacle. The Battlestar Galactica Orchestra are an extraordinary organism.
And then, the end. Watchtower. Bear sits at his piano with a blonde woman in a dress. (Not everybody, I learn later, realizes that this woman is Kara Thrace herself, Katee Sackhoff.) Bear and Katee slowly dance their fingers over the keys, then a bit faster, playing the notes, knitting together the bones of a song that has been altered forever in the shared geek consciousness. The drums sneak up, as they always do, those signature drums, and Katee kisses Bear on the cheek, waves and runs offstage as the band barrels from Heeding The Call into full-tilt Watchtower now. During this song, Brendan is a rock god. He is a messenger, he is a conduit. He jumps, rocks out like Pete fucking Townshend, and the entire Orchestra is right there with him. The guitars whine. Brendan screams. The riders approach, and the wind begins to howl.
There is nobody around me not playing air drums of some sort by the end. We are vibrating. It is over too soon, and the band walks offstage, waving, smiling.
We stand, we applaud, and it erupts in pockets: SO SAY WE ALL.
What else is a group like us going to say? Come on.
SO SAY WE ALL. SO SAY WE ALL.
We are all chanting it, and we mean it, and it's pretty glorious. Me. Sue. The girl I just met, next to me. Her friends. Our friends behind us. Everybody.
SO SAY WE ALL! SO SAY WE ALL! SO SAY WE ALL!
And the band comes back out, and they pick up their instruments again, and they smash into Black Market, and basically proceed to rock harder than anything or anyone ever did rock. It is a wicked industrial jam, a freight train of a song. The guitarists solo heavy, swamplike. Paul bangs his head with abandon. The drummers jump up and down to the beat. It is epic. It is a fleet of ships, an atomic blast, coming at us from all sides. It is the rhythm of the world. They bring the song to a screeching, crazy finish. Bear, who has been doing his own fair share of rocking out and headbanging, walks out to the middle of the stage, leaps onto and off of a monitor, total punk rock, joy personified. Brendan shouts his brother's name into the mic and we all applaud harder and Bear thanks us and then it is over for real.
Whew.
(Afterward there are other things. Running up to friends in disbelief, exchanging thunderous hyperbole about what we have just witnessed. I air-taiko with a girl I have never seen before in my life. Possibly we hug after. There is a signing, and we all get those wicked awesome posters signed by most of the Orchestra. Everyone is sweet, gracious and exhausted. Bear, Brendan, Raya and Paul remember Sue and me from San Diego last year. We meet Bear and Brendan's family, and their lovely mother Laura proudly gives us setlists as mementos. It is Saturday night in Los Angeles and we know we should go out and party as is expected, but instead we go back up to the room and fall into blissful afterglowy sleeps in white fluffy hotel beds.)
The Battlestar Orchestra plays like God moving over the face of the waters.
In an appropriately Caprican plaza in downtown Los Angeles, the various members of the band are running through a sound check. I am waiting for Sue to come down and join me. We have just driven six hours and checked into our hotel. I immediately changed out of my road trip clothes and came down to the plaza to see what I could see. It's hours to the show, but I grab a seat, and I wait. I do not know what I am in for.
There are a few individuals and groups of people already scattered throughout the plaza. A shallow pool fills the space between the angled seating areas and the stage. Concrete planters filled with flowers dot the pool like islands. Towers of nice, professional lights. The pleasant dissonance of instruments tuning. The sound guy calls instructions over the PA. Even in its halted, deconstructed state, the sounds emanating from the stage are unmistakable: this is the haunting and singular score of the late and revered Battlestar Galactica, composed by Bear McCreary.
I've been texting Sue updates, and she comes down from the room, lugging a fancy picnic and a fancier camera. She is just in time.
Paul Cartwright, madman violinist, has arrived. The string section sound checks, and I forget how to swallow food. The sound man announces over the PA that they will now be running through Black Market.
My memory here is hazy, and the order of events uncertain. Because the next thing I know, for all intents and purposes, the Battlestar concert is happening. To me, and maybe twenty-three other people. A band of conversing, tuning individual people coalesce into an entity that is beyond comprehension. Bear himself, slight and intense, is a magician when he is conducting, the ringmaster of this mad troupe of talented and passionate musicians.
Much of Bear's brilliance is in the space between the sounds, those pauses in his driving tribal rhythms that ache, that pull at your deepest systems, that make your mind contract into the base of your skull, anticipate, - and there. When the taiko drummers play, play then stop, arms high, in primal unison, that's where some of the simplest and rawest beauty can be heard. It would really all be too gorgeous for television, if it were for any other show than Battlestar Galactica.
Bear is a force, his hands precise, not frantic but at times jumping frenetically as the music rises, not conducting so much as conjuring. He plays the keyboard or harmonium standing sometimes, hair in his eyes, observing the crowd or off in a world of his own making.
Bear's fiancee, Raya Yarbrough, and his brother Brendan, voice of the Watchtower, sing together, a song I know as A Good Lighter but apparently it is called Wander My Friends. It is a bittersweet and hopeful theme, sung in Gaelic. The drums roll and sound like the end of a life well-lived. My heart swells and stops.
There are breaks in between the songs. The band checks things out, adjusts, goofs off. Brendan sees us and waves across the water. A lighting guy scales a rig like a rock-climber. The plaza starts to fill up.
Much how it evolved on the show itself, Watchtower sneaks up on us, in pieces. A chord progression, a jangly strum of guitar. Every time I recognize a small part of the whole, I jab Sue in the ribs with my elbow. This hardly qualifies as a sound check anymore. It is a gift and a privilege. I'm getting to hear all my favorite songs twice.
This version of All Along The Watchtower is different from the smaller, closer (but no less memorable) show Sue and I attended at the Anthology Club in San Diego last year. It is not merely the album track with added verve; no, first they run through the plaintive piano intro that Kara plays with Slick/Daniel/her angel in the final episodes of the series. (Later, we discover the reason behind this setup.)
The sound check to end all sound checks eventually ends, barely an hour before the show itself. Sue and I finish off our picnic, chat with old and new friends, take turns perusing the merchandise table. There are some amazing new posters with the Watchtower notes/Hera's drawing on them. We see Luciana Carro, who played the Viper pilot Kat in the series. The air is buzzing. It feels like it's going to be a big night.
It is an odd gray twilight time when musicians return to the stage. Brendan's Band plays first, rocks through a high-energy set of songs, including a bitchass Queen cover and his own When Will The Work Be Done, which was featured in the finale of the series.
And then the Orchestra reappears, and time loses pretty much all meaning for me here.
The strings slice the air like weapons. The woodwind wavers, sounds like a forest or a faerie ring, reminding us that oh yes, that sound is made by a human being and an instrument. Difficult to believe. These what, thirteen, fourteen people? Are far more than the human sum of their parts while they are onstage causing this magic and making this noise.
It grows dark. Spooky lights come on beneath the islands of flowers. A row of fountains comes to life back behind the stage, this perfect waterfall backdrop cascading down. Everything is reflected, dreamlike. The robotic lights rotate and shift colors as the sun goes down, and the stage is awash in devil-red.
Raya's ethereal voice and sinuous movements are a spell. They play Lords Of Kobol for the second time that day, but it's different in the dark, a true entreaty to the gods. We are in a wonderland, a fucking jewel-toned smoky tribal dreamscape, a shared hallucination. And it's really indescribable, no matter how many words I use to describe it. And yet - let's proceed.
They play seriously metal tracks, such as Prelude To War, battle anthems you can feel in your blood, but the feeling is no less intense when they play quiet, slower things. Roslin And Adama is a beautiful waltz which sounds like blossoms falling, a great slow love. Wander My Friends moves me even more the second time, Raya and Brendan's tandem Gaelic, the Irish whistle, the drums, like it's our last night on Earth and Heaven is just over the valley and everything is fine. My eyes blur with tears. Nobody looks at me funny. We are all in it.
Bear moves from piano to keyboards to conducting like a flash. The waterfall glows electric green then fire-orange. Everybody, musicians and audience both, is so into it, they are it, they are more than it. The brothers McCreary catch one another's eyes at times, feed of each other's energies. It is, since I can't avoid this word forever, pretty damn sexy. The drummers look to each other too, their sticks held aloft for perfect hovering moments. The strings make their own spectacle. The Battlestar Galactica Orchestra are an extraordinary organism.
And then, the end. Watchtower. Bear sits at his piano with a blonde woman in a dress. (Not everybody, I learn later, realizes that this woman is Kara Thrace herself, Katee Sackhoff.) Bear and Katee slowly dance their fingers over the keys, then a bit faster, playing the notes, knitting together the bones of a song that has been altered forever in the shared geek consciousness. The drums sneak up, as they always do, those signature drums, and Katee kisses Bear on the cheek, waves and runs offstage as the band barrels from Heeding The Call into full-tilt Watchtower now. During this song, Brendan is a rock god. He is a messenger, he is a conduit. He jumps, rocks out like Pete fucking Townshend, and the entire Orchestra is right there with him. The guitars whine. Brendan screams. The riders approach, and the wind begins to howl.
There is nobody around me not playing air drums of some sort by the end. We are vibrating. It is over too soon, and the band walks offstage, waving, smiling.
We stand, we applaud, and it erupts in pockets: SO SAY WE ALL.
What else is a group like us going to say? Come on.
SO SAY WE ALL. SO SAY WE ALL.
We are all chanting it, and we mean it, and it's pretty glorious. Me. Sue. The girl I just met, next to me. Her friends. Our friends behind us. Everybody.
SO SAY WE ALL! SO SAY WE ALL! SO SAY WE ALL!
And the band comes back out, and they pick up their instruments again, and they smash into Black Market, and basically proceed to rock harder than anything or anyone ever did rock. It is a wicked industrial jam, a freight train of a song. The guitarists solo heavy, swamplike. Paul bangs his head with abandon. The drummers jump up and down to the beat. It is epic. It is a fleet of ships, an atomic blast, coming at us from all sides. It is the rhythm of the world. They bring the song to a screeching, crazy finish. Bear, who has been doing his own fair share of rocking out and headbanging, walks out to the middle of the stage, leaps onto and off of a monitor, total punk rock, joy personified. Brendan shouts his brother's name into the mic and we all applaud harder and Bear thanks us and then it is over for real.
Whew.
(Afterward there are other things. Running up to friends in disbelief, exchanging thunderous hyperbole about what we have just witnessed. I air-taiko with a girl I have never seen before in my life. Possibly we hug after. There is a signing, and we all get those wicked awesome posters signed by most of the Orchestra. Everyone is sweet, gracious and exhausted. Bear, Brendan, Raya and Paul remember Sue and me from San Diego last year. We meet Bear and Brendan's family, and their lovely mother Laura proudly gives us setlists as mementos. It is Saturday night in Los Angeles and we know we should go out and party as is expected, but instead we go back up to the room and fall into blissful afterglowy sleeps in white fluffy hotel beds.)