This week's #ThisDealInHistory is the first of two excerpts from our 08/10/2002 set at The Berkshire Mountain Music Festival (Berkfest) in Great Barrington, MA.
With the possible exception of our very first concert as a band (which begat our This Is Live album) there is no gig more important in the history of theNEWDEAL than our first Berkfest show in 1999.
For starters it was our first real gig in the U.S. as theNEWDEAL - that itself would make it an important venue to us - but it's the circumstances surrounding our set that cement Berkfest near the top of theNEWDEAL gig list.
Rewind to '99 - somehow we had managed to wangle our way on to the Berkfest bill. We had been passing out This Is Live to anyone who would listen and I think that The Wetlands' Chris Zahn had forwarded it to Andrew Stahl, the man behind Berkfest. Andrew decided to give this weird instrumental trio from Canada a chance and offered us an afternoon slot at the festival.
What we didn't know was that our afternoon slot would be INDOORS on one of the sunniest days of the summer, in a lodge tucked away from the main stage and far apart from all the other bands. The chances of people hearing us were slim and, with zero name recognition, we were preparing to play to nobody. We were pretty depressed about that - we knew that all we needed was for people to hear us and they'd be hooked... but with an indoor gig at an outdoor festival, your odds are tough.
Until three minutes before our set when it started to rain.
I mean POUR.
Thunder, lightning - the whole bit.
Huge summer storm.
There were only a few covered venues where all the festival goers could seek shelter - guess where they ended up?
Five minutes into our set the place was jammed with people and every single one of them was still there 90 minutes later when we finished, despite the fact that the rain had stopped 30 minutes earlier.
If it hadn't been for that rainstorm, who knows what would have happened to tND?
That experience always seemed to give a little boost to our Berkfest sets. This one from 2002 is no exception.
The cut begins with an interesting Drum+Bass version of the "Homewrecker" intro. What I like about Darren's drumming here is that he's managing to play quite minimally in a style (D+B) that usually screams for maniacal drum fills. His tasteful grooves eventually lead us into the regular "Homewrecker" beat at 1:00 or so. Note Dan's meaty stabs throughout the main melody section - he would often combine the main bass part with innovative "soloettes", each one different than the last.
The jam at 2:16 displays some interesting elements - we were, as mentioned in previous #TDIH's, focused at this time on maximizing the hypnotic element of repeated musical lines slowly morphing over time (through tempo or harmony) until they would no longer resemble the original musical statement. I always enjoyed listening to Steve Reich and I was attempting at times to mimic that same slow sonic metamorphosis.
We shift this motif via tempo and tone, eventually landing on a filtered bass/organ/Moog/Hi-NRG drum build that leads us at 5:26 into a super-abrupt shift (have I mentioned before how much I love those?) featuring Rhodes and Moog.
Sounds to me like Dan's playing the trigger cue for "I Feel Love" at 7:56. We might have been heading in that direction but the music took us somewhere else and we never looked back.
We hit a pretty cool break at 9:48 - me on the Moog Prodigy and Darren and Dan NAILING it at 10:01 with a balls-to-the-wall two-pronged attack. Dan is WAAY up on that neck.
I play the trigger for "Glide" at 10:50 and again at 11:02 (this time w/Dan joining in) but, as is our style, we don't get to the track for another three minutes or so, preferring to let the music breathe a little with a short ambient jam (note the bass providing a repeated muted rhythm underneath). From there it's into "Glide" and the end of this week's #ThisDealInHistory. -Jamie
