Art be damned, get me my gun

Art be damned, get me my gun.

I went to a percussion show the other night. A friend of mine here invited Hanka and I to go with he and his girlfriend. When asked what type of music, he said it was to be a mix of percussion, vocals, some DJ mixing etc… Sounded cool enough to me. Anyway, I want to check out the local music scene, you know, to see what things are like here and what not. So we all meet and walk to the place where the show is to be held, The Vltavska Culture Center (English translation).

The ‘VCC’ looks like and pretty much is like any VFW or American Legion hall in the states, a community meeting house with various rooms for meetings, events etc… We arrive and join up with some other friends and relax with a cup of instant coffee and wait for the show to begin.

Instant coffee. This stuff is everywhere here. You can find it in every home kitchen. There are machines everywhere that sell it. These machines do, however, offer more than your basic instant coffee. The technology is advanced here enough to offer coffee with milk, sugar or both, AND for the gourmet, cappuccino and espresso - OOOH, nothing more sophisticated than a cappuccino in a plastic cup while standing on gum littered asphalt outside a porn shop. There are shops in malls and along the streets that sell ‘freshly mixed’ instant coffee. You get this stuff in ceramic cups. They go so far as to up sell it a bit by displaying real coffee beans all over the place and selling various coffee related paraphernalia. For the record, real coffee is sold here, and they offer some good quality stuff too. The real coffee is just a lot more expensive than instant and the ‘coffee craze’ that happened in the states has not arrived here yet.

Back to the show. We step into the hall where the show is to be held. It is a rectangular shaped meeting room with three glass walls and one solid wall. The stage is positioned on the solid wall. There are curtains pulled over all of the glass walls. The only light is coming from fifteen or so tea light candles placed on a 30 cm tray that is on the stage in front of the ‘musicians’. In front of the curtains, lining the three walls, are chairs. I figure that with this much open space in the center of the room, people are going to be ‘getting their groove on’.

On stage there are five drums, a tambourine, a didgeridoo, a maraca, some sort of a hand drum held from the center of the backside, a juice harp and six hippies ready to bring their campfire jam to the limelight. I now see the purpose of the candles on the stage, campfire simulation. No two turntables here, although there is a microphone. Wait a minute, a microphone? Aren’t people like this supposed to shun electronic assistance in the musical field? It’s just not natural man!

This musical treat begins with a slow tribal beat that seems to be for the purpose of beckoning their ilk. A slow decrescendo of the drum beat brings to the forefront, nonsensical ramblings (in Czech, I guess), into the microphone. This is just like any hippie campfire gathering anywhere else-drums, firelight and body odor. I had a grin on my face from the start of this thing that had nothing to do with excitement for the music, as I figured out pretty quickly that music was not the reason I was here. These guys (and one girl) were terrible. Each individual beating of the drums (song) was the exact same. The idea here: start slowly beating whatever is in front of you and increase the speed of your beatings until you can not move your arms any faster and the crowd starts to let out sounds like: ‘whoo’ and ‘yo’, and then, finally, stop. The crowd applauds, and then you start again. I found myself dreading the times when the beat would speed up as it was in direct proportion to the increase of the smell of body odor as well. A rather nasty cause and effect this, although I will say that there was no smell of patchouli in the room. Wow, a hippie event with no smell of patchouli! The only difference to each beating (song) was the percussive instruments that were not drums. Each beating seemed to ‘highlight’ one of these other instruments. I tell you, nothing can get my feet moving more than an intense ‘jam’ on the didgeridoo.

The worst thing about this event, musically, was that these people could not hold a beat to save their lives. Every time the beat would speed up one of the members of the group would start to just get into it and randomly beat his instrument thereby throwing off the whole groove. I pegged this guy quickly. He played three different drums and each time someone was sounding out of rhythm, I could see him, spastically beating whatever drum was in front of him. He was hilarious. Whenever he was standing and playing, his body was doing way more than his arms. Nothing more anticlimactic than a rhythmic drum beat with no rhythm and a drum show. To make matters worse, the acoustics in the room were the worst for a musical event of this type. All of the noise from the drums was bouncing off of the hard surfaces in the room (marble floors, brick walls, heads etc…). The resulting sound was what I would term as: ‘percussive mush’ – a disgusting blend of different percussion instrument sounds made indistinguishable by the sounds of each of the other percussion instruments. The event: Drum Haggis – different distasteful ingredients packed into a vessel and cooked in a moist environment (the sweaty room).

The crowd here was, as I am sure you have figured out, typical of this type of gathering. I am watching them as much as the musicians because this was, in my eyes, part of the entertainment of the evening. As far as I could tell, no one here had rhythm either. There was this girl next to me jerking her body and flailing her limbs in such a non rhythmical fashion that I was wondering if she would need medical attention. I have seen this spastic form of dance before, but not to this degree. It appeared she was going through the resetting of the brain termed in the medical field as ‘epilepsy’. As I look away from her to the crowd, I see this guy moving from across the room (no shirt, no shoes, and no rhythm) towards us. He is going for ‘seizure girl’. Sure enough, they entwine their bodies in what is probably an event in the hippie olympics called synchronized non-rhythmic grooving. One of the highlights I am sure, right up there with ‘longest bong hit’ and ‘I need a miracle’ in which medals (buds) are awarded to those who can hold up their finger the longest for that free ticket into the Dead show.

Just as I am starting to grow weary of this nonsense, one of the guys in our group comes up to Hanka and asks us if we want to go an see something else. The answer, which, of course, was lost in the ‘mush’: a resounding ‘yes’.

We adjourn to another of the meeting rooms where there are several different couples dancing to modern music. This was a total contrast to what was seen at Drum Haggis. These couples were really good at this form of modern dancing. This was really cool to see. These people were going off. What I saw there was as much a form of exercise as it was dancing. The dancers had red faces with sweat rolling down them and were breathing hard. According to Hanka, It was some kind of dance practice for competition. Cool. The Czech equivalent to ‘Dance Fever’. I was looking for Denny Terio everywhere. No luck. This one couple was really captivating to watch. They had this amazing chemistry that I could really feel just by watching their moves.

When the dancers are finished we head downstairs to get something to drink, where there is yet another room with people dancing. There is a ballroom dancing course going on here and it is full. It makes me think of something Hanka had told me previously. When she was growing up and going through school, one of the requirements was dancing. Everyone had to take it. How cool I thought, to teach this to everyone. Nowadays it is not required, but most take the course anyway. The Czechs are into their culture and preserving it. The dancing thing is part of this preservation.

After getting kicked out of the ballroom dancing hall we go upstairs to find that Drum Haggis has ended. Whew! I did not want to deal with that racket any longer. Happily we go to retrieve our coats and head back out into the Praha night trying to shake off the body odor smell from others that has permeated our clothing…