Oneida + Black Mountain

My father is going through a divorce with his second wife, and I’m finding him a bit needy. We’ve been hanging a lot more than usual. Several hours before the show, he calls me to see what I’m doing. I tell him I’m going to see this band from Brooklyn called Oneida and he mock pleads, “Please take me with you.” I get the feeling it’s a joke, unless I really do feel like inviting him, in which case he might take me up on it. I go on guard; music is a common language for my father and I in the abstract, but it’s also an arena for competition. He’s fond of telling me what bands — from roughly 1967 to 1978 — sound exactly like each and every group I play for him. Out of dual concern for him not feeling out of place and me not feeling like I’m at the club with my father, I ignore the inquiry, letting it pass into the comfortable silence of our conversation. My blanket displeasure with ’70s rock — even the uber rock my father listened to — is, of course, a remnant of a punk-inspired youth. The fact that Black Mountain is even on the radar speaks to my softening values. I’d listened to Black Mountain’s self-titled debut several times over the last few months, but I never really figured out how to read it. The album seems strange and I can’t help feeling that it was created by a coven of dirty hippies (sorry — just an unshakeable prejudice). Its backwoods, Wiccan guitar plucking, muddy bi-gender background vocals and groovy, white R&B are the kind of sounds that haven’t seen popular interest in some thirty years. As much as I’ve been compelled to dismiss the whole record, there is a pretty killer guitar lick at the core of “Don’t Run Our Hearts Around”, the second track on the album. On this evening, Black Mountain played that song early in the set and I was drawn into the performance in a way I hadn’t expected. I remember coming around to the notion, several times throughout the show, that if I had wasted my time in high school smoking pot and listening to Black Mountain — as opposed to listening to Led Zeppelin — I might have reached punk rock a lot quicker. Listening to Black Mountain live, taking mental notes for this review, I chastised myself for not paying greater attention to my father’s record collection when he first exposed me to it. In this club, listening to this band, it just made total sense. Kansas, Asia, Poco — I can see myself flipping through the stacks, wondering why all these bands had single-word names. While listening to the band, I take time to consider whether or not my father would appreciate this band. It really sounds like something he would be into (particularly now that he has cultivated a taste for The White Stripes). He claims to have never heard of “Prog Rock”, and I suspect the term meant Kraftwerk and Can at a time when he was listening to Pink Floyd and Genesis (two bands that I might now refer to as Prog). In any case, I’m captivated by the idea of Black Mountain — sans light show, sans double-necked guitars. But I don’t know. I’m getting a bit of a contact high from the band’s shtick. Black Mountain’s set ends, and Oneida eventually follows. The latter reminds me why it wasn’t a good idea to bring my father to this show. The first song of the set is a punishing groove that lasts fifteen minutes, repetitively hypnotizing, pushing me deeper into the material of this story. Oneida reminds me that rock music — even from say 1967 to 1978 — is just fodder in the contemporary mix. The band uses psychedelic rock and prog rock in the same way that it uses punk; they are all just elements of a sound. In the shadow of Black Mountain’s set, I figure this out pretty quickly. Of course by this time it’s too late. It’s not that Black Mountain is a demanding band, but I do find the idea that I could appreciate unfiltered progressive rock a bit demanding. I’m sort of burnt out and Oneida is too intense for me to pay attention. I see my father the next day and play the Black Mountain record for him. I’m trying to pick his brain for some prog connections for this article. He tells me that he thinks the band sounds like Blodwyn Pig, a comparison that I find less than appropriate. The analogy relies too heavily on the minor incorporation of saxophone on the Black Mountain album — a major feature of Blodwyn Pig. Black Mountain hadn’t even produced a saxophone on stage, and I’m left wondering if my father going to this show would have produced more appropriate subject matter for this article. Or maybe our ideas about music are still so hopelessly out of sync, and I’m stretching, merely attempting to bridge our vocabularies.