Surrealville, USA
Once upon a time in another life, I played rock guitar for a niche Philly-based band called Mohenjo. This is a journal entry from one of our stranger shows.
I had misgivings. Even before I got in my car for the ninety minute drive, I was concerned. Mohenjo, basement band extraordinaire, would be performing at St. Peter’s Oktoberfest in Chester County, our first gig of the month.
What had me worried? The festival advert. It stated:
“10 Bands! All Kinds of Music from Soft Rock to Country!”
Whenever I’m asked about our music, usually by work colleagues or barely-interested extended family, I often struggle to describe our sound. Mohenjo is like a bouillabaisse, a meal of techno-funk tribal featuring a pinch of punk-metal misanthropy and a garnish of avant-garde.
Not Soft Rock. Not Country. Not even close.
We’d gotten on the bill thanks to the networking prowess of Jeff, our
DJ/Keyboardist. I’d been thinking about this since he’d told me, wondering
whether to inquire: How had he described us to the booker? As the date
approached, I’d shared my concerns with Pat, the drummer and my co-founder.
We’d decided not to ask. Mohenjo got the gig. Good enough.
The day had arrived.
St. Pete’s, 45 miles due west, proved a bit of a slog, much of it on car-clogged highway. Our six members formed a convoy of broke-ass musicians, all wondering if the festival exposure would be worth the gas it took to get there. Eventually we hit Valley Forge where the ugly road gives way to the folksy majesty of farmhouses and rolling hills, a grand view if only occasionally marred by treeless, charm-deprived gated developments.
Charm returns in St. Pete’s, where the Oktoberfest is held inside the quaint Victorian-style village of boutiquey shops facing a waterfall. The falls pours out from its highest point between graffiti-sprayed boulders, the signature of an artistically-devoid and possibly semi-suicidal tagger. Impressive derring-do to be sure, but why deface Mother Nature’s canvas with a slather of shitty scribble? If you’re gonna tag, tag well.
Before hauling out our gear, we met with the event’s MC. A big fella in a big Stetson, he asked us to call him “Geronimo,” then pulled out a clipboard for sign-in.
Mr. Geronimo, it must be noted, was whiter than white-bread, most likely of scandinavian stock, with nary a hint of Native American ancestry evident in his melanin-deprived visage.
“What’s ya’ll’s genre of music,” the confused cowboy asked with a tilt of his 10 gallon. This attire, genetics, and moniker made for a curious combo, seemingly less of a cosplay situation and more a midlife identity-crisis. Any rate, I braced for Jeff’s response, which of course would be neither Country nor Soft Rock.
“Electro-funk” was Jeff’s answer to which Geroniman blinked once, twice, then said: “Rock and Roll?” The big boy appeared to be glitching like a malfunctioning replicant ranch hand from Michael Crichton’s Westworld; blankly he stared, a busted bronco buster refusing to reformat, his mental genre database unable to parse this new info into usable data.
After a pause, our MC turned to his clipboard. “Rock and Roll,” he said again, confidently this time, and scratched at the checklist with a pockmarked pencil.
“Oh, Geronimo, I forgot to mention,” Jeff said and motioned to his friend Ken who’d just arrived. Ken, a bassist buddy of Jeff’s from pre-Mohenjo days, occasionally partnered with his old friend Jeff when opportunity knocked, such as this festival. Known collectively as Antennae, Jeff and Ken would today serve as a sister act of sorts, a kind of Mohenjo supplement. This added wrinkle — a new band not on Geronimo’s agenda — seemed to utterly confound our host. As Jeff elaborated on Antennae’s relation to Mohenjo, and what bearing all this had on the festival’s narrowly defined musical category borders, I imagined Geronimo’s face popping off, Yul Brynner style, his antiquated subroutines unable to process the notion of sub-genre. Instead, the hulking herdsman simply nodded and checked in another band.
What made this exchange amusing was the mirror-like make-believe between Jeff and Geronimo. Jeff, outfitted also in a cowboy getup (a Down Under Jackaroo of outback overcoat and crushable wool hat) was as much Australian Stockman as “Geronimo” was Apache Shaman. Neither were actual cattlemen, but only one of them seemed to be aware of this fact. Showbiz!
We left our strange new friend to survey the scene.
#
Traffic woes caused us to miss most of the earlier acts, but we watched the group preceding us, a standard-issue emo-rock ensemble whining earnestly through an angst-filled set. They exited the stage, taking with them a gaggle of semi-interested teens (aka “the audience”). Mohenjo was left with soccer moms yearning for Rod Stewart and Journey. Lucky for them, Geronimo was announcing the next act.
“Y’alls ready for a heapin’ helpin’ of sumb good ole’ rock and ro’?!” The diminished crowd’s response was a collective shrug, somewhere between “I guess” and “whatever.” At this, our cow-punching compadre eyed us, turning from band member to band member, his finger gun cocked, targeting us for rock and roll ratification. Yes, we confirmed. We were indeed ready to rock.
Though my impulse was to rebel yell, I simply nodded, trying to remind my perception-scrambled brain that we were actually some distance from the Mason-Dixon line. Geronimo’s deep-fried, Foghorn Leghorn shtick had me geographically disoriented; the man seemed to be terraforming reality itself, his earworm accent vocal frying a small Pennsylvania town into Texas Toast.
“Puh-lease put yo’ hands tugetha fo’ Mo-Hen-YO!”
I exchanged glances with Pat, his deer headlight eyes gleaming from behind his drumset. Although it was but a mere second, the two of us seemed to share an astral-projection, fellow travelers instantly transported into Bob’s Country Bunker. Visions of barbed wire, broken beer bottles, and the Brothers Blue had us digging deep, aiming to survive this gig from beyond.
After a sloppy start, Mohenjo hit its stride somewhere during song #3. By then, only the festival staff seemed to care. Strike that. On a second view, I realized they were simply facing our direction, force-subjected to endure us while manning the refreshment tables. At our set’s 33% mark, a serious-looking Geronimo stormed the stage, seemingly ready to warn the crowd of an imminent bomb threat. Stacked tall in John Wayne boots, he towered over the band, a buckeroo behemoth waving us mid-song to stop playing. He took a mic and suddenly smiled wide, then pointed his big mitt outward and addressed the perplexed onlookers. “Come one come y’all! Check out the face-paintin’ contest ovah yonda, under the blue tent!”
Did I mention this was mid-song? Just to be clear — so there’s no confusion — he stopped us mid-song. Mid. Not after. Mid.
The indignity, coming right after this Dude Ranch Reject mispronounced our name, was one tortilla too much. Prior to the show, out of respect for the setting, we’d decided to strip any songs with heavy themes from our set list; pieces that felt overtly political and activist-tinged. Such fare was so far removed from “soft rock and country” as to seem rudely defiant, a spit in the eye of our host’s sensibilities. But this faux frontiersman’s mid-song cockblock was an attack on our proverbial Fort Sumter.
A response was required.
Mohenjo (pronounced Mohen-JOE, thank you) angrily launched into Fuelis Fossilium, an aggressive ditty of citizen discontent in which America’s sociopathic war-for-oil leaders are akin to Romans feeding people to lions. This tune took MC’s questionable hosting etiquette and equated it, in our minds, to the abuses by those bestowed with power. Our loud blast of subversive metal was, for us, a battle cry, a catharsis crack hit, a bah-fungoo to this cornball caballero. He wanted rock? We gave it to him. We’d rock his freakin’ spurs off.
Geronimo was less-than-pleased. Miserable-looking, it was clear Mohenjo was not his cup of fermented corn tea.
Truth be told, blasting this replica range rider off his high horse satiated our punkish impulses. If southern hospitality was not a part of his manufactured persona, then why play into the pretense?
Getting that out of our system — and with plenty of vouchers in hand in lieu of actual pay — Mohenjo finished its set and exited the stage in search of sustenance.
#
Just as the event’s questionable flier claimed a “wide variety of music” there was similarly “all kinds of food, from bratwurst to jagdwurst.” But, to our delight, the wursts proved wúnderbar, a culinary balm soothing the frustrations with Geronimo’s delusional ridiculousness.
Team Mohenjo chowed down as Antennae took the stage. The sky was darkening and most people were heading home. The only people that mattered were the people who remained.
Earlier in the day, an elderly woman dressed in black had performed a strange and beautiful medley using only a bow and crosscut saw, the latter a dangerously long, serrated, and bendy bit of business she contorted to her melodic will. Antennae, a streamlined Bass and DJ combo, brilliantly conscripted her into some improvisational lead riffing which proved hauntingly lovely. After their final number, I wanted to yell “More saw!” but worried this might sound sarcastic. Honestly, she was the Jeff Beck of lumberjack blades.
Mohenjo then joined Antennae to close out the show. We were immediately shut down by… who else? The hardheaded horse herder, Geroni-shmo, who claimed he was acting on his “Boss’s orders.” What boss? No boss. Just pretend CowboyIndianMan.
It was now plain to see. The counterfeit cowhand was no friend of Mohenjo.
Geronimo took the mic and declared an end to the festival by praising the “good old rock and roll” of the day, totally unaware he was being mocked by three wise-ass pre-teens at the foot of the stage chanting “Rock and ROH! Rock and ROH!”
We began packing up. Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless The USA” mysteriously issued forth from the speakers, filling the streets with its unabashed patriotism. But the music sounded a bit off, out-of-tune, or something. I couldn’t quite place it.
I turned to see our host tightly gripping a mic, lyrics bursting forth in revelatory sensation. His crows feet moist with emotion, the Pennsylvania Cowpoke thrust one giant meatball fist skyward and touched Heaven in a holy commemoration of Rock, Roll, God, and Country.
Oy.
After this side-eye spectacle, we were joined in our commiserating by two scruffy rapscallions, obvious locals, who’d been watching Antennae’s performance intently with much beer imbibing (reminder: Oktoberfest). They’d started following Jeff and Ken around the village like bored but inebriated manchildren, which I guess they were, looking for something “fun” to do. I viewed the surrounding woods with concern, my spider-sense (aka, paranoia) ringing the red phone.
Time to call it a day.
The night drive back was a nature film by way of David Lynch. The Valley Forge road was a view into a dream, quiet and eerie. Deer everywhere, several dozen including one buck, all moving past us, just outside of the car’s reach and only fleetingly revealed by the light of our headlamps. We were in their world for one short yet endless moment but after today’s fiasco I sorta kinda preferred it.
Later, Pat mentioned that the old lady, the Satriani with the saw, told him how much she liked Mohenjo’s music. Maybe she was just being nice, but if we made only one fan at St. Pete’s, who better than a senior sister wielding a musical cutting implement? I mean, how metal is that?
It’s certainly not soft rock or country.
