2001-03-15 - 07:42:53
I have never seen hands come alive like that before. That's it. Now I've done it. Somebody out there, right now, saw Jimi Hendrix defy the logic of guitar, somebody out there saw Coltrane change the way melody is considered, nobody alive saw Beethoven whip an orchestra like a horse gasping it's final breath but willing to charge it's last fatal gallop for it's master but tonight I finally saw a man defy the nature of his craft and pull the audience into a frenzied stupor that drove his art into their ears and out their minds. Tonight I saw Mix Master Mike. This man has the hands of Michelangelo and the mind of Mozart. I used to be a deejay, I used to be a damn good one. I won best club D.J. three years running in this town and I hosted a bad ass local/alternative radio show, so I have a smidgen of credibility as far as turntable antics go. No one in my experience, be it Terminator X, Evil E, D.J. Spooky or any of the hundreds of deejays I've witnessed can compare to the motherfucker I saw take the crowd on the ride of their lives tonight. (Mike, if you ever read this, thank you for giving a jaded old musician a glimpse of the spark that started him on this path.) The tweak, curl, vibrato and thunder of his performance caused me to stand in a stupor among hundreds of fans in a sardine packed house. I never, let me repeat - NEVER - go to the front of the crowd at a big show, since a slamdancing pile-on put me in the hospital but (check it out poison squirrels, rhymes with boys and girls, get it?) I found myself, three people deep from the edge of the stage, drawn magically, unafraid and grooving my ass off. Groove isn't even the word, there isn't a word. It was performance art, dance, funk, scratch, cut, squeal mayhem and I am overflowing with absolute bliss and I will take this experience with me till the end of my days. If I ever meet the Creator, I can tell him, "I saw the redwood, I saw the lily, I had wild animals eat out of the palm of my hand, I slept on a hammock slung between two trees by a stream in the prettiest spot a human could ever wish for, I heard Bill Hicks, I had an orgasm so powerful it stabbed the memory of my own birth, I jumped off a fifty foot cliff into the dead of night only to be embraced by the arms of the Guadelupe River and I saw Mix Master Mike.
And it's only the first night of SXSW.
