Daevid Allen at the Knitting Factory 11/18/97 - report

[Marc Power]

[This is a courtesy copy of an article posted to Usenet via Deja News]

Ah, what a pleasant evening. First of all I scored HAWKWIND - Palace
Springs (is it a bootleg? The names of the tracks are somewhat
humourous...Void of Golden Light, Lives of Great Men etc.) CD for $8.99
AND Pinkwind/HawkFairies Purple Haze for $6.99 in a used CD store in St.
Marks Place.

On to the venue, reached the Knitting Factory and there are about fifty
people waiting in the small, dark recesses of the room (which looks very
industrial, pipes and concrete pillars and so on).

Daevid Allen appears, charming, witty, charismatic and er...old?

I haven't seen him perform for at least ten years and in that time
he has acquired the 'Elder Statesman of SpaceRock' look, snowy white hair,
skimpy white beard,  a little frail, more the Pot-Head Pixie than ever
before.

He packs an acoustic guitar and plays a whole set of acoustic songs
performed in a folky style, but with drones, vocal embellishments and
chord changes that do occasionally invoke vintage Gong, a taste here and
there of Soft Machine, a hint of his work with Euterpe.

Opening with a word-salad, apparently improv song, he warmed up the
crowd with quite amazing verbal and rhymester dexterity.

He sings about his ex-lady who left him for a rich Australian dude
(Gilli?), moves on quickyl to another song about age and aging,
where he names every part of himself as newly aged, except his
genitalia, which, after turning his back to the audience and
apparently examining it, he declares 'has always been old'.

He then launches into a very animated performance poem about how he hates
sex because it somehow is never as good as his I-magination, which had
its extremely funny, guffawing out loud from the audience moments. The
crowd had swelled to about sixty persons by now, excepting those in the
balcony, whose numbers I could not see.

Time for more beer, a very worthy Boddingtons.

He finished off with 'I am a Child of the Universe' in which he seemed to
sing 'A part of every Woman, A part of every Man', which rollocked along
as well as a lone Pixie balladeer can.

All in all a vastly entertaining set from the man who helped expand the
awareness of many, and who innovated, originated, experimented and pushed
 the boundaries of SpaceRock, in those far-off early days when the genre
was newborn.

Then, the interval, before Daevid (you gotta respect someone with a Greek
AE in their first name!) would play again, with a local NYC musician
called Kramer.

Ah! what an interval! little did I know, but the crowd was packed with
the SpaceRock veterans of Strange Daze 97! and during this interval we
all chatted, quaffed fine beverages and mulled over with teary eyes that
seminal SpaceRock event that was Strange Daze.

A hello to James O'Keefe (Veteran Cosmic Rocker and NetHawks T bearer),
Robert, the charming Bonnie, Scott, fellow Bass-guitarist Thom
"Sasquatch" from Finally Balanced, and of course, the ubiquitous Adam
Strider and Erin.

My apologies to those whose names now elude me.

Next, NYC musician Kramer, with Daevid on Gliss guitar (beautiful and more
divinely refined than ever) and vocal. I'd never heard Kramer before, but
when they played John Lennons "Working Class Hero" and Leonard Cohens
"Suzanne", your intrepid SpaceRock reporter retreated to the upstairs
Front-of-House bar. Stirling renditions both, but not my vessel of
brownian-motion brew.

In Space we Trust,

Marc

--
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