It’s dark inside Chop Suey. The floor is sticky from spilled beer. I mean a hope it’s beer. A sour smell in the air, of marijuana sweat, the ozone coming off of poorly-wired amps, a few cheap candles back by the novelty photo booth. I’m waiting to see Daikaiju, a surf-guitar band out of Huntsville, Alabama. It’s a Monday night in Seattle.
There’s barely anyone here. One band played, something fuzzy and forgetful, to a crowd of about 30 people. They broke down their set while I grabbed another beer. I least I hope it’s beer. The next band managed to hang on to half the people in attendance. And now, guys in dirty white t—shirts and ten thousand miles of road weariness on their shoulders are setting up a drum kit. There are so few people left inside, they’re not even bothering with the stage. They’re setting up right on the floor.
A drum kit, surrounded by speakers, surrounded by guitar stands, and a black web of licorice wires, spaghettied on the floor, draped over soundboards. It’s a mess. A complete mess. But no microphones.
What if, right now, there’s an asteroid hurtling towards Earth. And it’s the perfect size to do nothing more than punch through the roof of Chop Suey and kill those four guys who are at this moment putting on kabuki masks. Would I be grateful? That I’d seen them perform before, that I’d always have those memories?
Or would I envy you, reading this now, who have probably never seen them perform, and don’t know what would be missed. Because as much as I can describe for you this place, this set-up, these four guys, I can never convey to you the amazing. I’m reduced to resorting to vague words like “amazing.”
If an asteroid were to punch through the roof right now, that itself would be sort of incredible. A story to tell people. An extremely unique experience. I bet they’d interview me, the papers or the TV or some magazine. And that’s too bad—because I can describe that for you just fine. The sound like a freight train, the heat, the vibration, getting knocked on my ass. Confusion and chaos and running to the back… and then?
And then trying to tell you that Daikaiju will never perform again? You’d think me shallow, to focus on THAT and not the fact that an asteroid nearly killed me.
But if you’d ever seen them perform, you’d understand. Because here they come, running up to their instruments, throwing their guitars onto their bodies. Daikaju IS the asteroid. They’re going to destroy everything else for the next hour as they run around the floor, wrapping us up in their spaghetti licorice, knocking us over with so much reverb, we’re never ever going to be able to describe it.
People are flooding into Chop Suey now. We’ve gone from 30 people to 15 to 5 to about a hundred. And yes, that’s beer spilling everywhere. For this writing assignment I was supposed to tell you how I’d feel if something I loved was suddenly gone. But I just can’t do it. Tell water what it feels like not to be wet.