If you’ve ever listened to any Stooges or Radio Birdman records, you’ll be familiar with the idea of the O-Mind. The concept came from a lyric in the Stooges’ Down In The Street: “floatin’ around on a real O-Mind”. In the literal sense, it meant the whacked-out bliss of a drug stupor. But musically, it meant something else: a state of transcendence where all earthly concerns fall away and you’re left focused on the only thing that matters, which is Right Now, the moment you’re in.
I’ve never seen it referred to as a kind of orgasm, but the effect is similar.
For the Stooges, the O-Mind was the musical holy grail. They were bent, as American critic Ann Powers once memorably put it, on touching rock’s molten core, and they did it again and again – on Down On The Street, on I Wanna Be Your Dog … Hell, the entire first two Stooges albums constitute a trip into the deepest recesses of the O-Mind. For the Stooges, pharmaceutical and personal psychosis was the inevitable result.
I saw the Real O-Mind last Thursday night. The band was New York City’s Endless Boogie, playing to a crowd of about 50 people at the Jubilee Hotel.
I generally hate jam bands. I prefer brevity: the Ramones are my favourite band ever, hands down. And if ever there was truth in advertising, Endless Boogie are well named – the infinity symbol adorns all their recordings. Despite that, there’s an economy and simplicity about what they do: find a riff; lock the groove; then drive the whole thing over a cliff. There’s touches of psychedelia, to be sure, but it’s not remotely progressive. Nothing is complicated for the sake of it.
Besides, their primary singer-guitarist, who’d been propping up an impressive merch stand up until that point, doesn’t look like Cousin Itt so much as a caveman. As soon as I spot him propping up an impressive merch stand, I know this is gonna be great.
He’s got long, long hair that hangs in his eyes, a row of stumps for teeth and he’s wearing the clothes he’s probably worn for a month. Calling him a singer is a stretch, since he doesn’t so much sing as gargle and howl and grunt, but you realise singing’s hardly the point once they launch into their first song and not a syllable’s been crooned after about eight minutes.
After about 12 minutes, there’s a power failure. The band, unfazed, continues – or rather, the drummer does. He doesn’t miss a beat. To play this music you need to be above all accurate, and this guy is a human metronome. There’s a bit of fiddling from the house engineer and we’re cooking again. The band plough on – and on. The song must clock in at over 20 minutes.
But length doesn’t matter in the way I might expect it to. Firstly, because it’s all about groove, it’s actually easy to dance to. And secondly, the longer some of these songs go, the better they seem. The guitar playing is clean and sharp and always tasteful. The music hits fantastic peaks, sustains them, backs away, then builds again. It’s mesmerising.
“Floating around on a real O-Mind” indeed.
It’s no exaggeration to say this changes the way I listen to music. I’m not sure if Endless Boogie are necessarily fantastically original – in fact, I’m sure they’re not. It makes me wonder about all those Hawkwind and Grand Funk Railroad records I’ve ignored all my life. Drawing on my more familiar reference points, it’s like Asheton-era Stooges crossed with Krautrock influences like Can or, more particularly, Neu!
There’s also more obvious classic-rock influences like Crazy Horse, and early ’70s Australian shit like Lobby Loyde’s Coloured Balls. (That connection’s underscored by the fact that Steven Malkmus, an avowed fan of the Balls, is also a fan of and friends with Endless Boogie, and has joined them on stage more than once.)
Now I’m at home, writing this blog and listening to Focus Level, their first album. It’s a double, of course, and stretches to the full 79 minutes – the maximum length a CD can handle. The reviews I’ve read haven’t been all that kind, so maybe it helps that I’ve seen them live, and am not reacting to it the way a time-poor critic needing to write a dozen McNugget-sized reviews might.
Right now, it’s all I want to listen to.