"Get on with it!"
I was in a tiny room in Williamsburg, Brooklyn lit entirely with red fluorescent lights creating a strange pink glow which had started to create an ache just above my eyes. It was a frigid night and the streets were slippery with ice. It was 10:30 on a Thursday night. I was three train transfers away from a warm bed. I literally cannot tell you where I was. I just remember using HopStop to find the place, nearly killing myself on the ice, and finding a door without a number and a few torn rock posters and some DJ noise emanating from inside. Once inside, I was greeted by some incredibly nice people, especially the bar staff, and I started to appreciate the new independent spirit of Kings County up until the moment I went to use the bathroom and found an almost dada-ist configuration of dried vomit floating in the toilet.

Carla Bozulich was onstage bending over a collection of wires and switches while much of the crowd was there to see Joe Preston of The Melvins perform as Thrones. It was getting late. Evangelista is a band that has to have at least six members. (I've seen them play with as many as twelve.) However, as a band trying to curb travel costs, there are only three permanent members: bassist Tara Barnes, keyboard player and noisemaker Dominic Cramp (who also records his own work as Qulfus) and Carla Bozulich, the center of attention. Luckily, Carla has enough connections to great musicians in the different cities where Evangelista plays that she's able to gather the rest of Evangelista wherever she goes from local talent and the NY guest stars in tonight's band were astonishing: accomplished improvisational cellist Okkyung Lee, strongman drummer Ches Smith of Good for Cows and Marc Ribot’s Ceramic Dog among others, and guitarist Sam Mickens of Dead Science. The upside was that the potential for greatness was palpable. The downside of putting together a band on the fly is that there were six world-class musicians on a stage the size of a post-it note trying to test their gear through rented amps. Someone kept yelling "Get on with it!"

"There are no unimportant shows to people for whom music means everything." Bozulich took the mic and told him that there was a very nice warm diner across the street so if he wanted to "Go out, take in some of the world, away from here." he could skip out for a while and come back when they were ready. I wasn't moving. I claim no objectivity in this article. For me Carla Bozulich has always been one of the rare artists who constantly surprise and challenge me, and this was the first time they’d played my town in 17 long months.

For those uninitiated with Ms. Bozulich: She had been one-third of the hilariously decadent, profoundly wicked Ethyl Meatplow and she had created my favorite band, the criminally undersung Geraldine Fibbers whose two (now out-of-print!) albums were my drug of choice when my life felt like the vortex of an existential black hole. And that was three bands ago! Now, this same strikingly beautiful and charismatic woman - less than a year after performing at the prestigious Ruhrtriennale in Germany to wide acclaim - and her cohorts were jostling and retrofitting a cello, guitars, drums, bass and a keyboard on a stage built for three. Nothing boded well.

And the band seemed noticeably on edge. The first song was a song originally recorded by Scarnella (Bozulich’s partnership with guitar hero Nels Cline). It was a difficult song called ‘Underdog’; one that starts with a slow soulful vocal and erupts into loud, steady noise. Bozulich wore a concerned look, still adjusting guitar levels with her feet as the song began, wit evidence of that concern in her voice as she began her vocal. While Mickens and Barnes kept the foundation, Lee, Bozulich and Cramp seemed to be searching their instruments for the right “wrong” sound. About three and a half minutes of carefully controlled noises (and while Carla still seemed to be checking her levels), Smith started in on the drums; madly pounding as guitar and bass joined in and Lee sawed on the cello. Suddenly, it all came together and I was experiencing what I was craving: The magic moment I can only describe as a precise, profound and meaningful chaos. Carla was literally kicking her heels. Barnes pumped the bass. Cramp seemed in a trance. They were a force of nature and what’s more they were a great, great band. You could tell that Bozulich was deeply satisfied in the moment. A sly laughing smile appeared on her face and she leaped like a happy child. She turned to face the rhythm section and Barnes smiled back just as widely.

After ‘Underdog’ wound down, the next song in the set was a Geraldine Fibbers song. Carla has claimed that ‘Outside of Town’ may have been the first song she ever wrote, but it seems older than that. I wondered about those in the crowd who didn't know her work and if they thought the song was an old country ballad or an Irish folk song. It's about love and murder and it has somehow been a part of every project Bozulich has headed since the mid-90s. Evangelista was the one project of Bozulich’s that didn't add the song to its repertoire - but here it was again in a new decade and it was welcome. It's the story of a young and a love affair gone tragically wrong:

I knew I'd end this way since the day I was born
I've never known nothing 'cept hunger and fear
And the love that you gave me was lies to keep me near.

At this point, the band began driving the song and as it did, Ches's drumset started to drown out the rest of the band leading the singer to smile and gesture to hold it down. It was a funny moment in a song that gets progressively sadder. The heroine cries: "I'm ruined for love and I'm ruined for life." And the chorus warns of events that are destined go spinning off course:

You smile so sweetly, my momma would say
But you're wicked, my little girl.
When death comes, to heaven you ne'er will go.
'Til then, I will love you, 'til then.

The young girl kills her lover. ("Please tell the angels to turn their pretty heads. I can't bare them to see me when I kill you dead.") She's hung for the act and it's revealed that the man was also the man her mother loved. And yet, there's that chorus: her mother judges and labels and sets the stage for her daughter’s fate and yet, like the lover, she claims love and, maybe unlike him, feels it. The song has the heart of a great tragic roots ballad and it is a marvel of human paradox. Our narrator is destroyed by the two people who tell her they love her, but she also destroys them and the listener can't help but empathize with the bodies left over. The band here, with its accomplishment and skill played the dancehall-like swirl of strings and rhythm as good as, perhaps better, than the Fibbers ever did. And Carla seemed to inhabit the chorus’s contradiction ... the singer of her own sad song: She played the part sadly, hitting all the right emotional notes. But as the Lee and Barnes and Mickens pulled together with precision, she was smiling as sweetly as her protagonist.

The next song was ‘You Are a Jaguar’, the first song of the night originating from Evangelista. This was the performance’s closest thing to a straightforward rock song and the night's moment of pure, unfiltered fun as Carla played the rocker while blissing out and - shaking her hair around - moving with jerky quick spasms. She sang as if she were expelling demons. Which she was. Barnes and Smith were astonishing here and it felt like the music was creating the energy surging through the neon lights. The mood changed with the next medley: the sweetly unnerving ‘Nels' Box’ and Low's ‘Pissing’. The Low song is a mournful song whose most repeated line is “lovers sleep alone.” The sound blanketed the room. I’m not sure how many ways I can say “The band was amazing.” but the best was about to come.

‘Hello Voyager‘ is a song I once described to fellow Hellbomb writer Gary Bombardier as Carla's ‘Radio Ethiopia’ because it's long (clocking in at over 12 minutes on record) and overpowering and seemingly impossible to recreate beyond the 2008 recording that employed scores of percussionists. But it really isn't ‘Radio Ethiopia’ because, for one thing, unlike that rarely played Patti Smith song, ‘Hello Voyager’ is something of an Evangelista standard, expected at every show. It’s also unfair to compare it to anything because I don’t know many pieces in contemporary music that can compare. It's a little like theater, complete with a call-and-response. And a trumpet: An out-of-tune trumpet that someone in the crowd gets to blow on to herald in the piece and which amazingly sounds the same no matter who blows it. In this case, Carla gave the trumpet to someone in the audience she obviously knew very well and gave instructions for when to start and he kept missing the cue. A little bit of comedy at the beginning of the party. So ... well, you really have to hear this to take it in but it goes like this: Carla bangs on a snare drum. Barnes blows a whistle. The trumpet blows. Bozulich acts like a traffic cop signaling to the band and the crowd. There's a LOT of noises and then Bozulich starts to do something akin to a sermon or a sales pitch … with the pacing and cadence of a beat poem. The overall moral of which is as voyagers together we share something we can't talk about: A sense of shame, a neurotic fear of being judged, guilt at ourselves. This is the heart of the Evangelista idea ... if this were a sermon in a proper church there may be a call to look to God or to beg forgiveness. Here there's something a bit more poetic and more human:

We can look at the dark sky of day and say...
(Beat)
I never was who I seemed to be...

And on to:

Tell the truth and be free: This is my hit and run, This is my porn collection
This is me feeling superior to you (Carla that night: "Feeling better than you! I'm better than you!")
This is me selling you out when you needed me most
This is my huge diseased throbbing prick
These are my homosexual inclinations (Carla that night: "Because I'm a FAGGOT!")
This is me loving someone I'm not supposed to love.
This is me. This is what I don't want people to see.
Look upon me and let me be free.
This is me doing things I don't think normal people do.
But I can see you. Ha ha! You're dirty, too. You're dirty, too. Through and through.

The answer to the human dilemma? "When there's no hope, there's only one word... can you say it with me? The word is LOVE!" with the plan being that the audience shouts out LOVE each time it's asked for. There's no judgment. Just understanding and love. And then the noise ... the crazy Bozulich noise. And it came from that little pink-lit stage. Massive, overwhelming sound. This is why there needs to be so many people in this band. And once again, the smile from Carla. We were off the NYC radar. There were just a few people in the room. There was NOISE and yet in the back, some woman was trying to talk to her friend over the band. But I was up front and so were a good bunch of others who just wanted to be there drowning in sonic waters in the name of unconditional love and human acceptance. The message had to get through. It didn't matter that it was a Thursday, or that the show was a house party. It might have to another group of musicians. But here, it felt that the importance of a good show was a matter a life or death. Bozulich stood there among the slow weeping cello and the tones of the keyboard and the loud pounding drums and bass and smiled. This was fun - fun for me - and it seemed like fun for them. And it wound down to a last tired plea from Carla "When there's no hope, there's only one word that cries out from your parched lips. Can you say it with me...." but now without expecting a response ... just a quiet “The word is love." I'm not sure how the crowd responded. I think they went a little crazy. It didn't matter.

Well, actually, I do know there was a woman talking during the whole thing and shouting to her friend: "I totally get it! I get it!" Not about the song, but about whatever domestic issue they were discussing. She made sure their conversation stayed inside and competed for volume with ‘Hello Voyager’. Carla knew it to and dedicated the last song bitingly "To the blonde chick in the back who gets it." I wasn't ready for what came next. ‘Evangelista 2’ ends the Carla Bozulich album Evangelista, recorded before Carla considered naming her band Evangelista. It's a love song to someone who isn't there ... pillow talk in the night to someone who's absent; a way of dealing with loneliness. It's a song that's come to mean a lot to me. It's not a song that you expect to hear played at a show where Thrones is coming up next or where precedent has already been set for disruptive crowd chatter. And it isn't rock and roll. It's poetic and theatrical and it's something that may just make more sense when you've lost a lot more and therefore aged a bit, even if only metaphorically. It only required Ches Smith, who curbed his natural ability to make his drumset cry by softly touching the cymbals and Dominic Cramp who combined his own live, tender touch on the keyboards with samples of creaky floors and haunted house sounds: The sounds of the middle of the night. Carla sung mostly with her eyes closed:

I kiss your hands
I kiss your eyes
Though you can't see
Swing to me, my love
I'm breathing in and out of you
Gentle baby, gentle now
I'm listening. Can you hear me, too.
Calling out...

It was so poignant and so painful that it was almost unbearable. It didn't matter where we were. Carla was able to take you to that place: To personalize the moment. Even though it would be perfectly logical that this song would be talked over near the end of the set in this atmosphere, I really don't know if anyone did. This is why I was in Brooklyn on this cold night. You just can't get this anywhere else. And it will probably be a long time before it returns to NYC and I probably won't be in Europe when Evangelista tours there this spring. I felt the way I always feel after one of these shows: That I was lucky to be there.

Postscript:

A couple of nights later, Carla played The Stone both as part of a duet with Sarah Lipstate (aka Noveller) and as part of Evangelista again only this time with even one more added guitar courtesy of Shahzad Ismaily. The Stone is equally small but I had no way of getting lost finding it. It's on Avenue C and Second Street and it's a non-profit developed by John Zorn to create a place where talent is showcased. It's a lot like an art gallery and there are chairs. You're encouraged to sit. In fact, it's required. There's an air of prestige to playing The Stone and the crowd on Saturday was a different crowd. They sold out the venue. The audience was there for Carla and were either in on what was about to happen or had brought along someone to introduce to the experience.

Before the first set, waiting outside to get in, I watched the members on NY February 2010 Evangelista leave, possibly to get dinner. And once inside I sat down to a set of improvised ambient strangeness from Carla using various gadgets and devices (including her voice) and Sarah Lipstate on guitar. Projected behind was a film by Lipstate: A loop of painted film creating polka-dots. Dreamlike, Carla and Sarah made trippy, ambient sounds and occasionally Carla would sing something into a device that would then replay a sample of what she sang. Music for music's sake. It was, essentially, something utterly different from Evangelista and pretty mesmerizing even if I have difficulty describing it. And since it was about the sound, Carla would stay on the floor for minutes at a time with her gear to create the experience, denying those sitting her presence much of the time. But on occasion Carla would get up and create a shadow effect with her figure against the polka-dot background turning herself a living art installation. This would have been a nice appetizer for the Evangelista show as it was, but then Carla and Lipstate started to discuss a chord progression and the next piece was not ambient sound but something akin to a really beautiful song. And then - after some lovely playing and no more crouching and a bit of foot stomping - it became a cover of ‘O Death!’ with Carla singing: A big surprise leading to warm applause.

The second set was, as noted, a seven-member Evangelista and since it was almost the same rag-tag band from Thursday, the set was similar with a few fun additions such as the semi-autobiographical ‘Lucky Luck Luck‘ and the gorgeously creepy ’Winds of St. Anne‘ which - as Bozulich pointed out - was filled with double entendre "Because I'm sexy and sexual." The evening started with ‘Evangelista 1’, from that same first solo Evangelista album. This song is like a sibling to ‘Hello Voyager’. Carla essentially preaches another secular sermon, one where the preacher - the evangelista - is looking for those in pain and reaching out. Like the Thursday show, the band was not only together but even a bit beyond since they started this time with their sea legs and it set the scene for an even more emotionally draining evening. And I was in a seat as was most of the audience. Carla screamed "I'm pushing out, I'm pushing HARDER! AND HARDER!" and in the confinement of The Stone, I felt like I was going to jump out of my skin. Once again there was ‘Hello Voyager’ - this time with a young man from the audience playing the trumpet and getting all the cues right. With the seated crowd and the dark mood lighting and velvet curtains, it seemed even more like a set piece and Carla moved into the crowd and sat on some laps. People actually shouted "LOVE!" loudly and having the whole room grooving on the experience was cleansing and emotionally exhausting. And when most of the band left and Carla sang her sad song at the end it was just as intimate. Maybe even more so. And when it was over, some people stood, which is the benefit of a seated crowd: They can stand for you at the end.

In a lot of ways, this was the triumphant night because people gathered and complimented and albums were autographed and Evangelista got their well-deserved moment of appreciation. ("Who really GOT it!") But I decided to focus on this show a bit less because I'm amazed that every member of the band put as much into the night in the red room with the vomit in the john as they did at the show where they were showered with comfort and love. There are no unimportant shows to people for whom the music means everything. So while I know people went away happy in Manhattan on Saturday night, I'm hoping some of those who walked home in Brooklyn in the cold on Thursday night found what I found over a decade ago when I first saw the Fibbers play. It's those people I feel the happiest for.