pfork day 1, pt. 2: built to spill

Doug basking in the glorious rays of his indie guitar jammery

I have seen Built To Spill live somewhere between five and seven thousand times. When I was 17, I listened to Perfect From Now On the way I used to listen to, like, Led Zeppelin IV or Paul’s Boutique. That is, endlessly, with Talmudic intensity. For a long, long time, it was the only tape I had in my car. The love runs way deep.

So watching them last night in Union Park on a gorgeous (if chilly) night, big white church looming over the trees over my shoulder, was a pretty great experience. As Joe has already mentioned, the headliners last night were (or were supposed to be) playing all-request set lists. This made for an interesting group-listening experience: when they started playing, say, “Kicked It In the Sun,” the ungodly beautiful penultimate song from PFNO, you looked around you grinning, as if to say to everyone, “Good job, guys!” When they played “Big Dipper,” you could practically fucking hi-five the stranger next to you. Sometimes it was like a live-show version of Missed Connections: when they started playing “Stab,” for instance, or the dreamy little pop song “Else,” off of Keep It Like A Secret, there was the charge of hearing it performed live for the first time, but there was also this weird, quiet validation: I had never heard anyone else, ever, tell me they loved “Else,” but clearly lots of people did, and we were all sort of making that discovery together simultaneously. It was neat.

But THEN they played the pseudo-Eastern brain-fart “In Your Mind,” the third track off of Ancient Melodies From the Future, which, apart from “Strange,” is justifiably the most unloved spot in their catalogue. And then there was audience-wide bafflement. We voted for this? It was, more or less, the only “off” moment of the entire set. Otherwise, the night was spilling over with good vibes. Doug Martch’s scruffy, indie-rock-dad charm was in full effect; with his too-tight baseball cap on, a swatch of hair sticking out the back, he appeared ready to go fishing with a bunch of Cub Scouts the second he finished up his last 11-minute guitar solo. Alas, apart from “Kicked It In the Sun,” live Perfect From Now On songs remain as tantalizingly rare as jackelope sightings (Bloom County ref, anyone?). No “Velvet Waltz,” no “Randy Described Eternity,” no “I Would Hurt A Fly.” But it was a fantastic show nonetheless. For the curious, here’s the entire set list:

Liar
Stab
Strange
You Were Right
Kicked It In the Sun
Conventional Wisdom
Else
Big Dipper
In Your Mind
Virginia Reel Round the Fountain
Goin’ Against Your Mind
Carry the Zero

Further updates to come!