Monday, May 19, 2014

Leaving The House To See Acid Mothers Temple Do Flute Time

By: Ben Johnson


Leaving the house always seems like such a hassle. Like you leave the house, you go do a thing, and then you come back to your house. Why not cut out the middle man and just stay home? I like it there. It’s my home. It has my girlfriend and my dog in it. It has a TV and records and movies and books and comfortable places to sit. It does not have any drunk people in Red Hot Chili Peppers t-shirts breathing near my face, or teenagers talking loudly and stupidly to each other within various microsecond-long social postures. You know, home. Light switches. Hand soap. Throw pillows. It’s nice.

But last night I went out to see live music because I can’t only just be at home all the time until I die. Being at home too much makes home worse. Being at home makes it dirty, and then you have to clean it. Or you don’t clean it and then you don’t clean it, and then you really don’t clean it, and then somebody comes over and you go “shit” and you spend an entire day of your life cleaning your home just so somebody and their cousin can come and be awkwardly bored there because it is not their home. “Yeah,” you’ll say to this person and their cousin, “that’s a thing I put on my wall because I like it,” and you’ll see, through this person’s cousin’s glazed eyes, how low your home, which you love so much, rates on the general who cares meter.

I went to see the band Acid Mothers Temple play music. At a rock club. In Chicago. In a busy neighborhood people go to often when they’re not at home. It was an okay experience.

Acid Mothers Temple is a psychedelic rock band from Japan. They have been around for a long time. They know what they’re doing. They know how to be a good psychedelic rock band. If you like psychedelic rock bands, you should definitely go see Acid Mothers Temple. That would be a good experience for you. If sometimes you see a psychedelic rock band and you think “I don’t quite trust these guys to take me on a good psychedelic rock journey without sometimes getting all dumb and doing stuff I don’t like,” which is a constant danger with a psychedelic rock band, you don’t need to worry with Acid Mothers Temple. They’ll take care of you. You’ll be in good hands.

I was not on drugs last night. I am not on drugs anymore ever. I mostly don’t know how to get them, and I understand they cost money and you pay that money and then go “whoa, I’m on drugs” and everything’s weird, and then later you are not on drugs anymore and everything is painfully not weird and then also you have less money by a factor of whatever amount you just spent on drugs. I used to be on drugs a lot more often, especially alcohol, and I hated when things got not weird again so much that it made me into an asshole. Like, "How are things? Not weird enough for my specific liking? I HATE THINGS. (glug glug, act like an asshole)" So I don’t do alcohol anymore, and then because of that I don’t really want to do other drugs anymore either. What am I gonna do, be on drugs? With, like, other people around? Ummm, no thanks. I don't trust myself not to be a complete asshole while sober, I'm not gonna do drugs just to give myself an extra degree of difficulty.

But if you like to be on drugs and then experience a psychedelic rock band, or if you don’t like to be on drugs but for some reason also really really like psychedelic rock bands anyway, by all means you should already be a huge fan of Acid Mothers Temple. They do a real good job of going from thing to thing competently and slowly and without being too embarrassing about it. Like at one point a Japanese flute came out, but it wasn’t like “stop everything, guys, because here’s this flute thing we’re doing now that we want you to be extra impressed by” so much as “huh? What’s THAT noise? Oh, a flute. Okay, I guess it’s flute time!” And because flute time is a result of the competence and confidence of an experienced psychedelic rock band such as Acid Mothers Temple and not a bunch of damn kids who think flute time is some kind of an anarchistic political statement they’re making, you’re like “Okay, these guys have earned flute time. I am enjoying flute time. Flute time is good right now.” Then during good right now flute time, you think mind-expanding things like “maybe Pharaoh Sanders isn’t completely intolerable like I thought he was when I was 26.”


Guess what never happens at my house, no matter what? Flute time. And if flute time somehow did happen at my house, it would NOT be good. It would be upsetting. For at least one of the people living at my house, and probably exactly one dog, any plausible flute time in the home scenario would be like, “oh man, it’s FLUTE TIME? That SUCKS.” So hey, I left the house and I experienced a good version of flute time thanks to Acid Mothers Temple, and I learned that good flute time is one of those things that only happens outside. I don’t think I really need flute time to happen all that often and I’m not sure what I’m supposed to do with this new flute time information, but there we go.