There's a lot of messed up stuff in the world. But there's Big Gulps and shit, so just chill the fuck out."
Thus spoke Dan Deacon last Friday night at Johnny Brenda's. "Chill" as an adjective, however, has little relevance to the Baltimore-based sine wave slinger's music. With a barrage of spastic beep-bleat-blop cartoon dance songs, Deacon whisked the uninitiated audience into a warm, moist froth.
Deacon is silly, both in sensibility and semblance. Of his advanced hair loss and bowl-full-of-jelly physique, he says, "It's easy to stand out amongst a bunch of bands where everyone is tall and slender and skinny, to be the bald, creepy nerd in the corner. It helps to be recognized. It's sort of like a cool van with flames painted on the side."
Wearing a threadbare Fred Flintstone t-shirt with holes under the armpits, gray New Balance sneakers and a pair of enormous red plastic-rimmed glasses, his appearance falls somewhere between middle-aged paper-pusher and excitable six-year-old. Deacon is in fact twenty-five, with an M.A. in electro-acoustic composition. He's released eight records in the last four years and has been touring for nearly three.
Among a small subset of the underground-conscious population, Deacon's live shows are legendary. Between songs including "Pizzahorse," "Moses vs. Predator," and "Lion with a Shark's Head," he leads elaborate New Year's Eve-style countdowns, instructing the audience to inflect certain numbers with specific vocal tones and to replace others with unrelated words or physical actions.
Deacon's also a spinner of surreal yarns. "It helps me relate to the audience and makes me feel more comfortable when I can talk to them or tell some kind of story or some sort of pseudo-stand up. I think it makes it more comfortable to dance - because the music is inherently dance music." During Friday's set, he handily warped the story of a car crash he was in while on tour in December. As Deacon told it, the police officer who arrived at the scene urinated in the snow in the form of a swastika, then exposed an extra mouth located on the palm of his left hand that he encouraged Deacon and a friend to enter. Inside, they encountered a world made entirely of hair, including a hair lake, where the two took a long nap, "and it was awesome."
Deacon's deep-seated love of the absurd can be traced back to his childhood obsession with Devo, Talking Heads and They Might Be Giants. Later while at SUNY Purchase, he stole a copy of the book Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond by Michael Nyman, which led him to Conlon Nancarrow, Scratch Orchestra, People Like Us and the Fluxus movement. Another key influence was the pixelized kitsch psychedelia of the art collective Paper Rad.
Previously, Deacon's appearances in Philadelphia have been limited to basement venues, making the Johnny Brenda's show unusual. When he played at a house on 47th and Baltimore last month, the atmosphere was familial. Most of the crowd gripped PBR tall boys or Yeungling quarts. The air was thick with the smoke of tobacco and pot. The two dozen or so in attendance all seemed to know one another.
It's a long way from West Philly to Fishtown, however. Friday's audience of a couple hundred was distinctly less cozy. They had come to see Girl Talk, one of the most hyped acts of the last six months among the Pitchfork set. Few had seen or heard Dan Deacon before. That Deacon was able to get a crowd of forty or fifty not only on their feet but dancing suggests his wild approach to audience engagement works.
Before the last song of his set, Deacon yelled, "Let's do a countdown of ten 'Christs,' and instead of 'four' we'll do 'Our Lord.'" The audience roared along: "Christ! Christ! Christ! Christ! Christ! Christ! Our Lord! Christ! Christ! Christ!" The music kicked in, and Deacon went into his hyper man-child dance mode-flailing limp-wristed, eyes shut, giddily unself-aware. He's illuminated by red and white 60-watt bulbs and a strobe light inside a green plastic skull, all of which he controls. In the neon green light of the skull strobe, apparently in slow motion, individual beads of sweat could be seen rolling down his extra-large forehead.
