Touring with Sufjan

Seattle seems like a small eternity ago. I was there during the weekend that Sufjan wrapped up his tour in the US. Last stop, Paramount Theater.

The theater itself looks like one of those old-timey theaters, where someone must still go out and place letters up. This bit of nostalgia is a bit of Americana, where technology rushes forward, but bits of history linger, trying to root us to some time and place, even if that time and place is less than a hundred years old, perhaps indicative of the brief period of American history.

Inside, there is ornate art on the ceiling, on the side of walls, again recalling a period in time when people seemed to care about this. Oddly enough, it reminds me of my trip in India, where buildings built by kings were also ornate. At some point, the craftsmanship needed to create such art has been lost, replaced by plain walls. To be sure, baroque things sometimes look way overdone, far too glitzy for the common man. Yet, they also harken to a time when this kind of excess meant something.

This theater looked like it could easily hold 500 people. I did some mental calculations. My ticket was probably 40 dollars. Sufjan probably makes, hmm, 30 bucks on the ticket. That means 15,000 dollars on the evening. And he's sold out everywhere in the US, presumably at similar sized venues.

And perhaps he needs to make such a pretty penny because his band is huge. For such a personal singer, his stage performances seem more like Broadway, or perhaps, an oddly put together high school stage performance, than a normal band.

At least, Sufjan (or his band) thinks that when you come to a performance, it's more than just the music. I had likened it to Prince. So many bands put all their creativity in the songs, and very little in the actual staging. This may simply be Sufjan's literary background coming through. Stories to be told and seen and sung.

Sufjan's band wore plastic butterfly wings the size of small kites. Sufjan himself donned eagle wings, also kite-like. He would arch his shoulders back and forth, causing his wings to flutter. Reflecting much of his persona, this borders between kitsch and mocking to something profound, much like his 50 states project.

Blow-up Santas and Supermans were strewned throughtout the stage as part of setup. Again, total kitsch and possibly kink too. Who blew them up? (Perhaps machines!). And did they buy out the only Santa/Superman blowup factory. Apparently, most of these were tossed out into the audience who then lofted these dolls upward, in some kind of cartoonish mosh pit, without the angst and seriousness.

All the while, I'm thinking of logistics. Bands often stay one day in a city, and perform the next day in another city. Do they arrange hotels? Do they decide to stay the evening, and then head to the next destination in the morning? Are they taking huge busses around? Are they flying? Does someone go ahead, while the others remain behind?

Do so-called band-aids hang out, hand selected by those who know of the peculiarities of someone's tastes?

I know. Odd thoughts while attending a concert. I'm supposed to be in the here and now. I'm supposed to sing with the lyrics. I'm supposed to laugh at Sufjan's curiously oblique story, one that has been told time and again, but refined because the story didn't quite hold water. It was a large paper mache rooster, and it was raining, and they propped it in the forest and we made a "caw, caw" sound, oh, but roosters make, what is it? "Cock a doodle do!".

We were like brothers, he said, born on the same time on the same day. ("What day was that, Sufjan". He demurred and would not answer). And this meandering story prefaced the song, the Predatory Wasp of the Palisades is Out to get you, a song which seems to be about gay longing, though many have tried to dissect its meaning (maybe the narrator is a woman). It gave rise to a thought that maybe he was singing in the guise of his friend, who had something for Sufjan, and that it was Sufjan that may have freaked out.

Or not.

As I was heading back from Seattle, then heading out to India, I knew Sufjan would similarly be touring in Europe, to eventually conclude the tour in Iceland, land of Sigur Ros, in some church, perhaps of some stature.

This vast entourage would wend its way from town to town. More like city to city. Would the stories make sense? The humor, so attuned to American oddity a la Keillor, might not make sense abroad, but then, maybe it wouldn't matter. Interesting how Europeans and even Japanese embrace bands that don't speak the local tongue, and yet foreign bands struggle in the US. When was the last time you went to a band that didn't really speak English?

No, I don't mean Ozzy.

One of these days, they might actually take a good picture of Sufjan, but then, he'd actually have to look into the camera.