In the smoke and the flame:
A review of My Morning Jacket’s show at Kit Carson Park
THE FLAMES FLICK slowly between two huge logs that’ve been burning all night, adding to the pile of yesterday’s ashes. Now, dawn and Venus pulling up the sun and goodbye to the star-stitched quilt of quiet night. Birds wake and warble, yawn pink clouds.
I am here to help keep the fire alive. A friend sits up the mountain on a vision quest. Several of us tend to her spirit with song and prayer. I look into the center of the sacred fire to the deepest reach I can peep. Like looking down a long birth canal. A white-hot eye looks back at me.
Eye in the sky at evening’s marbled sunset. The stage lights at Kit Carson Park blaze orange, beckoning Grammyaward-winning rock-and-roll monsoons, My Morning Jacket, into their glow. Roll call Jim James (lead vocalist, guitarist), Patrick Hallahan (drums), Carl Broemel (guitar), Tom Blankenship (bass) and Bo Koster (keys). They grab at the sky and shake the music into vibration. The steady heart pump of “Circuital” drives forward, connecting “earth to moon to our heavenly bodies.”
A buttoned-up man on the grass next to me buys me a Lone River Ranch Water hard seltzer, which isn’t your cow’s typical trough. During opener, Joy Oladokun’s, honest and tender and politically-poking set, his sister turned to me and said of the main act, “You’re going to have a spiritual experience.”
And I know. I have felt the absolute lightness of being at past Jacket shows. Like at the New Orleans Voodoo Festival some Halloweens ago, where I was dressed as a sparkly seahorse and felt no separation between myself and the sea of people entranced in the swell of Hallahan’s rumble and James’s siren tides. I was born ’n raised in Kentucky, where the band formed in 1998, and so there’s something of a bloodline — a
specific vessel of memory — conjured in the listening.
Lights shimmy across the trees. The rock is heavy and fierce. The crew circles around Hallahan on his elevated platform, as if they’re all hungry for the brown-butter grits he likes to cook up when he ain’t simmering the cymbals. All their long hair frolics in the fan breeze, wispy like the rain clouds that have drenched Taos this summer, y gracias a dios.
A must-be four-or-five-year-old boy who’s hot on somersaults spins my way. Together we jump and pump our arms, and then he gives me a glow stick. Reminds me of how MMJ encourages those childlike ways — always remembering humble beginnings. How, in the mantra-like “Love, Love, Love” off the bands most-recent, self-titled album, James sings, “Before you run, you gotta walk / and to start, you gotta crawl.”
I’m shocked that I’m still awake, still able to move after last night licked my eyeballs dry, only an hour of sleep to my present name. In that sacred space, I took myself very seriously. Sometimes I feel so desperate with disconnection. Trying hard for god, forgetting that god simply is — can be felt in a laugh, or the bright flash of comet.
Tonight, it’s nice not to have to force anything. To stand alone and tall, gently sway, deeply breathe, and go where I wish in the wide-open field, whether close or far — all angles — while everyone repeats the call, “Hope to watch the victory dance after the day’s work is done.” To feel the flame stoked by James’s rainbow-spectrum voice.
And how long has James been howling? How many skies has his voice soared through? Lone eagle plunging right into the heart of the fire, through that pulsing canal, past the lids of the white-hot eye, and into the darkness that lives on the other side. Born of a cosmic egg — black, shiny, buzzing — that voice. Egg cracking open — spilling a million suns, a thousand rivers, which waterfall into my mouth singing along with James, now solo: “I’m going where there ain’t no need to escape from what is / only spirits at ease.” Medicine that helps me to remember the power of my own voice.
I think of my friend in her second night of questing. Wonder how this round of stars is treating her, if she’s awake, if she’s crying, if she’s seen a bear, if her ancestors have come to her, if she’s ready for the rain that will inevitably fall all day the next day. I bum a rollie off some kid, and puff at the tobacco, sending well wishes her way.
Then, show almost over, I hear it. The bing-ing beginnings of the song — “Touch Me I’m Going to Scream, Pt. 2” — that I’ve been repeatedly whispering for. The one that starts slow and mysterious and tiptoes toward the burning explosion of desire. It lights me up and lifts me up and I have plenty of space to whip my head and body around.
“Oh, this feeling it is wonderful, don’t you ever turn it off,” James sings as the band blasts off.
What a blessing to remember we don’t have to.
Heart loud, I smile through the smoke and say, “I hope you can feel this, my girl. This joy. For all of me. For all of you.”