By the time the Plastic Crimewave Vision Celestial Guitarkestra finished loading in at the Empty Bottle on February 27, somewhere between 40 and 50 amps filled the stage and ran in a line almost the entire length of the club’s main room. My Fender Deluxe Reverb was set up on the floor in front of the stage. Going into our performance, we had a lot of things working against us. We’d never all been in the same room together–I’d responded to the same recruitment e-mail most everybody else had–and many of us had never even met. No one, not even Plastic Crimewave, aka Steve Krakow, our ringleader and conductor, had more than a vague idea what we were going to do once we started playing. In the e-mail, which he’d sent out in January, he’d explained that he wanted us to “send vibrations and ripples into the multiverse for positive change” and “perform a sonic exorcism on the evil that rules this land.”
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Fortunately, with such a big turnout the sound was going to be impressive no matter what we did. The crowd of performers milling around before the set with beers in their hands was bigger than the whole audience at midweek shows I’ve been to at the Bottle. Though a few people seemed to have gotten the e-mail at random–nobody recognized them, and not even Krakow could guess who’d forwarded the invite–the lineup was stacked with ringers all the same. Sure, there was the fortysomething guy who told Krakow he’d come out because he thought it might be his only chance to perform in public, but there were also members of the Ponys, Coughs, White/Light, Ambulette, the Functional Blackouts, and Krakow’s band the Plastic Crimewave Sound, among many others. After we turned on all the amps to make sure their combined power draw wouldn’t black out the whole block, Krakow gave us a quick briefing. He said a couple things that sounded familiar from his e-mail–that our goal was spiritual transcendence and the enactment of some sort of chaos magick, and that we were supposed to play in the key of E–but left everything else up to us.
Krakow’s original idea was to recruit 23 guitarists for the Guitarkestra–it’s a special number to fans of Discordianism and psychedelic magick heads like Aleister Crowley–but he ended up with more than twice that many, plus a handful of nonguitarists. Soundman and engineer Jeremy Lemos brought an oscillator setup, and his wife, Gwen, played an amplified Indian harmonium. Aleksandra Tomaszewska of Aleks & the Drummer sang and her bandmate, Deric Criss, played a trap set. A trombonist from Mucca Pazza came out, along with several videographers and a couple guys doing audio recordings–including ubiquitous show taper Aadam Jacobs, who set up a guitar and a practice amp back at his usual spot by the mixing board.
Maybe just feeling like some magick might have happened isn’t too different from it actually happening. By Krakow’s reckoning, at any rate, the shit went down, and he’s already planning another Guitarkestra, which he hopes will happen this summer at the Hyde Park Art Center. “People told me all sorts of amazing stuff about puking and having visions,” he said. “Supposedly someone in the crowd just started kissing people at random. I think it went good.”
