Shows/2000-01-15
| January 15, 2000 | |
|---|---|
| [[File:|center|frameless|]] | |
| [[File:|center|frameless|]] | |
| Knitting Factory | |
| City |  New York, NY
|
| Tour | |
| Event | |
| Billing | |
Set list
Incomplete
- Bad Medicine
- Mother
- I'm So Blasé
- Keep All Your Friends
- Portrait of V. I. Lenin in the Style of Jackson Pollock, Part I
- The Ballad of Younis and Sofia
Reviews
New York Times
January 17, 2000[1]
Jon Pareles
The Professor Returns, Still Creatively Contrary.
As long as rock has had an avant-garde, Mayo Thompson has been part of it. Free-form psychedelic jams and precise Minimalist lattices, elaborate progressive-rock structures and epigrammatic vignettes have all turned up in his songs since he started the original Red Crayola in 1966.
Mr. Thompson has been a member of Pere Ubu, a producer for groups including Cabaret Voltaire and a collaborator with various avant-rockers, while intermittently reviving the Red Krayola moniker (with the spelling changed to prevent trademark infringement). His latest Red Krayola lineup, including David Grubbs from Gastr del Sol on guitar and George Hurley from the Minutemen and Firehose on drums, performed at a packed Knitting Factory on Saturday night.
The songs were contrary and proud of it, flaunting every loose end. Mr. Thompson has a mild-mannered voice and the stage presence of a slightly harried professor; he currently teaches at the California Institute of the Arts. But with his guitar in hand, he took charge of his own scrappy domain.
Some songs dissolved into jams, with guitar lines washing over one another as the beat melted down and reappeared; others were prickly, intricate skeins of dissonance. Songs with the three-chord structures of basic garage-rock, like ''Bad Medicine'' and ''Mother'' from the band's 1999 album ''Fingerpainting'' (Drag City), were destabilized with contrary drumbeats and stray guitar lines. A prettily harmonized pop tune, ''I'm So Blase,'' held together while revealing its fragility.
Mr. Thompson's songs have whimsy, cynicism and Marxist visions of a battle between rich and poor. One song envisioned breakfast in bed served by fat millionaires. Another was a biography of Jackson Pollock.
There was a calm narrative, set to a spiky guitar riff, about a plane crash that may have been a suicide. There was a vision of massacres and civil war. Mere dialectic isn't enough for Mr. Thompson; his songs showed multiple perspectives, sometimes as many as there were musicians onstage. Even in his most complex songs, he never ruled out the possibility that anarchy could be an improvement.
References
| The Red Krayola Shows | |||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1966, 1967, 1968 | 1969 | 1970 | 1971 | 1972 | 1973 | 1974 | 1975 | ||
| 1976 | 1977 | 1978 | 1979 | 1980 | 1981 | 1982 | 1983 | 1984 | 1985 |
| 1986 | 1987 | 1988 | 1989 | 1990 | 1991 | 1992 | 1993 | 1994 | 1995 |
| 1996 | 1997 | 1998 | 1999 | 2000 | 2001 | 2002 | 2003 | 2004 | 2005 |
| 2006 | 2007 | 2008 | 2009 | 2010 | 2011 | 2012 | 2013 | 2014 | 2015 |
| 2016 | 2017 | 2018 | 2019 | 2020 | 2021 | 2022 | 2023 | 2024 | |
| Live recordings | |||||||||