Hollywood Bowl, Pt. 2: Radiohead Is Not There

Somehow I am at The Hollywood Bowl and Radiohead is about to take the stage. It is a crisp fall night in Los Angeles. How the one-hit wonders of 'Creep' turned themselves into the greatest and most subversive popular rock act in history is something I will never be able to truly comprehend.

When I first heard 'Creep' I was singing along by the second chorus. In an era of spearhead, zebrahead, myriad-other-heads, another band ending in -head seemed destined for the scrap heap of marginalia. Even the heavy chunk of the guitar kicking in right before he says 'I'm a creep' seemed TOO of the moment. This riff was so spot on it threatened itself with cliche. I wouldn't have been surprised if we'd never heard from these fellas again.

And then came 'OK Computer'. Oh, I know they released 'The Bends' before it and 'Fake Plastic Trees' was on the 'Romeo and Juliet' soundtrack, but for me, Radiohead truly came into being the first time I heard 'Paranoid Android'.

Unsettling. Gorgeous. Terrifying.

Listening to Radiohead for me is like being trapped inside a camera on the nose cone of a missile that will one day descend to earth and wreak utter destruction. Before it makes that awful fall it endlessly circles the planet revealing the true nature of existence through sheer observation.

To truly demonstrate the disparate natures juxtaposed within their music, I used to sing 'No Surprises' to my son as a lullaby. He would have been less than one year old so the lyrical content couldn't keep him awake and petrified.

They are (as close as I can tell...)

A heart that's full up like a landfill,
a job that slowly kills you,
bruises that won't heal.
You look so tired-unhappy,
bring down the government,
they don't, they don't speak for us.
I'll take a quiet life,
a handshake of carbon monoxide,

with no alarms and no surprises,
no alarms and no surprises,
no alarms and no surprises,
no alarms and no surprises,
Silent silent.

This is my final fit,
my final bellyache,

with no alarms and no surprises,
no alarms and no surprises,
no alarms and no surprises please.

Such a pretty house
and such a pretty garden.

No alarms and no surprises (get me outta here),
no alarms and no surprises (get me outta here),
no alarms and no surprises, please.

When I started singing it to Cashel, I made up the words as I went because I didn't know them. Mine were as follows...

This is the final act
I'm going nowhere fast
No alarms and no surprises
No alarms and no surprises

This is the pit of love
Fantastic from up above
But when you're down in it
You're flying
When you're down in it
You're flying low

Now, it doesn't rival 'Rock A Bye Baby' for sheer creepiness, but that is how Radiohead helped my little boy get to sleep.

Radiohead transformed themselves into a juggernaut of iconoclastic melody and bombast. The fact that such a complicated message struck such a widespread core has been a comfort to me. Their artistry articulated something very profound about the new ways in which we related to each other as human beings. Or didn't relate to each other as the case may be.

Again, somehow I am at The Hollywood Bowl and Radiohead is about to take the stage. And no pristine setting can counterbalance the primal force of decay and despair that roars forth from this collective. They obliterated us. Their sound expanded to fill the canyon. It was as if some Terminator had been created far in the future, all technology and records of human brutality and beauty had been fed into a genesis machine, and then the machine had been given old tapes of The Clash and The Beatles. The result? The collected output of Radiohead.

During their encore, they began looping their instruments and combining them with a found radio broadcast. As the layers grew, the sound now included aspects that were NOT actually present. The song morphed into some twisted actualization of humanity...there were sticks being smashed against animal skins and fingers plucking cat guts stretched into strings there were ones and zeros in the air funneled through silicon steel plastic and ozone.

One by one Radiohead left the stage. The music continued without them. It was out of their hands. Radiohead was no longer there.