Abrupted on Electric Avenue By Paul Bukovec

I’m 56 and pure white of hair but mercifully immature enough to have refused to grow out of a never ending fascination with certain ongoing shifts along the boundaries of music and cultural trends where the edgy and marginal meet the popular and trendy.

 And as far back as Catholic School, I always liked to dance.

Jimi may have started it all, but I got my head seriously dislocated from my whip lashed ass by the poly rhythmic fusions of different seventies jazz rockers branching out from Miles and Herbie and Fela and King Sunny ; and then I got my spine  scyncopatedly funked up  by George Clinton and Wa Wa Watson and Bernie Worrell.

African drums drew me deep into World Music in the eighties. Juju and Soukous and Zouk and Township Jive and Reggae pushed my pulse, pumped my blood, gave my knees and torso new ways to relate. And then there was Prince and Chaka and even Madonna on the home front and the dance remixes in the bins at Sounds of Market Street where lots of the extended plays flashed through long jazzy grooves, and that incredibly sexy woman on the jacket of Black Box compelled me to buy the vamp and the soulful beseeching wail that would haunt me and lure me deeper into club music.

And then it  all got so much more  electric and eclectic when the posses formed in London and Bristol and I was grabbed up soul to Soul ll Soul, my body entranced by those grooved hypnotic beats. And somewhere in the nineties, I saw Tricky at the TLA,  got sucked into Trip Hop and Acid Jazz and swept along from those dark eddies into the spinning whirlpools of electronica and the choppy turbulence of progressive hip hop.

And surreptitiously House Music became a guilty pleasure I enjoyed secretly away from most of my peers, usually driving both me and my car to and from work or even more deeply on monthly forays to dance clubs with a small band of like minded peter pans and tinker bells for periodic bustamovathons.

I started, also, to occasionally drift through places like Silk City or the now very dearly departed Revival or the defunct Smoke or Palmer’s Social Club alone on my way back from some other event to absorb the beats, work up a solitary schvitz and roll on home. I learned to stay in my own orbit when soloing at these spots since I was, even back then, considerably older than most of the crowd. Basically, it felt like mutual noninvolvement pact. I was there for the bass and drum lines. I kept to myself while taking in the music and the scene and episodically dancing alone in the crowd. Inside my own circle, inside the music. Feelin it.

I’ve always had lots of Funk and R&B in my music collection, especially for the yearly house parties we’ve thrown for  the last couple of decades. But cookin alone in my kitchen the sound track is now likely to be stuff like Massive Attack, or Groove Armada, or Kruder and Dorfmiester, or Thievery Corporation, or DJ Krush, or Wagon Christ or even stuff like Underground or Dubtribe Soundsystem. More often than not, I just wanna hear a good beat. And be moved in the place where I am. 

Like the two Chemical Brothers’ concerts at the Electric Factory I caught and was electrocuted by the energy, and sheer excitement and exhilaration of what felt like thousands surging simultaneously to their Svengalian twists of dials and shifts of levers.

This summer, a variety of obligations and a fabulous vacation had diverted me from the kind of live music that keeps revitalizing me, so those cravings for good thumping, driving electronica overrode my solemn oath to never darken the portals of the Tweeter Center again, and I transnavigated the Delaware late on a tuesday afternoon for Moby's answer to Lollapalooza to pay forty bucks for a lawn ticket to maybe witness a long list of performers, some of which I even knew  like Busta Rhymes, the Blue Man Group, David Bowie and, of course, the little bald guy. But mostly I made the trip to visit the Playstation 2 Dance Tent to experience the raving light and sound storm of a series of top notch DJ's.

So I set up on the grass, watch and sway to Busta & co, then begin what is to be my wander route for the evening: down across the lawn, past the vending booths, short stop at the water fountains then on into the air blown/cooled tent for an ever darkening evermore light flashing spectacle of twisting jerking fluidly high and bouncing kids frenzied by some very good beats. I move slowly and meanderingly through this maze of revelers stopping briefly to groove a little here and there then I wander out again to return to the lawn for a while before I get the wanderlust again...

So I'm on about my third tour through the crowds, stepin light, feeling a mostly nice vibe from those I'm sliding around and through catching only the occasional fish eye from somebody or other who wonders what that gray dude is about or makes me for security or a cop or a friend of their father... but mostly I'm fairly oblivious and grooving on the sights and sounds and pretty astounded at the dancing and the music's incredible energy and how much more alive it feels in this balloon of techno and sweat and swirl than out on the lawn too far away from the Duke to feel Bowie's cool burn... and the music gets revved and pumped deeper and higher and I'm practically skipping through the throng as I reach an opening near an edge of dancers and I just stop going forward in my sharklike swerve and move in place suddenly gripped and wracked byandthrough the beat and I'm dancing a kind of spastic snapping flapping funky unfluid freeform gyrate that feels at first self-consciously unlike all the action around me, then allatonce I'M just unfuckingconscious or caring of anyshit other than the abandon of the music entering me and leaving having played my meager instrument and plucked all my marionette strings... and just as intensely and suddenly as that electronic tornado picked me up it drops me down and i stagger away wadshot and sweatweary through the crowd.

But off to the side and a little behind me comes this little female person who grabs my arm and whips around the front of me. She is almost yelling to be heard above the storm of sound and it's coming from a very soft nodding and maybe affirming face. I have to turn my ear to her mouth to get whats coming out...  SO HAPPY...YOU CAn RECOGNIZZee/ ...shoW/ and?/ HONOR (?)  OUR MUSIC!!!! IT'S JUST SO NIIIIICE!!!  JUST WANNA THANK YOU!!! FOR...*+^>! OUR MUSIC...  And i mumble /yell back in a voice that barely leaves my lips before it falls suicidally to the floor never reaching her face saying: i like to dance... but I want to scream: IT'S MY MUSIC TOO!!!  but (all of a sudden, i'm melting like the wicked witch, and...) i shake her earnestly outstretched hand and nod at this ecstatic munchkin and then just stagger on out of the tent through what now feels more like a gauntlet of fisheyes up to the water fountains where it seems the young folk are parting ways to let the senior citizen  get his much needed drink...

and i wander endlessly back to my towel on the now very huge lawn and lie down while David Bowie implores us: LET'S DANCE and i look around to notice how differently the audience out here moves to this music than that in the pulsating gigantic condom over there where the tripped out waif assassinated my bliss  and left me limp and lonely and impossibly ancient by thanking me so profusely for being some kind of a music time traveler to, but not actually part of this scene at all: just a groovy old guy  showing props to the kids. And here I thought I was some subset of one in that raving mass of integers just grooving differently, separate but equal...  Nah.

And, honestly, I know that little gal meant well by me. And that she had no idea how my vulnerable psyche was gonna momentarily collapse in that moment of interruption and bubblebursting recognition of my (remarkable to her) presence. And the truth is I’ve always known somewhere down deep inside that not only have I probably stood too long at the dance but back in my thirties when I started following the thumping out into the places where the tribal sounds stirred primal movements and feelings, I was already a bit late to that party. But it has been a wonderful Ride On Time. And Time will tell you, if you bend your ear to listen, that music and movement are great ways to feel timeless and forever young, but the beat does go on. Within you and without you. And eventually it gets easier to tell the dancer from the dance.

 PB 2003