Who Cares About the Music?

To those who did not come of age (read: discover sex and Led Zeppelin) in Lawrence, this little town with a big ego is like the island in Pinocchio where the wicked boys were sent to overindulge in cigar-smoking and pool until they transmogrified into donkeys — at least until, in what appeared to be the last vestige of a grown-up hand attempting to control errant youth, the city banned smoking indoors. Still, a frequent complaint against Larry is that the same youth culture that consistently brings great indie bands tends to alienate anyone who’s not an early twentysomething with — it’s true, damn it! — horn-rimmed glasses. Even recent college grads living in Kansas City feel a bit out of place moving through the Mass Street crowds.

This perceived impenetrability is probably why the movement to rescue the Esoteric has been so, um, esoteric. Unless you’re one of the well-loved heavy-metal crew’s modest legion of followers or you happened upon its Warrensburg concert (see Prairie Dogg, March 10), you probably haven’t been prevailed upon to donate funds to this band, which lost its practice space, its studio, most of its equipment and — for three of its members — its home in a February 22 fire. I finally had the opportunity to drop some Pitch money in the collection plate last Tuesday and Wednesday at The Bottleneck and The Granada, respectively, when the Esoteric held its first official hometown benefit shows. Jejune Lawrence white-kid camaraderie was in full force both nights — especially at the cavernous Granada — as 18 bands played 20-minute sets, passing on every cent of each night’s $5 cover to the homeless headliners.

Fortunately, only a couple of bands on the bill were in the same genre as the Esoteric. Because, frankly, I can’t stand the Esoteric’s music. I’m thoroughly impressed with the band’s near-virtuosic ferocity — displayed both in the taut, roaring interplay of the guitars and drums and in the balls-out charisma of hardcore barker Stevie Cruz. But listening to this throat-ripping death-metal nonsense is about as much fun and as uplifting as watching the kitsch-sucking goth kids and lard-ass, small-town ex-football players eat it all up like sugar-dipped balls of soot. There’s so much of this kind of maggotsatemyfleshcore in the Midwest that I have to wonder how — even in places like Iola, Kansas — kids can find their lives so devastatingly dull that they have to get their aesthetic kicks listening to the musical equivalent of a pack of cats going through a bolt-making foundry.

Much love to ya, Esoteric.

In some sense, though, the sprawling event wasn’t about the music at all, a point that reflects the good side to Lawrence’s frustratingly tightknit scene. While Conner was onstage, I encountered Adam and Drew, who were sitting by a back staircase talking to each other, evidently uninterested in the proceedings — though they’d obviously paid to get in. They pointed out that the benefit was well-attended mainly because Cruz and his bandmates are humble, amicable fellows.

“Despite their harsh sound, they’re very soft-spoken dudes,” Drew said. “There are plenty of people who don’t like their music, but everyone knows them.”

“Yeah,” Adam echoed darkly, “and there are plenty of people who, if their house burned down, I wouldn’t come to a benefit for.”

Another blessing was that the bands donating their time and pushing their merch were fairly diverse soundwise. But apart from the Esoteric’s admittedly impressive performance — which seemed to raise a spectral cloud of smoke from the stage by the end of each night’s demonic catharsis — the doubleheader’s highlights were a couple of MCs and an almost-country band.

Tuesday night, the shorn-headed, intimidatingly smart Mac Lethal auctioned his soul for $4 on behalf of the Esoteric, then launched into a familiar but moving set of Jesus-dissin’, mom-missin’, off-pissin’ hip-hop. Then, on Wednesday, before kicking out the jams with automatic flow and his trademark rapid-fire sign language, Approach stood back and let cohort DJ Sku effortlessly prove himself the single most talented bastard of the evening with a series of physics-defying, classic-rock-sampling turntablism, making the crowd move for the first time all evening — and causing all rappers who lack such proficient sidekicks to drool all over their hoodies. (We love you, Lethal, but you gotta do better than that double-A-powered backup band.)

Also in good form was KC’s Buffalo Saints, whose pile-driving alt-country resurrects the ghost of Uncle Tupelo — and chucks empty bottles at it. These boys get extra points for donating $2 of every merchandise sale to the Esoteric’s cause. Not that they sold any, but it was the only gesture of its kind that I witnessed.

It’s hard to complain when a scene, however inaccessible to outsiders, creates the possibility of two full evenings of ten-course local-music feasts — a deeply gratifying sampler of the established and the hopeful (some of whom outright sucked, which is helpful in its own way). After all, would a live music benefit of this magnitude and of this nonblues, nonfolk nature even be feasible in Kansas City? Just as Lawrence is known for swarms of so-called music supporters who pay the cover only to glare smugly at whatever act dares to mount one of the town’s hallowed stages, Kansas City has a deservedly bad reputation for its otherwise upstanding young people who go out only to sit at the bar, poking at the screens of lame-brained video games while ignoring whatever band might be playing its ass off, then driving home completely smashed.

I don’t know about you, but I’ll take the music-respecting Larrytown brat pack over that kind of imbecilic indifference any day.