New World a-Coming, Ch. 14
The BNRO at the Straight Theater
Late summer, 1967
One night I was at the Straight, a big cavernous old ex-movie house at Haight and Cole streets, when the Band was opening for Big Brother, and they had started their set acoustically—in fact, out in the street in front of the club, and then the winds and brass led a parade in through the doors, through narrow aisles, and up onto the stage.
It was this big cavernous space--used to be a movie theater--and you'd think that the echoes from an electric band would have been bouncing right off the walls, but more than a lot of other bands, the BNRO knew how to handle their own volume and balance. and I think maybe the arrangements that yes get bay wrote took that into account too. Etsy told me later that they had had to play so many hundreds of gigs over the years behind the curtain, sometimes without any kind of electrics at all, that they had learned to just kind of get by.
A lot of the San Francisco bands liked to talk about the cosmic multimedia aspects of everything: I remember them some of them got really messianic about feedback and bad sound and just volume, , but the Band always kind of sounded like an orchestra to me. I had heard orchestra concerts with my mom back in Cincinnati, when she was trying to raise us with some sense of, culture after my dad died, and I had to admit that I still had something of a, soft spot for all that, black tuxedo music.
But the band sounded different from that too: they could get as loud as the rock and rollers, with all the horns and drums that they used, and they had that multimedia thing, that the players dressed and moved and and the ways that the singers moved, and then when they danced on the instrumentals. But it always felt a little bit more rooted than, the acid dancers from the acid tests, and you always had the sense that the Bassandans were coming from some kind of shared space or place. They could function inside the crazy lights and projections of the Joshua Light show, but you didn't really feel that they needed, that kind of spectacle to get their thing across; they were already pretty spectacular all in their own.
That was another thing they seemed to have going for them: although a lot of the hippies liked to paint their faces, whereas a lot of the bands like to wear vintage clothing that made them look cool like they were out of Old West posters, the Bassandans always painted their faces before they played, at least most of them. I never really talked to Etsy or Yezget-Bey about it about it, but you did get the sense, if you are backstage with them before a show when they were painting each other's faces, that they were going into some kind of religious space or maybe a ritual. They didn't necessarily explain the ritual, but you did get the sense that they were turning into something else, someone else, even before they played the first notes.
Yezget-Bey didn’t get into the face painting, or really even the costuming or the dancing that most of the players and singers did; sometimes he would be standing in front of the band, and he would just tilt his head or lift a finger and point, and the music would go off in another direction. Other times he’d step out from behind his music stand, and walk toward one or another section; he might lean over to Ishayo or Aisha, the saxophonists, and shout something in their ears—it was really, really loud and echoey in the Straight—even while they were playing, and then he’d drop his hand, and the rest of the Band would drop out, and the saxophones or trumpets would go into their own thing, all honking at the same time as they were all improvised, but sort of collectively, like they’d played together so much that they could kind of anticipate what each other was going to do even before they did it, or as if some small gesture from Yezget would signal a totally different piece or direction in the music. And sometimes it would be the singers—the girl Raakeli, who had long curly hair, and pale skin, and bright, bright blue eyes, even under the stage lights, might sing in this kind of yodeling keening kind of way, and the band would drop out entirely from playing, and then sing along underneath her, and then the drummers would come crashing back in. Sometimes it was the dancers: they would jump down off the stage, and dance in the middle of the audience. It was wild how, even in the middle of those crowds, people would just clear back while those girls danced.
I loved watching the BNRO chicks dancing; it wasn’t just that weird frug that some hippie chicks had learned in high school, and it wasn’t the crazy-dervish stuff that some of them did at the Acid Tests. But the singers, especially the ones called Ani & Raakeli: they sang and moved like they were comfortable in their own skins—like they didn’t have to get out of their minds on acid or MDA in order to let their bodies take over and tell their brains what felt good. And the flute player called Tereza—she (I think it was “she”?) was one of the ones where you couldn’t tell boy or girl: played like a man, moved like a girl, but short hair and flat chested and dressed like a raggedy tomboy, with a newsies’s cap and corduroy overalls.
There was an older dude who sat in on a few numbers that night; I don’t know, even now, if they were regular members or just friends of the Band, or maybe not even that—maybe just guys who wandered in off the street. There was this short guy with short hair and a thick beard like a US president—Grant or somebody—and glasses, who played a weird electric guitar, a brand I never heard of, really loud, that was covered with Cyrillic writing and had extra strings and tuners on it. Even when he didn’t touch it, it put off all these sounds—buzzes and crackles and these low roars—but then he’d move his hands, and the noise would stop, and it would sound almost like he was singing through the instrument, really pure and sweet.
I remember that Etsy was in full flight that night, and he and the women in the in the violin section—I remember the leader with the henna’d hair, Madame—kind of dueled with each other, and with the Joshua Light Show projections. He was so damned beautiful up there, wearing white clothes like a vodouiste and with his white clothes and white hair and beard taking on all the colors from the light projections, that for most of their set, I just stood below the stage and stared up at him.