Notes on a Buckethead Show

I am not well-suited for intimate jazz-metal concerts. The first half of the show blew me away and nearly brought me to tears (blues-metal isn’t dead, by the way; it is merely unemployed); the second half pummelled me, and I was half dead by the time I staggered out. I’d been overly warmly dressed, and not excited enough about the music to be able to ignore the discomfort of standing for four hours in dress shoes.

Buckethead, for those not yet familiar with the phenomenon, is a tall man who wears a Kentucky Fried Chicken bucket upside-down on his head, covers his face with an expressionless white Mardi Gras mask, and plays electric guitar like the mutant robot offspring of Jimi Hendrix, Tom Verlaine, Eddie Van Halen, and Tom Morello. He’s an associate of Les Claypool, Bernie Worrell, Bill Frisell, and that bunch, and is something of a favorite within the jam-band culture (eye-rolling as that culture can be, it at least has the virtue of appreciating technical brilliance, something far too lacking in the general indie world). His stage show abounds in a junk-culture aesthetic which includes samples from video games and Disneyland’s “Haunted Mansion” ride; displays of Napoleon-Dynamitish “skills” like breakdancing, doing the robot, and nunchucks; and, of course, heavy metal. If angry white boys anywhere cherish it, he’s probably used it — and subverted it. There’s a childlike innocence about his stage presence that’s either charming or infuriating, depending on your taste in musical showmanship.

Generally, though, he uses heavy metal the way, say, John Coltrane uses the blues: as a mode through which he expresses avant-garde ideas. There were too many rote funk-metal riffs for my taste (though both the frat boys who are starting to love Buckethead and the fat bearded stoners who shouted “fuck yeah” at random, mostly in my ear, seemed to love them), but compositionally, they worked as the departure point for his often-lovely solos. When he managed to make Van-Halenesque tapping more about texture than about showing off (“look ma, no soul!”), it was redeemed.

As mentioned, however, I am not built for endurance. Much of the second half of the show was spent trying to work the crick out of my back and the cramps out of my legs (I’m not used to standing, more’s the pity), and while I certainly don’t want to suggest that any given fifteen minutes of the show was less valuable than any other, I can’t help feeling that conscientious editing is always an artist’s best friend

Not that you’d know it from me.