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On June 2nd, 2023 I woke up next to m’lady in a yurt in southern Tennessee. I’d had a pretty rough sleep – experiencing an uncomfortable and unexplained illness during the night – so we spent much of the morning lounging inside the air-conditioned VIPness of the yurt while I tenderly took stock of my innards. It seemed I was pretty much fine, thank ye gawds.
This was the second day of a four-night stand with King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard at The Caverns, about an hour south of Nashville. We’d seen KGLW the night before when they had pummelled the sold-out 1,800-strong crowd that was gathered inside the utterly unique cave-venue that had drawn the band (and us) to such a small, out-of-the-way town for a multi-night run. Jet-lag had kept me exhausted and sober during the show and I was hoping for a stronger personal showing for night two, so illness was out of the question.
After relaxing as hard as I could I finally dragged my carcass out of bed around 11am. We drove a town or two over to Tracy City for breakfast and a few groceries. Being in the south it was all I could do to resist ordering biscuits and gravy (I just drooled on my keyboard) but my fragile health simply wouldn’t allow it. I consoled myself with corned beef hash and eggs, which probably wasn’t a genius move either. By the time we were cruising the aisles at the grocery store my illness had reprised just enough for me to say “no” at every food and snack suggestion m’lady made. “Want some chips?” No. “Should we get some peanut butter and a loaf of bread?” No.
All bad decisions, every one, and all made under physical duress. To this day I can’t believe we walked out of that store without a single discernible snack of any kind. Sick, indeed. When we got back to the yurt I laid down for an hour until boredom finally forced my ill health aside. I got up and cruised the concert campground until I found a small jam where I could borrow a guitar, and there went the rest of my pre-concert day.
I had been severely disappointed in the opening act the previous night and was happy to skip them on night two, which saved us a lot of fatiguing standing around on the moist, poured-concrete floor of the cave. We made the short pleasant trek through the woods from campground-to-cavern around 8:30pm and found a spot beside the soundboard just as Kamikaze Palm Tree played their final note.
Nailed it.
During the brief changeover I noticed Mason from NY was standing just in front of us. He was one of the afternoon jammers, the guy who had loaned me the guitar, so I tapped him on the shoulder and introduced m’lady. Just as King Gizzard was about to begin I gave him a wave and said, “Talk to you in two hours!” He replied that he might leave before the end because he wasn’t so into the band’s heavy stuff. “But what if they start with their heavy stuff?” I shouted over the crowd’s welcoming applause.
“They don’t usually do that,” he answered. Hmmm, I thought. I was about to respond that I wasn’t sure that was necessarily true when the lights went down and King Gizzard exploded all of our skulls with a four-song mini-suite of sonic piledrivers that damn near collapsed the cave (I’m in Your Mind>I’m Not in Your Mind>Cellophane>I’m in Your Mind Fuzz). About twenty-five minutes into the pummelling Metallica-meets-Godzilla romp I leaned into Mason and yelled into his ear, “I think they might start playing some heavy stuff soon!”
Having a six-piece band raging at you for all they’re worth from a tight stage just a few dozen feet away affords one plenty to pay attention to, but every once in a while I managed to distract myself enough to appreciate the venue itself. After all, it’s not every day I see a concert inside a real-live cave (these two days notwithstanding; for the next two nights King Gizzard would be playing outside on The Cavern’s much larger outdoor stage). A shallow, sloping room with a rocky roof that wedged down to a knee-high stage, it looked like a miniaturized Red Rocks with a low stone ceiling. To be honest, it was so perfect it almost seemed prefabricated, Disney-esque even. The room was reminiscent of The Flintstones or the set on that ’70’s kids show with the Sleestak and the dinosaurs; kind of like the inside of the fake mountain that stands in the middle of Canada’s Wonderland. No way around it, the Cavern Underground is a pretty nifty place to see a concert.
As I mentioned, the show started heavy and as I recall it pretty much stayed that way until the last half-hour or so, when the Gizzards picked up their specially-made instruments and concentrated on their deliciously innovative and arguably groundbreaking microtonal material. There was no encore.
Bottom line: Great, great show.
When the lights finally came up Mason was gone. I hadn’t noticed him leaving but he definitely left early. How early I could only guess, though I didn’t bother.
Despite feeling significantly stronger than the previous evening I once again almost didn’t drink any beers at the show. And just like the first night, when m’lady and I emerged from the cave we basically bee-lined it back to our yurt, though the walk home felt much less death-marchy this time. Matter-of-fact I could easily have done a few rounds through the regular camping area looking for some after-shenanigans, but this would be our final night living it large in the VIP village and we wanted to bleed the yurt’s air-conditioner dry while we still had the chance.
Todd Man Out 