Birdsongs of the Mesozoic at the Knitting Factory

I had just finished reading John Strausbaugh's Rock Til You Drop when I happened to catch one of the 20th-anniversary shows of Birdsongs of the Mesozoic: a gang of paunchy, wrinkled, grizzly, gray-haired, middle-aged guys with rock instruments in their hands.

Strausbaugh's contention is that bands that have been around this long and are pushing middle age have no right to act like teenagers. Die before you get old, or at least drop the rock shtick. He offers a number of ways rockers could age gracefully: quietly pluck a blues guitar, strum some folk tunes, go into classical music, for God's sake.

Birdsongs grew out of the raucous Mission of Burma. Formed by Burma leader Roger Miller, who could no longer rock due to an advanced case of tinnitus, the band tried to take all the Burma energy and channel it into something?shall we say?more adult. I saw them in 1981 in an intimate setting at the RISD coffee house and was amazed at how they succeeded at fusing rock 'n' roll with chamber music. The highlight of the show was their excerpt from Stravinsky's Rite of Spring. Although playing quiet electric instruments alongside a piano, they pounded and wailed as if they were still Mission of Burma.

Twenty years later, Miller has long left the group, leaving pianist Erik Lindgren, electronic percussionist/keyboardist Rick Scott, guitarist Michael Bierylo and reed player Ken Field to carry on the rock/chamber tradition. This was a retrospective show, and the band made a convincing example of how to grow old gracefully. Starting from a rock 'n' roll base, the notated and elaborately arranged longish songs (lasting up to 15 minutes) meandered off into unpredictable places; Bierylo's chunky guitar solos crashed into Lindgren's virtuoso keyboard runs, which were displaced by Field's idiosyncratic reed solos.

As Lindgren jumped up off his piano bench to spontaneously conduct the other members of the band, I wondered to myself why more bands didn't pick up on the Stravinskian legacy. With their 4/4 rhythms and foot-stomping crescendos, it's a wonder that most bands don't keep a version of Petrushka tucked away in their back pockets (other than early Mothers of Invention, I'm hard-pressed to come up with too many other examples of rock bands tipping a hat to Stravinsky).

This was a heady set, fusing Stravinskian pounding, Reichian minimalism and plodding prog-rock rhythms. It was rock music not to dance to; the middle-aged crowd remained seated, listening closely, for the entire show. As they should have.