Last Saturday night, Les Claypool brought to Manhattan the closing performance of his latest road show, The Oddity Faire: A Mutated Mini-Fest.  The tour was prompted by the recent release of his new album (Of Fungi and Foe), but Claypool’s ambitions were greater than hawking the record -– the Oddity Faire was advertised as a celebration of music outside the mainstream, artists who reflect Claypool’s sensibilities, not necessarily in sound but in their courage and eccentricity.  The Manhattan performance was 4.5 hours long and featured four bands (including Claypool) and intermission sideshows.  What might well have been a too-full night of music felt instead — owing to the eclectic, accomplished musicianship, the sustained but diverse intensities of the music, and the goodwill and camaraderie of the fans (mosh pit excluded?) — like actual prolonged celebration of community and music alike.  Rarely did any of the bands feel like supporting acts, since even when the music was less immediate or unique, it was always compelling and vibrant and weird.

Secret Chiefs 3 (led by Mr. Bungle’s Trey Spruance) opened the show with a powerful 35-minute set that (loudly!) exhibited the variety of their influences.  Sporting hoods like a band of medieval hard-metal druids, they played music that was primal, visceral and atmospheric, its frequently spooky tone counteracted by piercing melodies and hard-rock just waiting to explode into looser, more hushed percussion phases.  The venue, Terminal 5, is a tall, converted warehouse that, at its best, feels like a prison — the perfect place for this type of manic energy.  The crowd already well in attendance by the SC3 set, it was clear that this was no opening band and that the show was already in full swing.

Coney Island Circus Sideshow (Photo by Christina Latimer)

In between band sets were short performances by the Coney Island Circus Sideshow.  Rarely have I ever brought a friend out to Coney Island and not checked out their show — inexpensive to enter, the cheapest beer in town, and lots of fun.  At Terminal 5, they were somewhat awkwardly placed on stage next to musicians striking their instruments (their own instruments, mind you –- constant reminder that this was probably a huge venue for these bands of limited renown), but there was something to hearing thousands of people gasp as a nail was shoved into a nasal cavity or a woman swallowed a sword and then bent over.  Next time you’re out at Coney Island, check ‘em out.

Following was O’Death, an Appalachian bluegrass metal band.  What a sound these guys made — this amalgamation of heavy, aggressive music over dark, meditative bluegrass jams.  Most of the songs would have held up if played solely on acoustic guitar, banjo and violin (all instruments used onstage), but with O’Death, the drum beat was merciless over the twangy vocals, the banjo ran through noisy distortion, and by the end of the set, all but two of the musicians were playing shirtless, a wonderful counterpoint to the singer’s frizzy mountain beard.  All of this sounds a bit like a clever experiment or pastiche, but there was honesty to the hybrid; it was not just metal intensity over acoustic instrumentation but rather a bizarrely organic sound — two genres of music tied together perhaps by a shared fear of God or death.

Odeath (Photo by Christina Latimer)

After another Sideshow interlude, two musicians, dressed vaguely as spacemen, took the stage and began to fashion a funky, distorted soundscape to which Saul Williams entered and recounted, in machine-gun rhythm, a list of artists.  Dressed as a character, both in outfit and painted face, Williams was a captivating performer, thanks to his fluid but aggressive dancing, the intensity of his occasional spoken-word outbursts, and his persistent optimism, which led him to consistently remind us we had gathered to “celebrate life.”  He was at his best with spoken word, but most of the set consisted of a funk-driven quasi-hip hop.  This predominant style was certainly entertaining, but up against the fierce originality of the preceding bands, it was hard not to see it as relatively generic.  But there’s no question Saul Williams is the real thing, and there were some facets of the crowd that remained energized throughout his 35-minute set.

Les Claypool and cellist (Photo by Christina Latimer)

No sideshow now but rather old-timey tunes or radio announcements to keep us company while I wonder how Claypool could possibly raise the night’s intensity.  But from the moment he stepped out donning a phallic mask and hammering the bassline to “Buzzards of Green Hill,” it was obvious that we were in the presence of mammoth talent.  The music was as loud and wacky as you’d imagine, the songs all exciting (about half of them from Purple Onion or the latest record) and fresh, and the four-piece band (bass, drums, double-percussionist, and cellist –- no guitar!) capable of lively frenetic jams without compromising the more precise song structures.   But for all its energy, the mix was clear and polished. Claypool’s songwriting and arranging intelligence could easily have been swallowed by aggressive noise without too severely dampening the crowd’s enthusiasm, but the guy takes his songcraft seriously, and the sound clarity emphasized the song as much as its performance.  The greatest attraction was the man himself.  He stood most of the set with one foot propped up on his monitor, switching vocals between his two microphones (the lower one, bequeathed to him by late Morphine bassist Mike Sandman, provides the zany character distortion heard also on records), occasionally dancing a little bit like a chicken, but always in control.  This duality, between his ironic zaniness and considered precise songcraft, creates a profound sense about Les Claypool — the same kind of sense I imagine Zappa might have imparted — and the whole of our evening culminated in his set — an hour and forty minutes in the presence of greatness.

The Oddity Fest was a wild night of music and performance.  There were times in the evening when I considered the untapped possibilities of a show like this — what if it were more of a carnival roadshow, with the musicians playing more interchangeably, with less distinct and rigid set times — but that kind of speculative noodling was no distraction from the celebratory atmosphere of an extremely successful mini-fest.  The bad news is that the tour is over.  The good news is that, according to the some of the Claypool fanatics at Terminal 5, we have only to wait until next year for him to put it all together again.