Notes on Neko Case at Bimbo's 365 Club, December 2004

It has been so long since this acrid taste has set in the back of my throat: cigarettes and alcohol mingling in a pleasant sway as this woman wrings forth her voice. Specters of love past, distant factories, loyalties lost fly from her mouth in opaque clouds twisting around the room. They dance in and out of red velvet curtains, gently draped tables, rocking heads, fishnet stockings and horn rimmed glasses. They sweetly blow through wisps of long hair on tall, skinny musicians who back up that ethereal voice. Haunting, you have said.

She is beautiful, enthralling- that hair, the music, her sultry stare to the side- even the way she blurts out that she is bleeding and wants ribs with potato chips sprinkled on top.

For me she is an intersection between the present and my younger teenage self who reached for a model of something different, found in answer red hair dye, Aardvarks Odd Ark, mind altering substances, the Pandoras, Venice Beach, and Duckie from Pretty in Pink. Neko appeals to this incarnation of myself. For me, she evokes David Lynch- a scene from Twin Peaks where Audrey Horne plays a song on the juke box in the Double R Diner, languidly and seductively swaying in time to the spooky music.

I sip my gin and tonic and let Neko’s sway wash over me. I follow the treble of her voice on long midnight rides through abandoned doorways, forsaken meadows, dark woods, narrow alleys, pillows in gloomy apartments dampened with tears, and mornings with coffee when anger has run its course, and the outcome did not destroy life after all.