By Mike Faloon | Photos by Michael Bogdanffy-Kriegh / Studio MBK
It’s chilly tonight, cold in ways our backyard thermometer can’t measure, cold in ways that slow down everything and induce a huddle-round-a-fire feeling, trigger the need to pull in closer.
The Spanish Donkey are having a similar effect. They push forth enormous arrays of sound—guitar and keyboards mixing and melting, drums securing the perimeter. Maybe defining the perimeter is more apt. The band’s outer edge is more permeable membrane than rigidly defined border—it has to be given the frequency of ideas flowing in and out; the dimensions of those ideas shifting from moment to moment. Keyboardist Jamie Saft stomps on quarter notes. Drummer Mike Pride pushes steady eighths, and guitarist Joe Morris moves at a pace that I can’t break down. Yet for all the different dynamics, there’s something dense, highly concentrated, about their sound, all the parts pulling in more than pushing away, more centripetal force than centrifugal.
The band’s name has me thinking of Don Quixote, specifically Sancho Panza, the realist, the voice of practicality.
Joe Morris looks down at his gear. He maneuvers massive amounts of sound, yet he’s reserved in his responses, stoic, the cool-headed engineer at mission control. (Is there something of Robert Fripp in his approach?) I notice a new keyboard pattern, rich, vibrant organ sounds. Did Jamie Saft just start that or has he been locked into it for the past five minutes? I drift to the drums. Pride fluctuates the patterns, steers clear of easily defined beats. Before long Morris reemerges, like storm clouds you’ve seen coming for miles but still manage to startle when they open up. When I stick with one player I lose track of the others, never sure for how long, then I’m surprised by what’s developed elsewhere.

* * *
Season 2 of House of Cards opens with a long, steady shot of a D.C. park at night. There’s no one in sight and it’s very quiet, too quiet for a city park. You scan the frame for movement, evidence of action, purpose. Eventually two figures, dressed in black, enter the frame, jogging side by side. At first they’re too distant to distinguish. As they slowly emerge from the dark depths you realize it’s Frank and Claire. The absence of edits lets you choose where your eye goes. You’re given the whole and with it a chance to sift through the bits.
* * *
Last weekend I went to a reading in Brooklyn. I ran into my friend Brendan at Grand Central. We walked a couple blocks west to catch the F train. Before we even got on the subway he was wondering if he should have driven. We talked on the train but couldn’t lose track of time because neither of us was familiar with the F line. We had to keep checking the map and trying to decode the garbled announcements. When we got to Brooklyn we saw open parking spaces and free moving traffic, and Brendan was convinced he’d made the wrong decision. “I should have driven.”
* * *
The Spanish Donkey can blast, play loud, push the amplitude of those sound waves. But for all the band’s volume, their relative restraint is more striking. It’s not about the horizontal (movement or structure) or the vertical (contrasts in pitch or tone). It’s this sense of branching out yet staying within close proximity.
* * *
Between sets I order a drink. The bartender, George, chats with Joe Morris. It takes George a moment to break away to take my order. He apologizes but there’s no need. Morris is holding court and I enjoy the eavesdropping. He uses the phrase “static density.” I’m uncertain of what the term means but it seems to fit the Spanish Donkey. I think it fits that scene from House of Cards, too.
* * *

Back on stage Morris shoots through the stratosphere. Meso- and thermospheres, too. He heads for the exosphere, still somewhat bound by gravity but merging with other realms. It’s not like other guitarists don’t hit these levels. They might do so momentarily, but as a solo, an aberration, the break from the routine. For Morris, it’s the norm, cruising altitude, the place where he builds and sustains.
* * *
Later, still unsure of how to explain static density, I write this as a placeholder: “all three players playing at all times, overrides volume and tempo and other variables.” But it doesn’t ring true, so I email Morris a few days later and he responds, “The forward motion of time as pulse is so slow that it feels like it’s barely moving. Therefore we can make form without being burdened by the pulse, unless we chose to be.”
* * *
The reading was outdoors, on the front patio of Hamilton’s in Windsor Terrace. The afternoon was roll-up-the-sleeves warm, a perfect day to listen to our friend Brian read from his new book and watch tattooed helicopter parents stroll by with canvas bags of coop veggies, trailed by scooter kids in soccer jerseys. After the reading we all moved inside to have dinner. The food was good and the laughter loud. We forgot the time and stayed for another drink. Brendan said he was glad he took the train.
* * *
Jamie Saft, army jacket-clad, belly length beard and short cropped hair (anti-mullet?), radiates holiday cheer. Or crush-the-state radicalism. Maybe both. He holds down the middle, provides stability, a foundation. He’s the Yggdrasil that links the band. Without him it falls apart.

* * *
In Chris Offutt’s “Sawdust” the narrator, Junior, living in the hills of Kentucky, struggles with the seeming contradictions between the values of his family and those of the outside world. He’s considering pursuing his GED and, among other things, he’s confused by math: “a pile of stove wood doesn’t equal a tree. It made me wonder where the sawdust went to in a math problem.”
***
Pride lifts the massive ride cymbal from its stand. It’s the size of a small kiddie pool. And what’s that dangling on the side? It's not a pair of EKG clips. Is it a handle? I can’t tell if he’s adjusting the cymbal or replacing it. He takes hold of the cord, which is a handle, and I realize the cymbal is a gong. Pride stands and bangs. He sets the gong on top of his floor tom and wails. Sheets of mallet-on-gong sounds rain down. Then he drops the mallet and appears to pull a stick from behind his back, Green Arrow-style. (Where’s the boxing glove stick?)
* * *
Morris, Saft, and Pride create different densities. They rotate through the roles of high, medium, and low pressure. It’s the contrasts, the differences, that generate movement, push things along. I mention this to Mike Bogdanffy-Kriegh. He says it reminds him of a quote from Moby Dick, “the tornadoed Atlantic of my being.”[1]
I email a writer friend, Sean Carswell, about the scene from which the line is taken. "The Pequod (the main whaling ship) travels through some straits near Sumatra. They encounter a pod of whales there. They also encounter a Malay pirate ship. They flee the pirates. The escape leads them into an even larger pod of whales. Ishmael describes it as being two or three square miles. There is a birthing center in the middle. Ishmael drops into a whaling boat (each ship has several smaller row boats for catching whales) with Queequeg (the harpooner) and Starbuck (the second mate). Queequeg harpoons a whale. The whale flees into the center of the pod. He drags the boat into the birthing center. In the midst of all this chaos, the whaling boat is suddenly stuck inside a beautiful, serene, peaceful place where humans almost never tread."
There’s something about the Spanish Donkey that elicits the timeless, the epic, the classic. Maybe it’s the way they treat time, push it aside, give it less spotlight.
* * *
Junior, a modern Sancho Panza of sorts, adds, “After all that ciphering, there wasn’t anything to show for the work, nothing to clean up, nothing to look at.” It sounds like a description of most commercial music—linear, sequential, everything accounted for, no mess and easy to digest.
* * *
Joe Morris: “I use the term free music. Free from any industry, institutional or critical oversight.”
* * *
The Minutemen followed their greatest success, Double Nickels on the Dime, with an EP titled Project: Mersh EP. “Mersh” being Minutemen speak for “commercial.” The cover art shows a trio of executives gathered in a boardroom. Behind them a line graph. In the foreground one exec cries out, “I got it! We’ll have them write hit songs.”
* * *
Joe Morris: “People ask, ‘Do you make any money? Will it be historically significant?’ My answer is, Screw you. It took me a long time to get to that.
* * *
Nights at Quinn’s are all about the sawdust, not the mess itself, but all that goes into making the mess, insuring that there is something to show for the work. I flash back to the Buddhist monks in Werner Herzog’s documentary, The Wheel of Time. Gathering for an initiation ceremony, they build a sand mandala, a large, stunningly detailed sand painting the size of a ping pong table. Hunched over the table wearing masks and holding narrow metal funnels, they work in shifts for several days, laboring 18 hours a day. No attempt is made to presever the mandala when the ceremony ends. The monks' work is swept aside like crumbs on the floor.
* * *
The next day there’s an on-line dialogue about the show. Joe Morris writes, “It's places like (Quinn’s) that are the hope and the future of all of this. Small, local and brave as hell is always the best.”
[1] “But even so, amid the tornadoed Atlantic of my being, do I myself still for ever centrally disport in mute calm; and while ponderous planets of unwaning woe revolve round me, deep down and deep inland there I still bathe me in eternal mildness of joy.”