Sometime early on at the Dan Deacon show at the Fillmore, I remember that when confronted by a sticky dance floor, the thing to do is seek out the puddles of freshly spilled beer. If it is a choice of clean sneakers or smoother footwork, it’s not a choice at all. Later in the show, when Dan Deacon has us kneel around a dance circle, he tells us not to worry, that it’s not beer, it’s vaccine. Every so often, he stops the show to remind us all how weird everything is.
The second song Dan Deacon plays is my favorite, Crystal Cat, and I am briefly disappointed, not in the song itself, but that it has come so soon. I was hoping it would be near the end, when I will be most loose, most uninhibited. But I let that disappointment go in a second, why not become loose right now when there is an invitation to do so? I push my way closer to the front, where the crowd already knows the score and the dancing has commenced in earnest. I flail and pulse and realize this is the first time I’ve done so in years.
I first saw Dan Deacon at an afternoon show in a small parking lot in Baltimore. This was thirteen or fourteen years ago now and it was part of the summer DIY music festival he threw back then called Whartscape. What I remember of those shows is cheap beer and sweat and being twenty, I remember elaborate and interactive dance games. Mostly, I remember feeling ecstatic, and every time I’ve seen Dan Deacon since, I’ve felt the same.
Dan Deacon is an electronic musician whose songs become living things when performed live, the record versions serving more as landmarks than pre-established trails. The physics of a good electronic dance show are as simple to understand as an ocean wave: somewhere, out where the water is deep, a swell begins, it builds momentum by alternating troughs and peaks, the peaks
grow steadily larger and larger, and finally, when a wave grows so large it can’t hold itself up any more it breaks with crashing kinetic energy. And so tonight we move the same, following a pitch or a tempo to an unsustainable height and then crashing cathartically when the beat finally drops.
On stage, Dan Deacon is behind a laptop and a magic board with glowing knobs and wires, the instruments of his trade. While performing, he alternates playing that board and stepping back to sing with pitched up vocals, holding the mic in one hand and with the other raising it to grab the air above his head. His strobe lights make him glow in red and green and pink. At other shows, I’ve seen him play right on the floor, surrounded on all sides by the dancing crowd.
The joy of a Dan Deacon show stretches beyond the music. I am not someone who gravitates towards crowd participation but when he orchestrates a game of dance telephone, I adherently follow the moves of the person in front of me, when he tells us to dance like voter suppression for Black and Indigenous people can be erased in our country, I stamp the ground hard as hell. There is philosophy in a Dan Deacon show: that personal release can be accessed through silliness, that joy can be shared with strangers, that happiness can be elevated into collective action.
To me, the man on stage is immensely likable with red framed glasses and discursive banter. At one point, he asks the crowd if any of us know Lenny Kravitz personally and then he makes up a story about how Joe Kramer from Aerosmith defrauded Mr. Kravitz of a fortune in cryptocurrency. He spends another couple of minutes imagining himself practicing his stage talk in the mirror at home, something about Odie the dog from Garfield; his being dumb, lets us all be dumb.
But joy is a complicated thing, constituting its own kind of wave, with troughs and all. In the middle of the show, Dan Deacon brings the lights up. He thanks the crowd for welcoming him back so warmly, this being only his second show since the pandemic. He tells us he is happy that we can spend the night with him but he also tells us that he wants to acknowledge that that happiness, in him and us, is only temporary. It is an odd thing to say in the middle of a show that is at least partially about escape, but the proposition he is making is an important one: that joy cannot exist out of context.
For the first time anywhere, I hear someone say out loud that there is a collective grief we as a country have not yet contended with, that there is a cloud above our heads still unpierced by the sun. When the next song begins slowly, he tells us to root our feet into the ground, to feel the dance floor holding us. He tells us to think about a person we may have lost during this pandemic year and maybe not had a chance to grieve over; he tells us that it is okay to grieve for that person right now, that we can do so by dancing as a collective body of strangers; and because I am sweating, because I have been temporarily dispelled of cynicism, I choose to believe him, I choose to dance for the person I lost; I dance in anger, I dance in grief, I dance in all the ways I’d have him know I love him; and at the end of the song, when the wave crashes and everything is allowed to release, I dance without thinking at all. When that song ends he thanks us for being there, he thanks everyone working at the Fillmore, he thanks the opening acts, and most emphatically he thanks everyone in the last year he’s met who has welcomed him with softness and kindness, he makes me think maybe I can welcome people in that kind of way too.
The show moves on, from heaviness back to lightness, as if the latter is always accessible by way of the former if you know the right person to show you the way. He plays the songs I want to hear: Sat by a Tree, When I was Done Dying, Fell into the Ocean. To all of them I dance, finding the spilled beer and sliding my feet through it, dancing for a time with a man who looks like Andy Warhol, he is wearing cowboy boots and a thin blazer with skulls on it and when the song ends we squeeze each other’s shoulders goodbye as if to say, I see you.
With a couple songs left, Dan Deacon breaks in one last time to explain why there will be no encore. Like, it’s so silly, all I’ll do is walk to the side of the stage and look at my phone for forty seconds. He thanks us again, apologizes that he has to close with something so capitalistic as a pitch for his merch table, reminds us that if we should ever see him out in the world, we should stop him to say what’s been up with Lenny Kravitz lately, any lie you can come up with is good. He tells us this is the last song, Feel the Lightning, and that we should start jumping now, he says that tomorrow when our friends ask what we did tonight we can say we did calisthenics with a fat forty-year-old man, but I think I’ll tell them something different, I’ll say that thanks to a man and his magic board I joined a crowd of people all letting everything go, I’ll say that I danced in a puddle of vaccine, and when the last wave crashed, I rode it all the way into shore.
