It's another glorious day of fog and possible rain here on Long Island. I swear to you that this weather is seeping into my head and working my moods like a marionette. My brain is hooked up to these strings while the sadistic weather puppeteer has me switching from glum and blegh, to chippy and happy (this happens on these brief occasions where the sun shows itself). It's coming to the point where all I want to do is stay in bed. I don't think I can take much more (in the back of my head the weather is now shouting "dance for me puppet dance!". I think I might be losing it).
Usually my moods are dedicated by what's going on around me (I think this is common in most people) so I don't like the weather dictating how I feel. I should be making those decisions on my own ("I said dance!"). So I'm turning to my ipod for a bit of escapism. I need something to kind of wash away the gray, to part the fog even if for five minutes. I'm not asking for much, I'm just looking for a glimmer. There is no surprise that my ipod hears my pleas for help and gladly obliges my need to feel the sun. When O.A.R.'s (…Of A Revolution) On Top of the Cage starts to play I can't help but smile (for starters instead of five minutes I get a six minute reprieve from the gloom).
My relationship with O.A.R. is very special. There was a time where they were basically all I listened to. I first heard them when my college roommate, Jason, returned from what I believe was a successful trip to Canada (I'm not entirely sure how one has an unsuccessful trip to Canada). He had downloaded a couple of songs that he had heard up there (like Contagious by the Isley Brothers which is an incredible guilty pleasure) and one of those songs happened to be the studio cut of Crazy Game of Poker (which is an O.A.R. staple). My initial thought was "what the hell is this?" but Jay was persistent (or just didn’t care that I wasn't a big fan of the song) and continued playing it. After awhile I found myself tapping along and eventually singing along, and a love affair was born. Well almost. I decided that I would buy my first O.A.R. album and chose their third release, Risen. Again I wasn't overwhelmingly impressed. It was just okay dawg (yeah a little Randy Jackson) but I decided to fight through it. Maybe it was divine intervention that lead me to buy their second album, Soul's Aflame, but after that there was no turning back. I was officially, for better or worse, an O.A.R. fan.
After that I was buying all their albums and found that these guys were made to play live. The structure of O.A.R. is the live experience. The albums are more of a gateway to the live show. It's like "yeah we wrote these songs but they sound better live so hurry up and learn the lyrics and meet us at the show", and I was all over that (seeing O.A.R. either nine or ten times. I've lost count). I signed up on http://www.oarsa.org/ , which is the best site for any O.A.R. fan. They have set lists of every show and a community of fans looking to trade shows and talk music. I quickly got wrapped up in the whole fan community trading for different shows at a rapid pace and making friends all across the country. Like I've said earlier I never really got into Phish but I respected their fan community, you remember the Phish-Heads right? These were my Phish-Heads, and the whole experience was excellent. I ended up with tons of different shows spanning all stages of the band. I had never felt so immersed in a band before.
I was telling anybody who would listen how great O.A.R. was. I wanted nothing more than for these guys to make it. I loved that they played these small, intimate venues but they deserved better. They deserved to be played on the radio, they deserved to be heard. That sadly is where the love affair started to head a little south. O.A.R. did become more known. Touring with Dave Matthews Band and playing festivals like Bonnaroo got the band's name out there and they started to develop a different group of followers, teeny boppers. Teeny boppers are a disease and usually quickly bring about the downfall of many a band. This was no different. The crowd at O.A.R. shows quickly changed to fourteen and fifteen year olds who were getting drunk for the first time and wanted to a sloppy sing-a-long with the band's staple songs. There was no interest in the larger catalogue, as long as Poker was played this crowd was going home happy.
Then a terrible thing happened. O.A.R. noticed the change in audience and started playing to them. This was a band that was rooted in reggae music and jam band like styles, who have huge influences that can be heard in their music, now was starting to play a song used on the trailer for the re-vamped 90210. The first album to start their pop movement was Stories of A Stranger. I was at their album release party where they played the whole album front to back. I could notice the new sound a bit but it was surrounded by a bunch of older songs that were re-tooled and recorded for the album. The O.A.R. I loved was still there so I didn’t mind, I kept telling myself "it's okay. One or two pop songs gets radio play and that draws in the numbers to the rest of the awesome." Wrong. It was the beginning of a shift in sound.
When All Sides was released I was offended, actually to be more accurate I was hurt. I felt so betrayed by the band. It was like they had completely forgotten their roots and just dove into this pop scene to become just another band on the radio. To me O.A.R. was more than that. This was the band I would listen to at any moment of any day and feel happy, totally at peace. Their vibe and their sound would just wash over me and I would be free. Now they seemed to be turning their back on me. To me All Sides is pretty much unlistenable with two exceptions, both of which make me think of my wonderful wife. First being Something Coming Over which is actually a much older song that is recorded for the first time here and the other being On My Way which is a brilliantly beautiful new song. These two songs are the only good things to take away from this album.
So after All Sides I sort of stopped listening. I stopped going to shows (and I would see them at least once a year). I was angry and like I said hurt. I thought it best not to listen because it either reminded me of the band that was or the band they had become. After some time I sort of loosened up and realized that it was okay to listen to the older material. The new stuff wasn't for me, but there was no reason for me to ignore the music I fell in love with, that I enjoyed listening to. So I opened up and started listening to the classics again, and instantly I felt the same. This was my band again, this was my sound. O.A.R. has a new album coming out in Septemberish and they say it's going back to more of their roots, and I want to be excited about that but that's what they said about All Sides too. At least I'll always have their older material.
That's where On Top of the Cage comes in. I'm going to be honest, the studio cut isn't the greatest. Like I said before the studio cuts are the foundation of the song and to get the full structure you have to hear it live. On Top of the Cage is definitely a live song. Usually in the middle there is a guest spot, in most cases it's Scraps from Ordinary Peoples, who usually freestyles a couple of bars and that leads into a longer jam. Actually there is this great freestyle from Scraps where he works in titles of different O.A.R. songs into his rhymes. It's pretty epic. It's just a song that makes you want to bounce around, it's perfect summer music. In fact it's the perfect song to wash away the gray for six minutes and helps to cut the strings of my evil puppeteer ("Dance!").
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