Description
A live performance by the lords of rock, for the pleasure of those with discriminating taste and the purse to afford access. Performed at the Ottobar on April 9, 2005. Including bonus features and interviews.
The history of the Upper Crust is a subject that is, to say the least, controversial, in that various versions, reversions, diversions and perversions of the truth, as well as innumerable tales, anecdotes, accounts and outright fabrications have been put forth with a consistency inversely proportional both to their demands upon our credulity and their authority, in such a manner that the origin of the Upper Crust remains a subject that inspires bewilderment and perplexity among the best-intentioned and most sincerely curious, and the truth remains obscured as much by the sheer volume (in both senses of the word) of oft-acrimonious debate and the strident clamor of opinion, dispute and testimony, again, as much of it documented and attested by scholars of integrity and veracity, as it is obscured by the inventions and outright mendacity of those who would (sadly, but such is human nature) abuse our confidence in a matter of such unquestioned significance, in that one and all despite their differences are agreed upon an essential article of faith: namely, that the Upper Crust are the very font of all that we know today as Rocque and Roll and without a doubt the most important ensemble in the history of the world. That said, here, in a nutshell, is the story as most would agree it took place: Four young noblemen met one sunny spring day in 1730, or thereabouts accounts differ as to the actual location, at a chamber music concert by the shores of a beautiful lake or river or perhaps by the seaside? and being bored, impatient and given to the Dionysian antics and diversions of youth, decided to commission their artificers to make for them ingenious contraptions that would produce musical sounds amplified, as it were, by the application of the then-new technology of steam power, combined with advances in mechanical engineering such as the invention of the vacuum chamber and the flush toilet, the several felicitous discoveries in the field of chemistry and alchemy that provided a grateful humanity with ether, laudanum and the various modern alcoholic distillations, as well as the discovery of electricity with its sad train of attendant disasters, and that of gravity itself, which, while never previously identified as a principle of the physical sciences, had in fact been utilized from time immemorial, and observed by Archimedes himself, who shrewdly noted that a fall from a great height was very often fatal. The result, which at the time was truly and I use the word with the greatest circumspection revolutionary, was an entirely new species of music: no less, in fact, than the very birth of Rocque and Roll. While their contemporaries looked with scorn upon the “infernal racket” produced by the Duc d’Istortion (lead guitar, mezzo soprano), Count Bassie (bass guitar, castrato), Jackie Kickassis (drums) and the Lord Bendover (guitar, basso castrato), time has proved the still-vibrant and irrepressibly vital Upper Crust entirely and triumphantly right and their critics, never well favored in the best of times, completely and quite idiotically wrong.
