Casey Dienel et al, Big Car, 6.3.2006

The show, of which Casey Dienel (pronounced “dye-nell”) was slated to be only one-fifth, took Forrest and I 45 minutes to find. It’s in the backest of the back of this old warehouse in the Fountain Square district of Indy, which is this novel little poodle skirt and hot rod, not really updated since the 50’s neighborhood. We got there at 8pm, which is when the show was supposed to start, and walked into a large-ish white room, cluttered with the typical things one would assume an arty collective room would be cluttered with—Rubbermaid tubs full of whatever, stacks of nameless collage-work and unclaimed oil paintings leaning against walls, and, funnest of all, the majority of the room was stark white and people were drawing on the walls with markers—mostly decontextualized verse, naked caricatures, and boho-political scrawlings. An itty bitty blond girl was drawing in one corner, and she turned out to be Casey Dienel. In the meantime, more people had wandered in, and the show began.

I had been anticipating this show since reading about Casey Dienel’s stage presence at Casa de Flux (during an IM convo the day of the show, Matthew told me that “at first, she’s all tiny and demure, but then, all of a sudden, it’s I OWN THIS FUCKING STAGE”) I was anticipating she’d go on last, but she ended up third, behind a really great solo set (guitar/harmonica) from Mike Tapscott of Bloomington’s (and Jagjaguwar’s) Odawas. The reverb through the mixing board gave him a Grant Lee Phillips texture that was pretty great. Next was Dylan from this Massachusetts band Tiger Saw, who played a glittery silver electric guitar and sung lonely, sparsely constructed songs while standing very still. After Casey came Liz from Picastro, who wowed me. She claimed to have Guns ‘n Roses’ “Night Train” running through her head the entire time, but the sound of her music belied that fact—she used every ounce of the hollowness of the room to create a spare, gently haunting sound very reminiscent of early-ish Cat Power or Ricki Lee Jones. Then, a dude from local band Elephant Micah played, but we were really tired by this point.

The only reason we came, though, was for Casey Dienel, and she didn’t disappoint in the slightest. She unloaded a Roland keyboard that was literally almost as big as she was, and that’s when I asked her if she would please play what Matthew told me was a miraculous cover of “Cut Your Hair.” She agreed, and sat down to play. Lit, like the rest of the performers, by a wad of Christmas lights on the back of someone’s painting, she started into some effortless banter, the first banter of the evening, about how she spilled coffee on herself a few minutes before and hoped that she got the stain out enough. Before and after each song, she would chat with the assembled 15 or so people in folding chairs—talking about her birth by C-section in 1985, the fact that her boobs weren’t as big as some other boobs, and, best of all, the origins of some of her music.

“Doctor Monroe” is about a strange German man, and “Frankie and Annette” (mp3) is not, I repeat, not about the Beach Blanket Bingo duo but in fact a semi-autobiographical tale spun from two unnamed sources and Dienel’s own experience working at a cheese shop. She just fucking tore shit up live—ripping through six or seven songs with the confidence of a girl who dropped out of conservatory to play pop music, which she did (she told me it was because she would get so nervous that she would puke before performing in front of a jury). She started into “Cut Your Hair” (mp3), of which I missed the first 10 seconds or so because I was fumbling with my camera. And, well, I recorded it on a camera, which is a digital still camera, so you can get an idea of how it sounds. But it’s here, and it’s wonderful, especially what she does with the lead break about 2/3 through. Matthew wrote about it better than I can. We chatted her up after the show, and she told us all about her move to Brooklyn, her boyfriend, and then Forrest gave her a postcard of her painting and she told us that she drew her own album cover art, which is incredibly cute.