Church Of The Friendly Ghost gets religion, sort of
Image via Flickr
Amir Coyle, one of the more, uh, "spiritual" acts to pass through the Church's doors.
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Despite the name, the Church Of The Friendly Ghost isn't a religious institution, but the avant-garde music organization does enjoy flirting with the occasional spiritual endeavor. The group got its start hosting jazz, folk, and electronic music shows at a rented former church in East Austin and now maintains both a congregation and weekly Sunday services at the Salvage Vanguard Theater. While the Church refrains from asking for help from a higher power, it’s still in need of the occasional blessing to fulfill its mission of aiding "the proliferation of creative music”—help in the way of extra gear and maybe a piano for touring acts to play. To that end, the group has organized Saturday's tent revival at East Austin's The Compound to raise money in pursuit of its earthly goals. The evening includes music of a decidedly secular nature from Peter And The Wolf leader Red Hunter, Book Of Shadows, Hello Lovers, and more, as well as spiritual offerings both sacred (water balloon baptism, an appearance by performance artist/preacher "Bible Belt Jones") and profane (tarot card readings). In anticipation of an event that's likely to confuse the hell out of a good handful of Austinites who aren't in on the joke, The A.V. Club spoke with organizers Henna Chou and Aaron Mace—the Church's answer to Ted Hagee—about the more spiritually inclined guests to pass through the group's hallowed doors.
The A.V. Club: Has there ever been any confusion about what sort of “church” you are from your neighbors—especially when you were back in the old space?
Aaron Mace: Sometimes, yeah. Once, at the original church on Third and Pedernales, a group of five Outcry In The Barrio guys walked through the door during a Numbers On The Mast show to "check out our ministry.” If you can imagine, they’re all big, and they were wearing matching Outcry In The Barrio T-shirts. This is a substance-abuse recovery ministry, to a large extent. They were ex-addicts, ex-cons, ex-gang members. But they're also totally sincere, friendly fellas. They're pretty direct and intense in their approach—if a touch pushy. We were all drinking beer, and we had a really hard time explaining exactly what it was we were doing. They didn’t seem to catch on that we were just some guys living in there who were basically having a party. At that time, I think we referred to it as “throwing shows,” and they were really confused when we told them we weren’t really having a church service.
They were cool about it, and they asked, "Can we pray with you anyway?" And we talked to them, and we were like, "Actually, no, you can't." We didn't want to be rude, but we also weren't going to actually hold hands and pray together right there in the chapel. So they said, "Okay, but you can't stop us from praying outside!" So they marched out and stood in the grass across the street, all held hands, and stood in a semicircle, praying these big, loud, man-prayers. Eric Archer recorded the prayer session, and he worked some samples from it into the Numbers On The Mast performance later on. I heard there were rumors among some of the older folks around the neighborhood that we practiced witchcraft or something. Which wasn't true at all, of course. There was definitely some discord between how the neighborhood experienced us and how we experienced ourselves.
AVC: What about from the performers? Do you ever get touring acts who think they're going to be playing an actual church?
AM: No, not really. They all pretty much know the score when they come in.
AVC: So the tent revival is going to be your first experience with actual hollerin' and soul-saving?
Henna Chou: Well, there was Amir.
AM: Right. We did have this one guy play at the [Modern Aural Sculpture] Symposium named Amir Coyle.
HC: He was really sincere.
AM: Amir is a very pretty, very serious young man. He's 20, I think, and he's actually a male model part of the time. And he makes it known on his MySpace—and by announcing it before his performance—that he's fighting a spiritual battle to cure his mother's cancer through a kind of soul-prayer performance. So he's this really pretty, really swarthy, svelte fashion model shaman in these peg-leg jeans, vintage boots—
HC: The vest.
AM: Oh yeah, with no shirt underneath, and this awesome West Coast, Lenny Kravitz/Slash-fro. And lip gloss—the plumping kind. So here's Amir, bare-chested, flailing, doing this very sincere Jim Morrison impersonation-meets-Assembly of God supernatural ecstasy, speaking in tongues, and curing his mother's cancer. And this is serious! She had been diagnosed with a few months to live years ago, so it's working. It's not comedy. And he's got this stick. He's screaming and stomping and stabbing himself in the abdomen with a pointy stick.
HC: It was like he was trying to stab everywhere the cancer was.
AM: And he's jamming the stick down his pants. He's totally surrendered to the spirit world, wrestling a demon that was apparently trying to take possession of his crotch. And then he starts doing this tap dance and swinging his arms in these huge, Pete Townshend circles. And the way he's tapping—I hear it as, "Hello my baby / hello my honey / hello my ragtime gal.” He's tapping away the cancer-killing boogie and I just lose it. I start giggling like I'm 15 years old and I've just gotten stoned for the first time. I couldn't stop laughing. I had to run out of the place and try to contain it, with tears streaming down my cheeks. We'd definitely have him back.
Amir Coyle image via Flickr
