What's Up! Magazine

Rooftops perform during their show on Nov. 20 at the Rogue. (Photo by Paul Turpin)

The Rogue has long been an appropriate venue for a kind of beer-void zen visited upon the dumb consumer (me, still representin’). I was lulled into that trance half-way through Pan-Pan, the perennial opener for Rooftops. Had this cave-like bar caught fire, I doubt I would have changed my leaning stance against the low concrete sound booth.

Pan Pan plays a kind of open-form jazz-pop that, when accompanied with the more formalist Rooftops, fills me with a sort of optimistic nostalgia, as if we the collegey white folks could bring back that wood-winded hipster sublime of the late 40s and early 50s and this time not corrupt it into supermarket Kenny G, but build it into a Republic whose citizenry could really grasp at some fundamental beauty… I didn’t think this at the time, but I swayed like I believed the music.

Even if the Rogue were to install their vaunted sprinkler system, the absence of which will soon be their musical undoing as reported earlier, I think I would just stand on, wet-faced, looking up at the lingering memory of the band on stage. When it was Rooftops’ turn, they mostly didn’t elevate themselves above the crowd. Only one of the three guitarists stood on the stage. If I had to sketch the theme of a Rooftops show, it’s the presentation of a formal unity, those tripartite guitar sequences, those three-voiced lead vocals, whose golden unity generously reaches out to the tight huddle of audience around them. It could help that the band, as a small town act, is strongly supported by their immediate network of friends, who loyally attend each of their shows. But I think it’s fair to characterize Rooftops as a strong aural contribution to a burgeoning cross-media art movement in Bellingham whose main practitioners happen to be their biggest fans and best friends. When the three guitarists beat and steady strum-tapped into the warm updraft of “Raft Easily” a smile lit from one face to the other, before they started into the chorus all as one, nearly the only vocals in the entire set with the refrain of “I want a . . . I want a . . . I want a.” The audience is smiling too. (we can generalize in harmony . . . .) And as strings pop, and Mark’s face contorts in embarrassment briefly from a missed cue, and those careful chord structures off-kilter a bit like Johny’s asymmetric mullet, the symmetry is still held by those smiles around. And swaying together. This is (and ought to be) popular music.