Photo by MARK LIKOSKY
Ty Segall is like a combination Buddy Holly, Jerry Garcia and every character who’s ever died in a Mad Max film — but shorter, thicker, with a moonpie face and long dirty blonde Cousin It hair. We go way back. I’ve seen him in small venues like The Knockout back in his budding SF days. Those were smaller scale performances but he’s retained that same sincere demeanor of a committed devotee to shredding a hole in his private darkness and unleashing a blinding haze of purifying rock n’ roll light to awaken the masses. He is the sort of performer who could book a show on an empty planet — let’s say, for the sake of argument, Uranus — and disintegrate nearby moons and melt the sun with nothing more than a fuzz pedal and a Marshall stack. In a city like Philly with such a strong psych rock scene Ty was welcomed with warm ears as he effortlessly traumatized the Troc with what was the heaviest set I’ve ever experienced. I do Jiu Jitsu and I’m used to getting tackled and suffocated by guys over 250 lbs. This was heavier. I’ve seen steamrollers smooth out concrete streets on hot summer days. This was heavier. A local female power trio called The Long Hots opened the show, shredding out long heavy discordantly blissful jams with extremely minimal equipment. All told, the $30 door price was well worth the price of a much-needed primal scream session of psych rock therapy. How refreshing it was to walk out of the Troc on a rainy Sunday Chinatown night thankful that I ventured off the couch from Wild Wild Country binging to witness something wilder, weirder and altogether wonderful. — MARK LIKOSKY