I don't aspire to spend my Saturday nights in college student unions. So, though I'm a fan, I was tempted to skip Fog's show last night at the Whole Music Club in the U of M's Coffman Union. But I knew I couldn't miss it when I heard at the last minute that Fog was the opening band, and the main event was a thirty-year-anniversary performance of guitar master Rhys Chatham's 1977 "Guitar Trio" composition.

Though called "Trio," the composition has been played by more than three guitarists for quite some time. Last night the seven guitarists—seven!—included Chatham, plus Erik Fratzke (Happy Apple, Zebulon Pike) and Andrew Broder (Fog) from Minneapolis, and Rob Lowe, Ben Vida, Todd Rittman, and David Daniell, all from Chicago. Greg Norton (formerly of Husker Du, currently of The Gang Font) was on bass, and Tim Glenn (Fog) played drums.

You know that almost ethereal intensity of a really passionately played rock 'n' roll guitar solo? Multiply that by seven, and imagine it lasting forty-five minutes. Seven guitarists played the same chord at the same time, while Norton played bass and Glenn played drums. During the first twenty minutes, Glenn tapped the same cymbal to the same beat, in fact, which seems pretty conducive to a repetitive-strain injury.

This was one of those shows where I looked around and thought How can this be the entire crowd? It was historic, and utterly underattended. Yes, it's underground and off the mainstream radar, but that's the beauty of it.

Rhys Chatham was a founder of the No Wave music movement in New York in the seventies. His minimalist, avant-garde style is influenced by punk rock. He is a composer, a guitarist, and a trumpeter, and was the first music director of The Kitchen, in New York City, where he helped guide musicians such as Philip Glass and Brian Eno. He expatriated to Paris twenty years ago, where he has since composed a song for 100 guitars ("An Angel Moves Too Fast to See") and for 400 guitars ("A Crimson Grail Moves Too Fast to See"). But "Guitar Trio" is his signature piece.

Chatham and David Daniell are touring twelve U.S. and Canadian cities in support of the thirtieth anniversary of "Guitar Trio," using local musicians at each venue. The shows are being recorded and will be released on a CD called Guitar Trio Is My Life.

During last night's performance, the seven guitarists all stood in a circle around the perimeter of the Whole's tiny stage. Chatham led the group by turning around to face each of the guitarists and nodding to each. Though all seven electric guitars played the same chord, strumming on various places of the guitars' necks, Chatham led the tempo and beat changes. He was the conductor of this show.

Andrew Broder, Mark Erickson, and Tim Glenn's performance as Fog was a long time coming. The group hasn't been playing many live shows lately since it's been busy recording a new CD, Ditherer, which comes out this spring.

Fog's set was all new stuff from the upcoming album. Judging from the songs "You Get What You Paid For" and "My TV Has the Plague" (I'm guessing on the titles here, since I haven't yet seen the liner notes) I can't wait to hear the recording. I already know "Your Beef Is Mine," which is a cover of rap group Mobb Deep's "Eye for a Eye," will soon be playing on repeat on my iPod.

Broder's nasal-y, yet somehow sweet-sounding voice, blended perfectly with his pretty guitar licks, Erickson's rocking bass riffs, and Glenn's hard drumming. When three guys from Why? joined on vocals during Fog's last song, "Hallelujah, Daddy," it was the perfect end to an invigorating set that preceded the absolutely mesmerizing "Guitar Trio."

I have a confession to make: Unlike some of the editors in our office who know the difference from the Minneapolis Sound and the sound Seattle stole from us, who know the names of the members of Tapes 'n Tapes, Happy Apple, and Atmosphere, I am by no stretch of the imagination a music connoisseur. Nor am I one of the Tim Mahoney fans that have been following him since his days leading pop-rock band the Blue Meenies. I'm also not a fan of anyplace where my small stature lends to being pushed, trampled, shoved, and spilled on. But I do like attending events that bring together a good scene with good music and people.   

The last few times I've seen Mahoney were at his solo shows—just him, his guitar, and his boyish smile. But I never really got to see him flourish as I did last night, at his CD-release show for Leave/Stay at the Fine Line. In a Mahoney-fanatical environment complete with screaming ladies and whistling gents, he thrived. Playing for his hometown crowd, the man was in his element, playing easy-to-sing-along-to tunes of love and love lost.

A more stylish version of his twenty- and early thirty-something fanbase, Mahoney took the stage dressed in deep-blue jeans, a plain fitted white T-shirt under a black tuxedo jacket, and a five o'clock shadow, his brown hair curling out from under his fedora.

He opened the show with "Piece of You," a song with in which Mahoney pleads "I'll take a piece of you, with me, wherever I go, wherever I go." The girls in the crowd were instantly doe-eyed, singing along and bobbing their heads in unison. Through the rest of the show Mahoney sang songs from his new album,  including "Stay," "Leave," and "Sticks and Stones." When I got a chance to talk with Mahoney during an intermission, I was surprised to find out that this was the first time he performed these songs live.

With ten years in the industry and seven albums under his belt, it's evident that Mahoney has grown up a bit since his past records. He doesn't seem to be chasing down fame and his lyrics seem to be more heartfelt and earnest, bettered by heartache, loss, and age.

After watching Bill McCallum’s Tom Wingfield smoke a pack of Chesterfields through the opening monologue of The Glass Menagerie at the Guthrie, I can almost forgive Star Tribune theater critic Rohan Preston for rhetorically asking if this play has any relevance for today’s audience. At least I hope it was rhetorical. Because even as I suppressed giggles watching McCallum blow noxious, yet arty, second-hand rings over what is assuredly the most smoking-intolerant audience in Minneapolis (north of the Children’s Theatre), and even as I sat there inside the big blue Target-sponsored spaceship and rolled my eyes as McCallum set the scene of a domestic economy dissolving amidst “shouting and confusion and labor disturbances,” this was still ol’ Tennessee’s writing being resuscitated. And if any playwright had a grasp on the foolish optimism that’s (still!) at the heart of the American dream, he did.

Maybe Rohan is right, and today’s audience would rather see a reality TV cast heal thyselves than pay attention to these windy, emotionally brittle, psychologically warped, transplanted southerners hailing from a drama written in the forties. But this play is about misguided self-confidence, and the weekend that I saw it, I had just read two intriguing essays on optimism in The New York Times and Foreign Policy magazine. Delusional optimism, you see, is running up an unmakeupable trade deficit with China, embroiling us in an unaccomplishable mission in Iraq, and about to hand an altogether winnable election to Rudy Giuliani in 2008.

So yes, to answer your question, Rohan: Tennessee Williams is still relevant. (P.S.: Shakespeare isn’t played out yet, either.) Tennessee’s still relevant because misguided optimism is at the core of Williams’s mostly-autobiographical play. And while this production of The Glass Menagerie will likely be remembered by the root-root-root-for-the-home-team crowd because Guthrie vet Harriet Harris as Amanda Wingfield seriously out-divas Queer as Folk's Randy Harrison as Tom Wingfield, any production of this play, from high school on down, turns on the gee-whiz self-help B.S. of The Gentleman Caller in the last act. And, of course, this show is beyond anything our local prep ensembles can muster. When Jonas Goslow’s boyish, arrogant Jim O’Connor unwittingly corners lame, shy Laura Wingfield (played with just the right amount of Precious Moments–collector dowdiness by Tracey Maloney), Tennessee demonstrates the brutal collateral damage that that American brand of casually clueless optimism can have on the less sure, more fragile citizens among us.