Dan Deacon headlines local Halloween party

I had to fight to get into the Compound’s Halloween Party. My group and I arrived shortly after it had sold out. They were prepared to close the gates on us, and we only managed to enter after pointing to a few people departing the event and convincing the bouncer that they were exiting permanently. And so we snuck in right as the chain link fences were closing behind us.

Inside the high concrete walls was a phantasmagoria of the kind that can only exist in low-budget, DIY artist-run spaces.

A blown-up tubular ghost was waving on the roof as if to welcome us to a quarterly car dealership sale. Lights were strung across tree branches and gutters.

The entire outdoor space smelled of herbs and spices, of shrubbery that was rarely watered by Natty Lite, which meant it was shrubbery of a kind unfamiliar to me.

“This place is so cool,” said one of my friends. Cool is so overused, but I agreed. It was the only word that really applied here.

There were two stages inside the building, one of which was tightly pressed against an entrance to a bathroom, the other of which stood a few steps from a makeshift bar that boasted some of the cheapest drinks I’ve ever seen outside of happy hour. ($2 beers! 2-for-1 whiskey gummies for $1!) The event was BYOB, after all. I saw several empty six-pack boxes littered across the few tables and benches and potted plants littered outside.

Performers included Abdu Ali, 83 Cutlass, Kotic Couture, Chiffon and Dan Deacon. There were many others too — it was a constant stream of music in every area of the venue. For a while, it was tempting just to stay outside and enjoy the various bands that alternated across the stage.

It was a mild night, especially after a few minutes of dancing, and the fairy lights above could be confused for stars if you really wanted to pretend you were outside the city limits. The trees and dried grass and straw spread across the yard made comparisons to the country tempting. I think there may have been hay bales, but I’m not sure. Eventually, we decided to venture indoors. We stayed for a bit when Abdu Ali took over the mic. He was spirited, waving incense about, singing “I’m Alive” with his full body.

Time was flexible, multidimensional, for a few hours. It’s tempting to blame it on the alcohol, maybe, but I didn’t feel very affected by that. It was a good crowd, a great crowd; I think that had more to do with it. Halloween is a holiday that encourages people to step outside of their comfort zone for a bit, and Baltimore’s a city that encourages that every day.

I never saw any bad behavior between fellow attendees. People were happy, smiling, and smearing face paint on one another’s shoulders when they went in for hugs. When Dan Deacon began his set, it was this energy that seemed to fuel him.

My friends and I could have climbed onto the stage and joined him if we’d wanted to; we were front and center. But there is a particular joy in being in the audience of a Dan Deacon show.

He got us involved. There were dance contests. He identified audience members by their costumes, and a few of them stood in the center of the room, a cleared space. That’s no small feat, to clear a space in a room so tightly packed.

But Deacon is able to, and those of us who attend his shows trust that he’s going to lead us to somewhere. The crowd was unified in the getting there. We shared an experience. It elevated the moment.

“Close your eyes, and think of someone you love,” Deacon told us.

“Close your eyes, and think of someone you miss.”

“Close your eyes, and think of a black person lost to police violence, ‘cause they fit those criteria for a lot of people.”

It was a somber interlude for an energetic, upbeat set. It was a worthy thing to stop and say, and it’s always an important reminder to have. I don’t know how to elaborate on it without coming across as contrived, but I can’t leave out those lines and still fully capture everything that Deacon’s set involved.

We all left for the outdoors shortly before Deacon finished. We were sweaty and sticky from dancing in the midst of fog machines. We danced for a short while longer outside, before piling into Ubers and heading back to our homes in Charles Village.

There are good quality pictures of the event up on the City Paper website. Don’t look at them. All my pictures are dark and blurry and fail to represent how purely happy I was in the moments I took them.

The best parts of the night (the best parts of any good Baltimore night) are captured accurately only in the grainy, constantly decaying film of memory. It was a wonderful night. That’s all I can fully hold onto: the way I felt, the way that feeling has lingered.