When Dan Deacon came out into the crowd and stood in front of his rig of electronics, which was in front of a row of five large speakers set up on the Echo’s stage, he told us that he’d just got in on a flight after attending his grandfather’s wake. The crowd howled morosely and Deacon said, “No, no, It’s OK, it’s OK, in fact, I’m excited for him… This song is called Red F.”

It was insanity from that point on. At the simple announcement of the song the crowd went insane. I was standing in at the back of the venue like I normally do, waiting to see what happens, and what happened was astounding. I’ve been to shows before where the audience gets moving. Usually it takes a couple songs before the majority of the crowd gets into the movement, but for Dan Deacon almost the entire audience, packed in around him, threw their arms in the air and started dancing.

I didn’t know what to expect from Dan Deacon. I listened to all of Bromst a couple times and I had some idea that the show would involve a bunch of people standing around with intelligent looks on their faces listening to his complicated and noisy form of electronic music… but dance to it like there was nothing else in the world, like there was nobody watching? I never expected that. I never heard the dance music in Deacon’s Bromst until I saw it first hand.

Someone pulled out a massive stitched together sheet made out of multiple blankets and it spread out over the top of the audience, hovering in the air above us all, held aloft by the mass of limbs and hands jutting up into the air, catching the strobe lights and the lasers, and I felt, in that moment, like I would simply expire if I didn’t get myself in there and start dancing with everyone else.

Note: I don’t dance. I don’t like to move my idiot body around. I’m tall and skinny and (most importantly) extremely white. I’m all sharp angles and awkward movements. I knew that if I went into this crowd, this specific crowd, I would be at home with a large number of people who didn’t give half a shit what I did. So, dance I did, sandwiched among a undulating, violently moving throng of people, with a sheet above us keeping in the heat we were generating.

After Red F, or maybe after another song, Deacon stopped us and had us put our right arms in the air, stand on our tip toes, and reach for something invisible as hard as we can. Then we were instructed to leave only our index finger raised, and slowly bring it down onto the top of the head of someone else random around us. All the heads in front of me were taken so I turned around and put my finger on the head of the older gentleman behind me, a white guy in his early 40′s who looked a little bit like an older version of me.

Deacon instructed us to repeat after him, a speech whose words I can’t remember right now, while staring directly into the eyes of the person we have our finger on. The gist of the speech, what made me feel awkward, was that we apologized deeply to this stranger, a heartfelt apology I’ve never uttered to anyone in my life, much less a stranger I’d probably never directly wronged in my life. The experience was, regardless, cathartic and unique.

The concert continued in much the same way set by Red F, with the crowd (and me) going completely insane. The mass of people would surge forward on him and his rig, and we’d get pushed back, sometimes by a couple of feet at a time, everyone falling all over each other but holding each other up. At one point I was launched (and how, I don’t know) out of the right side of the dance floor and almost hit the ground if it weren’t for some guy reaching his arm out and grabbing my hand flying through the air and pulling me back in.

Deacon’s tricks didn’t end with the apology. For Snookered, with its quiet and contemplative beginning, directed us to stare at the mirror ball in the ceiling with our arms in the air reaching for it, and to slowly converge together into the center of the room until we were all crammed together in a big circle. He spoke, telling us to think of a time that we were truly happy (if I remember correctly) in the way children are, to close our eyes and imagine this place and time, and to reach for it as hard as we can. We did, and when Snookered really got going we were so packed together that it was impossible to get apart, and we were left with no choice but to dance as one solid unit, one solid mass of excitement and energy.

He staged a dance off, in which the rules were that both dancers on the floor had to hold their right hands tightly together at all times, while keeping your left arm in the air with a single jazz-finger extended on your left hand. This was pretty much fucking insane, and by the third trade off no one was holding the others hand, and sometimes there were three people on the floor, and finally Deacon instructed everyone to “Get the fuck in there!” and it was madness again.

A friend of his lead all of us in an “interpretive dance” of one of his songs, which was fun, if a little awkward, as at one point I ended up with my dude friends ass in my face. He was lucky, as he ended up with some blonde chicks ass in his crotch. Near the end of the set Deacon led us in a massive human tunnel (like at weddings or something?) forming line which resulted in the majority of the attendees standing outside in the Echo’s smoking area, holding hands with a stranger. (I was holding hands in the air with a girl while her boyfriend stood uselessly next to me, apparently unwilling to hold hands with the girl he accidentally got paired with.)

A couple times I thought I might pass out from the strobe lights in my face and the sheer amount of energy I was expending on keeping my legs and arms in the air, but there was no escape from the crowd. In these moments I found myself happier than I’d ever been, with the thought in my head that I didn’t care if I passed out (the crowd would hold me up anyway), I just wanted to keep dancing, I just wanted to stay in this moment for as long as I could.

By the end of the show not an inch of my clothing wasn’t absolutely soaked through with sweat. I looked at myself in the mirror after and I saw a goddamn mess, but I had one helluva smile on my face and both friends I took to the show with me looked like they had the time of their life. I did, too, and for that, I have to say:

Thank you Dan Deacon.