The decisive sound of bowling balls smashing through pins echoes through a nearly empty bowling alley in Portland's Hollywood district.

It's a lazy, crisp Fall afternoon tinged with the melancholy which autumn implies. Outside the cavernous bowling alley, people are waving those American flags like good-luck charms, like an incantation to ward off evil. Americans are scared for the first time in their lives, and those flags have more to do with fear than with freedom.

The Fireballs of Freedom have affixed a small American flag decal to the driver's-side window of their tour van. The van
has a quintessentially post-college communal-living alternative-lifestyle touring-rock-band feel to it, with smashed greasy potato products on the carpet and the band's "piss bottle" (a used Gatorade container filled with Fireball urine) sloshing around on the floor. I'm guessing that the flag decal straddles
a delicate line between postmodern irony and old-fashioned sincerity, a muted gesture which states that freedom would be nice, even though it's impossible to achieve.

It is perhaps important to note that none of the Fireballs of Freedom are practicing Muslims, nor do any of the members admit to being terrorists, nor of cooperating with international terrorist rings. But one never knows for sure, eh? As we roll through two cordial games of bowling, I decide that they're just a bunch of nice guys, although American in a way that might not last much longer.

We don't talk about music. I'm tired of goddamned music. There is no more useless entity in the world than a rock critic. I'm a man with a lingering hatred of almost all rock music recorded after 1963. I can't believe we're in the 2000s already and rock 'n' roll still EXISTS, much less chugs along unaware of its irrelevance. I'm a guy who'd be happy if all vestiges of rock music were purged from the earth. It simply doesn't
matter to me.

With all that said, I will note that the Fireballs of Freedom are a very good band with an iron grip on the hazy metallic desperation indigenous to the flat, lonely, exasperating Midwest.

The original Fireballs lineup congealed in a fit of bored urgency about ten years ago in North Dakota, land of Giant Buffalo Statues. Kelly Gately, amiable Fireball guitarist/vocalist and sometime pizza chef at Dante's who bears a passing resemblance to Mickey "Monkee" Dolenz, explains that in North Dakota, there's "Nothing to do but pretend you're going to
college, ingest drugs and music...constant music. It keeps you alive up there."

A few years ago the Fireballs relocated to Missoula and forged a reputation as Montana's finest psychedelic hardcore band before re-relocating to the relative urbanity of misty Portland town.

Live, the band smashes up things with an intensity one might not expect from such fine, well-mannered gents. They're a buncha wiggly worms up there on stage, melting down all resistance with a rock-'em sock-'em bronco-bustin' energy
and herky-jerky jazzlike rhythms. Experiencing them live is frightfully intense blast of solar heat...almost like the feeling one gets when you, say, stupidly snuff out your cigarette in a flashpot onstage and melt off half the skin on your hand. They're that powerful.