Date: Saturday 6 September 2003
Venue: Jitters Café, North Chili NY
Duration: two-and-a-half hours (7:00 PM - 9:30 PM)
Proceeds: $10 (tips)
Wore
blue Levi's 550s
white socks
black Rockports & belt
dark blue geometric paisley long-sleeved shirt, 100% cotton
green T-shirt
SET I
Let It All Hang Out (The Hombres by way of The Nails)SET II
Save Tonight (Eagle-Eye Cherry)
Living With The Law
She Caught The Katy
Positively 4th Street
Purple Jesus (mine)
Ticket To Ride / There She Goes Again medley
Soul Man (Sam & Dave)
Spoonful
Industrial Disease (Dire Straits)
When The Spell Is Broken (Richard Thompson)
Ring Of Fire
Cinnamon Girl *
Sweet Thing* = added to the set at the last minute, when I discovered I was running short
Werewolves Of London
Prairie Rose (Roxy Music)
Squeeze Box (The Who)
Sweet Jane
Save It For Later (The Beat)
Lovers In A Dangerous Time *
Portland County Jail (traditional)
My Favorite Things *
Expresso Love (Dire Straits)
Tuxedo Junction
Veronica * (Elvis Costello)
Tangled Up In Blue
(What's So Funny About) Peace, Love, And Understanding
Lullaby Of London (The Pogues)
Walking The Long Miles Home (Richard Thompson)
The Crowd
House empty or near-so all night; a table of Roberts kids upfront feeds me energy early on, but when they leave all the good vibes go with them. Owner a constant and sympathetic presence throughout, though.
The Rundown
"It's a blues crowd, mostly," Gary (the owner) told me when we booked the show. Well... No, it's not. In fact it's no crowd at all, and it soon becomes apparent that the blues is in fact Gary's preference. Fairy nuf; he's about my only customer, in any case. And I am, as previously noted, a professional. Honest.
Highlights
Time to play Da Blooze, baby—my idiosyncratic take on it, anywise. Early in the first set, it's Chris Whitley's "Living With The Law," for my money a stone-cold modern roadhouse classic, with all the swagger and desperation of Muddy or Wolf. I've been playing it for years—my signature song, I guess—but tonight it just doesn't take off. My hands seem clumsy; my voice isn't doing what I want.
"Poz 4th St" is probably the finest in Dylan's litany of Fuck You Songs. On a night like this I'm feeling it. I'd been told what a great room this was; now it's empty, and I'm getting angry—and playing too hard: break my high E during the fifth verse, and must vamp a while to recover my wits. I get through the song, but the flow is broken—plus it necessitates a long break, only four songs in, to restring and retune.
"Purple Jesus" puts me back on a good footing. It's a big stonking riff and a joy to play, and more importantly it's mine. I've written well on a hundred songs over the years (of which about ten are actually any good) and barely played any of them in public—another of the compromises. I've made a conscious decision to start regularly working into my sets such originals as are adaptable to the solo treatment (most of them were conceived for a full band) and, more importantly, to start writing some new songs. Playing "Purple J," and having this much fun with it, convinces me I've made the right decision.
The medley of "Ticket To Ride" and "There She Goes Again" was meant to bring together the two most important bands of the Sixties on the common ground of Amaj+9. For all that Lou Reed talks about the VU as the anti-Beatles, these two are essentially the same song seen from different angles, lyrically and musically. Which makes this intermingling sound like a good idea. It isn't. In fact—in retrospect—it's a bad, bad idea. The ending never comes together, for one thing.
I don't know what possessed me to try "Soul Man." Perhaps it is that I am a Red Sox fan, and understand the allure of a great lost cause; and if one white guy with one acoustic guitar attempting to recreate the excitement of the Stax house band isn't the very definition of a lost cause, I don't know what is—no matter how florid the guitar part is.
"Industrial Disease" made the set as an example of late 20th c. machine-age talking blues. I'm pretty proud of the arrangement—though it's hard to make the riff melody (sounded in the recording by the keyboards) stand out amidst the chord voicings—but in the end, after it's over, I find myself asking Why bother?
I bang my head on a swinging overhead lamp and storm off at the entr'acte. (Well, I don't really storm.) I'm in a mild funk of anger and disappointment. Talking to Gary doesn't help matters any. He has, from the beginning of this, seemed vague about the crowd and the scene surrounding Jitters: now he's contradicting himself left and right. First he's telling me that Jitters had to scale back its music nights, as they were presenting bands four or five nights a week and it was just getting out of control, a victim of its own success—then in the next breath he tells me that "the crowd around here just isn't a music crowd." Uh, yeah.
It's depressingly familiar for me, in that Gary seems to be a type I keep running into: a basically nice guy whose thought processes I will never, ever understand. My gut feeling is that he worked for along time to open this little café, and now that he's got it he hasn't the slightest idea of what to do with it. I don't think he's particularly interested in making Jitters a venue for music (he just wants to make gourmet coffee) but he feels it's expected of him to be running —which makes dealing with him constant passive-aggressive dance, and thus a constant frustration.
Sick of the dance, I head into the second set in foul temper. I am no longer a professsional.
First heard "Prairie Rose" in a version by Big Country, on a non-LP B-side. Still one of the best covers ever recorded, I think; it takes the high romance of Ferry's lyric and puts it into an unironically heroic context that's wholly appropriate, but that Roxy, saddled with its inherent archness, could never muster. The result is thrilling: a sly little love song for Jerry Hall becomes a paean to the American West itself, a big-sky swirl of guitars and shouts and giddy-up drums. I'm afraid I let the song down terribly here. I've arranged it for fingerpicked drop-D, but my worsening nerves lead me to fumble the riff, and the tune seems turgid and inappropriate in this set—and again, I've got no ending. Scratched off the list, for now.
I'd reimagined "Squeeze Box" as a Delta blues (bottleneck in open G tuning), but take it a little faster than I should: the result falls between the bluegrass-rock of the original and the greasy back-porch lope I'd imagined. Still, it was better than I'd feared.
For the traditional "Portland Co. Jail," I stay close to the arrangement we used back in the days of We Saw The Wolf. It's still a fun song, but a bad choice for this gig—too frenetic.
"Tuxedo Junction," of course, was a hit before your mother was born, though she was born a long long time ago. A big-band staple as an instrumental—the Glenn Miller Orchestra's version is the most famous—it actually has words, which I sing in a faux-Creole growl. It's also got, in my version, an ambitious guitar part, which sets a thumb-plucked bassline against partial chords in the treble, with the mute-trumpet counter-melody rendered as bluesy bends on the A and the D strings—oh, and the horn cadence of the coda is in there, too... My reach ssssslightly exceeds my grasp, here. Maybe with two more weeks' rehearsal I'd nail it; or maybe not.
What I Learned
Don't play angry. The songs get away from you; you play too fast, you don't talk, you lose control of the pacing, run short of time, and prolong the agony.
A show to an empty house is not a disaster—it's a rehearsal.
Know the tunes cold. Better than cold. When you're out there naked, you can't have a hair out of place.
When choosing the songs, trust your gut.
Don't be a show-off. Don't try to demonstrate your virtuosity unless you're damned sure you can do the trick.
Making yourself out to be something you're not, for the sake of getting a gig, is a losing proposition. Be yourself.
In the end? Blood on the saddle; a pretty lousy show, overall. But if I've gotta crash & burn, better to do it for an empty room.
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