Date: Saturday 8 November 2003
Venue: Jitters Café, N. Chili, NY
Duration: two and a half hours (7:00 PM - 9:30 PM)
Proceeds: $11.00
Wore
skinny black jeans
black shoes & belt
dark blue geometric paisley shirt / green T-shirt
wolf-hammer-cross pendant
The Crowd
Sparse, but that's not bothersome: I knew what to expect going in. Gary's not in attendance, either, which makes me feel a bit of an ass for so front-loading the evening with Da Blooze.
The Rundown
Loose. Good mood, good time. Tonight's more or less for me—a rehearsal, really.
Highlights
I nearly start the show with an off-the-cuff version of Nick Drake's "Pink Moon," in honor of the lunar event this evening, but in the end decide against it: whimsy and good intentions will only take you so far, if you don't actually know the damned song.
From the more recent (post-1960) pages of the Great American Songbook, it's Nina Simone's "My Baby Just Cares For Me," in a modified claw-hammer ragtime style with three fingers plucking chords. It's a great groove, when you lock into it—right wrist a limping metronome while the bass skips merrily along. The on-the-fly gender-reassignments on the lyric are great fun, too: Mel Gibson is not her style / and even Tom Cruise's million-dollar smile... This'n's a keeper.
Also nail "Wish I Were In Love." Nail it. Good and hard. Finally. Thought that fucker was gonna be the death of me.
On the other hand, "Tangled Up In Blue" gets away from me. Blindsided: I've sung this song about a hundred times! Wha'hoppen? I'm so rattled I completely skip "Can't Help Falling."
End of the year always makes me think about mortality, which led to me casting an eye over this year's obituaries for potential songs. Robert Palmer left us this year, of course, and though I liked him well enough, I'd never actually learned any of the songs. As it turns out, there's a funny thing about "Addicted To Love": it's a blues song. It doesn't sound like it, but when you isolate the guitar riff, it's a whisker away from something Willie Dixon might've written. Take the tempo down a notch, and there's a slow, grinding roadhouse number inside.
However, this revelation is in itself useless—a clever conceit is not enough to produce a good performance. It would help, for instance, if I actually knew the words, or could come up with a decent spoken introduction. But I don't and can't, so the end result is a mess.
So was "Poison Girl." That Big Stoopid Riff is more subtle and complex than it sounds (as with much of Chris Whitley's stuff), but the real dealbreaker was that my heart just isn't in it.
I've known "Whole Of The Moon" since an old hometown friend turned me on to The Waterboys in our freshman year of college—but I've never played it live before, because I could never work out a solo arrangement that pleased me: I tried a jaunty ragtime thing, but it never had the requisite drama. Recently, though, I heard Mandy Moore's cover, and whatever you think of the effect Moore's big, brassy voice has on the lyric, the backing track is just dynamite—there's a sunny, strummy, almost worldbeat feel to it, and something just clicked.
I've built my arrangement around a strum pattern not unlike that to Filter's "Take A Picture," which lets me play lots of different three-string inversions against open A and D strings: it's only three chords, really, but played about a dozen different ways. The drama comes not so much from the changes in the chord progression, which stays static, but from the change in the voicings. Thus do I refute those who proclaim in their ignorance that 1st vs. 3rd position for a Dmaj7 is an unimportant distinction.
On a good night my voice has three octaves, and while I don't feel compelled to use every note that's in there, I do like hitting the Big Notes, just cos I can. Now, when Thom Yorke sings "High & Dry," he goes to a weedy falsetto for the high notes on the chorus. Most of the song I sing quite softly, right up on the mic—but when the chorus comes up I step back about four feet and just roar it out, full throat. It occurs to me now that I might be missing the point.
"Now Be Thankful" would have been my sardonic/sincere version of a seasonal song, but it's really, really not good tonight. The guitar part has to be both flawless and offhand in order to work properly, and I'm criminally underrehearsed. And the tessitura of the thing is a killer: I'm at capo 5 (playing in G, for a vocal key of C), and the bottom notes are still too low for me. Damned if I'm taking it to capo 7, though: more intonation problems than it's worth, and for all the punch the sound will have I might as well play a goddam ukulele.
At the set break, I step outside into the old and look at the moon, a half-extinguished, red-rimmed coal on God's barbecue, and wish for the millionth time that I hadn't quit smoking.
Step back in for the second set, strap up, and launch into "Winter Song." It takes me a few moments of shapeless noodling in four-four to realize that I have, for whatever reason, started the song in the wrong meter. Getting back to six-eight is more difficult than it should be. Lindisfarne's original recording of this, BTW, really is remarkably beautiful—no drums, pristine acoustic guitars, a splash of mandolin and warm, melodic bass guitar—which makes its mystical hippie-Christian sentiments endearing, rather than cloying.
Ironically, the first time I heard these folk-rock also-rans, they scared me half to death. I must have been seven or eight. At the time, I liked to tape songs off the radio (literally—placing my portable cassette player in front of the radio speaker), and record my own comments in between, pretending I was a DJ. One day I left the recorder running while I left the room for a few minutes—the radio was in my parents' room—and when I listened to the playback I was spooked as hell by the song I heard; what I hear now is a mildly creepy ghost ballad in the quasi-Child tradition, but I was an imaginative kid. I never even found out who sang the song—I threw the tape away and avoided the radio for about a month. It was only last year that I ran a Google search on the phrase that had so rattled me —which I had never forgotten—and so discovered Lindisfarne and, eventually, "Winter Song."
Debuted another original tonight, a country waltz called "The Walking Song." The nod to Nick Cave is tongue-in-cheek, but the song itself—well, it's all a joke, until it isn't. Sparse, but pretty. My sister-in-law is at the show: she tells me later that this is her favorite moment of the night.
It feels risky, even slightly foolish, to take such a huge, overproduced rock classic as "What Is Life" and arrange it as a fingerpicked folk song, swapping electricity for nuance. I'm still undecided about it.
I've got a couple of minutes, so I throw in "Man Of Constant Sorrow" in a drop D, staying close to the spirit of Dan Tyminski's version, though (obviously) without his virtuosic chops. Fun nonetheless.
Ended with "Lullaby Of London," another song I've played a million times, and it's ghastly—an utter trainwreck. Amazing, to be tripped up by something I thought I knew so well.
Afterwards, a man in the parking lot compliments me on my playing, which I can't help but find ironic.
What I Learned
Falsetto would not be an admission of weakness: and even if it were, sometimes weakness is what a song needs.
Torquing the energy level down to a constant simmer (with a few carefully-placed explosions) is a viable strategy for getting through the night.
It's not always the tricky new songs that will kill you—sometimes it's the one you've played a skidillion times, the one's you think you know so well that you don't need to practice them. Jerk.
You're reaching a point where you can, for long stretches, churn out songs with efficient-if-not-soulless predictability. This is called professionalism; and though it is less memorable than either ecstatic flights or operatic fuck-ups, it is probably a good middle path to pursue.
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