"I don't want to be rich-- I just don't want to pay."
I tried to write this damn column once this week already, but for some reason I stalled out. Maybe it was the strange chemicals I ingested on All Hallow's Eve, but my initial attempt at this column just didn't look right to me anymore.
It wasn't too bad, the original piece. A bit of B.S. about my cluelessness as concerns industry up-and-comers because I'm too cheap to spend my precious beer money on records (and too lazy to get a real job...) led to reviews of a few serious industry darlings and heavies who swung through town last week.
Chris Whitley's show at Starr Hill (10/24/00) with the Soul Coughing rhythm section was discussed-- how they rocked (although the mellow stuff didn't really get me in the boo-boo, as they say) and how Whitley's fresh and devilish guitar work actually held up the electric band much better than I at first thought it might.
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"Set aside the brilliant freshly aquired Soul Coughing rhythm section (one of the baddest funky drummers in all of hipster popdom in the form of Yuval Gabay), and you've got an ex-junkie-style wifebeater-clad "sensitive rock and roll fetishist" kind of sexy girl-toy ripper taking new rock chances on a pile of electric dobros and old Martins slung too low and sounding metallic and beautiful. Very uncommon fingerings and puncuating slide spots in (I assume) a variety of open tunings provided a seductive percussionoid semi-acoustic front end for the funky deep rock the rhythm section effortlessly oozed. The slower tunes kinda bored my unfamiliar ears, but the rockin' bits-- where Yuval Gabay and Sebastian Steinberg streched out into the power pockets that used to rule the Coughing groove while Whitley spat metallic shreds up the center-- occasionally verged on divine. An inspiration, really."
I then launched into my "but" sequence where I detailed the way the show ended at 11:30 with people still arriving to hear music, and how I felt that an hour and a quarter is too short to play for a crowd that payed over ten bucks to get in. The biggest loser, I thought, was Starr Hill, who could easily have sold another several hundred dollars' worth of booze if people hadn't been rushing out to find someplace else to drink the rest of the night away.
"Oh well," I surmised, "Red Light (the Dave Matthews via Coran Capshaw (or is it vica-versa?) management juggernaut) just picked up Whitley last spring, and they are-- as you know-- deeply tied into Starr Hill, so I'm sure they forgave themselves. I just don't get it. Apparently Whitley's only been working with the Coughing crew a few weeks (Billy Martin and Chris Wood, another of the hipster pantheon's most touted rhythm duos, appear on the most recent record) -- so performable material might still be at a premium. Good show though, however brief."
I then tried to talk about Elliot Smith's show the following night at Trax but it was kind of a joke because although I did stick it out until almost the end, without the context of knowing his songs by heart, the show meant almost nothing to me. Really mediocre rock and roll, I thought. Tragically mediocre, really.
The place was packed wall to wall with perhaps the most uncomfortably square looking crew ever assembled in Charlottesville, a really crappy dead dumb keyboard and whiny squalor simpleton pop band called the Grandaddys opened (I spent their set wandering around telling people that my toothless 89 year old grampy could kick Grandaddy's ass), and then at least Smith didn't totally suck. I fully expected him to. You can't be this popular with a bunch of pasty comic book store loving zeros like this and actually be worth a damn. But he is. I thought his three-tune solo acoustic encore was far more intriguing than the rest of the show's full-band watered-down Bad Company vibe, and I think I'd have come away a believer if he'd just done the gig like that and gotten me good and depressed with it.
The following night Trax was a ghost town for Oteil and the Peacemakers, and I was sad for it. Sure Charlottesville, pack the place to the gills for a trumped-up just-barely-decent three-chord yawner like Smith's band, but a high-brow visionary jazz crew like Oteil Burbridge's gets crumbs and still blows the big house down.
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The Allman Brother's/Aquarium Rescue Unit bass player is towing a radical act of serious fusionoid jazz blowers that live to settle into massive funky solo sections, usually led by dialogues between Oteil's amazing bass and whatever instrument was slated to solo. They'd come out of some spiffy spit-polished new-world jazz head into a deep funk pocket and he'd start the soloist off by copying the first few lines of their lead on the bass as a sort of "call and response" then he'd cut 'em loose and let 'em wail. And wail, they did. The "straight from the guts" sax rippery of Kebbi Williams was especially powerful from where I stood. Charlottesville hasn't had this much fun with funky fusion since Warren Richardson and Robert Jospé backed Tim Reynolds' TR3. It was a really amazing onslaught that only 70-ish people got to experience. Peace.
