Wednesday’s show marked the first installment of my new residency at Brennan’s Pub in Marina Del Rey. My good friend Jeff has graciously offered me the first Wednesday of every month at 8pm opening for his incredible band Cowspace and I plan to fill those sets with new covers, fullfilled requests, and as many of my own musings as possible.
My approach to performing is that it is an honor and a privilege to have anyone’s attention for any amount of time on a stage (or on a blog for that matter). Furthermore, to express is what we live for, to put ourselves out there, and to let our hair down in the moments that matter to us most - it’s our revenge, our retribution, our redemption, and our offering. This show really felt like the beginning of that for me, and I’m bursting to break that levy. I played a ton of new tunes that have inspired me either lately or for a long time or both. I also dropped in a few covers from passed shows because people actually asked to hear them! Thank you for reading this blog and switching on your love for live music with me. Here’s the rundown:
Wednesday, October 5, 2011 - Brennan’s Pub - Solo Acoustic Show
1. “A Kiss Before I Go” - Ryan Adams & the Cardinals (Jacksonville City Nights - 2005)
The first song of this brilliant napkin sketch of an album, Jacksonville City Nights, “One Kiss Before I Go” is already over before you realize you’re in love with it. Somewhere out there (on a DVD included with limited edition release I believe) there is an unbelievably cool mini-documentary I saw once where Ryan compares his approach to making this album to that of a punk record - he doesn’t want to rehearse the songs to many times - he says the band will all start repeating themselves and become stale - he’d get bored - so he wants them to sound like these songs were only played once - he wants to keep all the mistakes that money can’t buy. There are mistakes all over that album, each one somehow making the song more and more invincible, making the recording more precious, humanizing the other-worldly existence of Adams’ songs through the Cardinals’ masterful yet very real, very immediate interpretations of them. It’s “wabi-sabi”, a term my mother always uses. I don’t know if she made it up, honestly it doesn’t matter because she’s my mom and that makes it truth anyway. Wabi-sabi is the beautiful imperfection in something that actually makes it far better than perfect could ever hope to be. Every ding on your guitar, every freckle on your lover’s face, and every time on this record that a note lands in the wrong place on song that somehow makes every note seem so right. My favorite mistake, however, is the distortion on the climactic vocal line toward the end of “Hardest Part”. I can see the cringe on the poor engineer’s face after not having enough time to set his pre-amp and compressor just right, and then I can hear Ryan telling him, “No man, it’s perfect, print it” - just like that. Whether that’s how it happened or not, it’s truth to me. Here’s a good live version of the tune, but make sure to pick up the full studio album. though this is really a recording that deserves to be heard on vinyl, or at least CD.
2. “Amsterdam” - Alejandro Escovedo (Bourbonitis Blues - 1999)
I spent the summer of 1999 living in Pittsburgh. Any chance I’d get, I would go stay on the Southside with my cousin who is a full-time guitarist and a hero of mine. One of my visits happened to coincide with the unfortunate (or perhaps fortunate in retrospect) end of his marriage. He was low on love but very high on this album by Austin-based singer/songwriter Alejandro Escovedo, Burbounitis Blues, which he opened my ears to one night. I had happened to arrive when her furniture needed to be moved out from the attic to the doorstep. It was at least a million degrees in the attic and the wood used in one particular dresser must have been the densest on earth. He blasted this album while we moved everything down the many narrow stairways of his 4-level apartment, and I recall that he kept repeating the line, “the journey did her well.” I’ll never be able to separate this song from that night, so in a sense Escovedo might as well have written it just for that night.
3. “Champaign, Illinois” - Old 97’s (The Grand Theatre Vol. 1 - 2010)
There’s a really cool story behind this song - the Reader’s Digest version of that story is that it’s basically a rewrite of Bob Dylan’s “Desolation Row” that the Old 97’s played live for years but never had permission to record. Finally, sometime before Grand Theatre was recorded, Dylan gave his blessing and the song is actually credited as a co-write. In the future, I’d love to sneak in a verse of “Desolation Row” to pay homage. If you listen to both you’ll see what this is all about. And speaking of paying homage, I came across this incredibly bad ass version of Dylan’s original tune by a band I’ve never given much consideration - check out My Chemical Romance doing their best “Desolation Row” - it’s a refreshing testament to them as a band and to Dylan as, well… Dylan.
4. “Give Up” - Original (written in September 2011)
For some reason, I’ve been fixated on the song title “Give Up” so much so that I have dreamed up several crude versions of the idea and it was a challenge to commit to one direction and finally finish and perform this tune. I wanted it to be perfect, but I realized that not only was that not going to happen, but also that it really isn’t about being perfect. Sometimes when you give up on something, you actually create much more than you destroy - you open your world up to the beauty of redirection and the value of failure. Statistically speaking, I feel 10x more likely to write another song (good or bad) simply from completing this one - it’s science.
5. “Kill Zone” - T-Bone Burnett (Tooth of Crime - 2008)
The idea to cover this song came from the first request I received through this blog, many thanks Bianca! Immediately I started listening to “Kill Zone” on infinite repeat. The best songs get better every time you hear them, and I became addicted to it’s appreciating weigh. Tooth of Crime and the precursor, True False Identity are albums worth immersing yourself in. Listening to T-Bone Burnett’s solo albums is like watching Chuck Knoll play linebacker, or Eisenhower storm Normandy on the front lines, or Steve Jobs send a text message (stick with me here…). I don’t love everything he ever touches (namely the inexplicably doubled vocal on the version on Tooth of Crime), which is why I love this song so much. Apparently he wrote it with Roy Orbison just before he died. I can only imagine Orbison’s voice on this bleak genius of a song. Here is a YouTube version to get the idea below (mercifully without the doubled vocals), but you really need to hear this song at a higher quality to appreciate T-Bone’s rich sonic low-end foundation.
At this point in the set I was joined on stage by my good friend David on vocals for a couple tunes that we’ve played together at past Razorface shows. David killed it!
6. “Unbroken (Hotel Baby) - Monster Magnet
7. “Hard to Believe” - Original co-written w/ David Bowick
8. “Clap Hands” - Tom Waits (Rain Dogs - 1985)
A couple days before the show I was walking around my neighborhood listening to this song on headphones making sure I had the lyrics down. At some point, as happens from time to time when listening to your favorite music in headphones, I heard an new element of the recording that I never had before - what sounded like a flimsy metal rake scraping concrete in the distance crept into my left ear and slowly got louder. However, as I turned the corner I saw a man raking leaves off the sidewalk, and my brain slowly but surely realized the sound was not coming from the song but from my environment. To me that’s what makes Tom Waits’ music, and Rain Dogs in particular so cathartic - as outlandish and dark and messy and brilliant and deranged and beautiful as the music is, it’s still nothing more than one man’s idea of what surrounds us every day.
9. “Healing Bones” - Jules Shear (Healing Bones - 1994)
This is the title track from the 1994 album by this relatively unknown monster of a singer/songwriter. I was introduced to his band Jules & the Polar Bears by complete accident through their 1978 album Got No Breeding which seems somehow better than anything of it’s time yet totally unrecognized. Healing Bones hit me over the head recently when I picked it up on CD for $3.99 at Amoeba Music in Hollywood. It’s worth noting that this song does not exist on the internet - not on iTunes, not on Spotify, not YouTube, not Google, nowhere - but for 4 bucks at an actual record store my life was affected greatly by this album. It shows to go you that you should never let anyone limit what you listen to, not for convenience, not for ease, not for anything. When I first heard the song ”Healing Bones” there was one lyric that grabbed me by the throat - “You got away, I never thought you’d leave, and it turned me inside out” that Shear delivered so brutally that I decided in that moment to learn and play this song no matter what. As I was learning the lyrics I learned that it was actually co-written by the one and only Rick Danko of the Band (along with another incredible song on the same album called “Never Again or Forever”). I went from feeling like the only Jules Shear fan on the planet to feeling completely connected to the lineage of his small but powerful impact on the world of music, and you or I would never have heard it streamed out of a computer. Support record stores, explore different mediums and formats for discovering music, talk to people about music, actual people, and attend live shows. As my 91-year-old grandmother says, you’ve got to find the gold hidden in the clay, and while there is more clay than ever right now, there is also more gold than ever.
10. “Why Would I Want to Die” - Grandaddy (Concrete Dunes - 2002)
The pride of Modesto, CA, I saw Grandaddy at the Exit/Inn in Nashville in 2001. I feel loved how much distortion the guitar had compared to how mellow the vocals were and how scientific the synth was. I read somewhere that Concrete Dunes was released without the consent of the band and that the versions weren’t the way they were meant to be heard - I also think this song appeared on a soundtrack in the late 90s. Either way, “Why Would I Want to Die” feels like the anthem for anyone who’s ever been quietly disappeared on and forced to imagine the worst written by the quiet quirky character in High Fidelity (one of my top 5 all-time movies) that ends up dating Darlene from Roseanne (my favorite all-time TV show). I don’t know if this all translated when I played, especially because I forgot to sing a verse, but the sentiment of the tune has always done something for me. Better albums to start with are 1997’s Under the Western Freeway or my favorite, 2000’s The Software Slump.
11. “Beyond Belief” - Elvis Costello (Imperial Bedroom - 1982)
I learning this song the day that my good buddy Jeff from Cowspace told me that Imperial Bedroom is his favorite Costello album. Mine is (if I had a gun to my head and had to choose) Brutal Youth, which I hope to explore cuts from in future sets. ”Beyond Belief” marries the audacity that makes Elvis Elvis with the that command for the language that makes him the master in my eyes. Generally speaking, I’m not sure what “Beyond Belief” is about, but there are lines that hit home perfectly. ”Do you have to be so cruel to be callous?” Apparently the answer is, and has always been yes… I can still remember buying that album (despite the nearly un-lookable album art), popping it in, and somehow knowing exactly what Elvis was trying to say and how it applies to my life and the world I see around me.
12. “Won’t Be Home” - Old 97’s
13. “Shelter” - Corrosion of Conformity (Deliverance - 1994)
On the drive back from our most recent Ocelot Robot show in Long Beach I forced my buddy David through an overview of the catalog of Corrosion of Conformity, a southern metal band that has been transformation in my mind. Grittier than Metallica, craftier than Pantera, and more Sabbath per decibel than just about anyone (except Sabbath of course, the first 5 albums at least), C.O.C.’s albums following and including Deliverance (their most commercially successful effort) all rock me. “Shelter” is an acoustic song that does anything but show their soft side. Like “Why Would I Want to Die” there is a very simple repeating chord structure which opens the door for the lyrics to be performed, altered, twisted, and personalized. The slide guitar on the studio version makes that recording special to me, and Pepper Keenan’s voice is as much Howlin’ Wolf as it is Rob Halford.
14. “Dead Flowers” - The Rolling Stones (Sticky Fingers - 1971)
Honestly, I first became familiar with this Stones classic through ex-Guns N’ Roses guitarist Gilby Clarke and his 1995 debut solo album Pawnshop Guitars. Compare his version below with the Stones’ original. It’s hard to argue with the quality of writing in this song, and when you combine that with the performer that the Stones are and were it becomes easy to see why they are a true miracle - musically, culturally, and probably scientifically by now. For my rendition, Mr. Son Vo added some bass and vocals to my performance of the song, though truthfully the highlight of the evening was hearing him sing lead on Cowspace’s opening cover of Otis Redding’s “That’s How Strong My Love Is” - wow! I sat there in wonder, and while I obviously encourage you to come see me play at Brennan’s on the first Wednesday of November (and every month), I strongly insist that you stay for Cowspace, they’re incredible. See you soon!
Upcoming Razorface Appearance:
- Wednesday, October 19, 2011 - Brennan’s Pub - 8pm (short set with Jeff Cleveland)
- Wednesday, November 2, 2011 - Brennan’s Pub - 8pm (1st Wed. every month!)
Photo by Catie Bellinger
