Jenny Lewis and Heartless Bastards, June 30, Jacksonville

I packed my cross-eyed Hyundai full of people who like good music (Rebecca, Laura, Kat, and Stuart) and we headed to enjoy the sun and sand at Jacksonville Beach and some decent Mexican food before the show at Freebird's (owned by a former member of Lynyrd Skynyrd, so shout it all you want). It's an interesting venue, two floors with an atrium, a full bar on either floor, so we headed upstairs to get a good view of the stage.

The Heartless Bastards opened the show, but they're so good, I prefer to think of them as co-headliners (Metacritic shows both bands' new albums at solid 75s), despite an abbreviated eight-song set (in no particular order) including "The Mountain," "Out at Sea," "You Could Be So Happy," "Hold Your Head High," "Early in the Morning," "Swamp Song," and "Sway." I compared Erika Wennerstrom's voice elsewhere to Grace Slick's, and I've read others compare her to Janis Joplin, PJ Harvey, even Robert Plant. Let's say she possesses the emotional urgency of the latter group and the vocal fog-piercing clarity of Grace. Erika's a blue-collar angel belling over the crunchy, deeply felt blues-rock she and her band lay down. It's a different band than the three-piece that toured with Lucinda Williams a couple of years ago. Erika moved to Austin after breaking up with Mike, the former bass player, and made The Mountain with studio musicians and, for the first time, a producer (Mike McCarthy), but because her vox and writing have always been the focus of the Heartless Bastards' sound, The Mountain sounds like an HB record. For the tour she added old friends Jesse Ebaugh and Dave Colvin, who played on the original HB demo, and capable Knife in the Water guitarist Mark Nathan. The addition of Nathan frees Erika from having to carry so much of the sonic burden, and she seemed more relaxed at this show than she did in Tallahassee with Lucinda, less working the music and more loving it. I mentioned this to Erika after the show and she agreed that she felt more relaxed and that she enjoyed the added elements that a four-piece allows, including at one point a nice extended dual guitar jam. On the other hand, part of the relaxed mood may be because, as Jesse explains, "Touring with Jenny Lewis has been fun. They're so funny and we've been laughing the whole tour."

I suppose that's not surprising given that Jenny Lewis spent her youth performing with the likes of Lucille Ball and the Golden Girls. She's spent the last ten proving that video hasn't quite killed the radio star, as her music achieves ever more mainstream cred, along with Elvis Costello's seal of approval (and vox "Carpetbaggers"). After Rilo Kiley's Under the Blacklight, it's not surprising that she strutted onstage confidently, vamping like a trailer-park cougar. No more innocent promish dresses and Toys R Us keyboards for Jenny (Execution of All Things tour). She's bringing back hotpants sass with energy and a wide smile. The crowd, populated by many young women, sang along and raised fists on cue, cheered and reveled over the course of her respectable set (list below) that began with the ambitious "The Next Messiah" and then moved back and forth equally between Rabbit Fur Coat and Acid Tongue, plus two new songs: "Just Like Zeus" and "Big Wave" and one Rilo Kiley song ("Silver Lining"). Her supporting band, including "boo" Jonathan Rice on lead guitar and duets, seemed very happy to be on stage with her. Barbara Gruska pinned down rhythm with deft drumbeats along with Jonathan Wilson on bass, while Farmer Dave Scher stepped out from rhythm guitar to bend fine and lonesome lap steel notes. Our little group, ladies and gentlemen all, fell in love with Danielle Haim (listen!), whose innocent look foiled Jenny's vamping beautifully, and she seemed to be having more fun than anyone else, shifting from guitar to cowbell to drums and backing up on vocals with spirited enthusiasm and a hell of a voice. The show ended with Danielle and Barbara hammering out a primitive drum duet to close "Born Secular" as everyone else left the stage.

We took our happy ears out to the beach's more primitive soundscape and frolicked a bit before the two-hour drive home featuring a lively literary discussion about some British classics ("Heathcliff's a dick!" "No he's not!").

All photos by Rebecca Lynn. Pictured Kat and Laura (front) and Stuart, me, and Rebecca.

Los Campesinos! and Titus Andronicus, Jan. 19, Jack Rabbits

Multiply literate existential anarchists Titus Andronicus, from New Jersey, could be the bar band in a Thomas Pynchon novel. At Jack Rabbits in Jacksonville, Patrick Stickles perched above the rest of the band, impassioned channeler of the songs, more medium than singer. It's the only way I can explain his remarkable range of vocal influences, from Lou Reed to Replacement's Westerberg to Clash's Strummer to Pogue's MacGowan, though he's slight and jerks around sometimes as though possessed by Ian Curtis. The band lays a storied sonic tapestry underneath Stickle's voice, woven through with rich influences from sock-hop and surf-rock, classic punk, jig and dirge, grunge and 90's indie, even the Boss. Two of them have literature degrees, but, while allusions from Brueghel (clearly Auden's) to Hunter S. Thompson and Albert Camus to Cormac McCarthy punctuate their work, they're working class scholars and know that when the revolution comes, they'll attack the ivory tower first. That is, their songs are accessible and ironically intelligent anthems for the meaninglessness of life, which I suppose boys from the New Jersey suburbs know more about than the rest of us. The pinaccle for me was "Fear and Loathing in Mahwah, NJ," as Stickle hammered out a long closing jig crescendoing into collapse and a bleating recorded reading from the darkest passage of the bloodiest Shakespeare play. Fuck this description, which is just lists and lame comparisons. If you like nothing, you will love Titus Andronicus.

Envoi: After the Los Campesinos! finished, while fans milled about groveling for autographs and conversation (myself included), Patrick started playing around with Los Campesinos!' glockenspiel, fascinated, picking out a melody, utterly absorbed. Perfect.

Los Campesinos! followed with a strong and strikingly upbeat set (despite the absence of ill Harriet [get well] and her violin), but certainly not diminished in enthusiasm or dancibility. They're difficult to describe, but think Toy Dolls backed by Arcade Fire (on nitrous oxide) singing songs Robert Smith and Siouxsie Sioux might have composed chronicling their various beautiful dissipated difficulties and darknesses. LC! threw out their ironically, clashingly upbeat symphonic tight pop in all its exuberantly desperate yearning. No matter how fucked up the situations in the songs, it's hard to be sad when you're dancing, and everyone was, from the "classics" like "Death to Los Campesinos!" through the new songs dealing with love and loss and the sad, shitty state of the world we're all slogging through. I especially enjoyed the "Box Elder" intro into one of their songs. Which one? I can't recall, but we should all be happy that, as the title song posits, "WE KID OURSELVES THERE'S FUTURE IN THE FUCKING, BUT THERE IS NO FUCKING FUTURE." And we collectively were, carried by Garreth's bright cheery vocals and Aleksandra's Elizabeth Elmore-ish countervocals and the band's perfectly timed chaos and even that one girl on the dance floor who never, ever stopped dancing.

After the lights came on, the band hung out and chatted and signed merch. Garreth is personable, charming, and as cheerful as the band sounds. Aleksandra is absolutely lovely and a bit shy (I mentioned my fondness for Elizabeth Elmore's Sarge and The Reputation). Tom, lead guitar and song writer, turned out to be a fellow Califone fan, so we had that, you know, irritating to anyone not in the know, whole nerd fan conversation.

Tom Waits, Jacksonville, July 1

"I'm like a fucking race horse."

--Tom Waits, Jacksonville, July 1, 2008

Tom Waits' tours are fairly infrequent, so when I heard he was headed to Jacksonville two hours away from my house, I splurged. Jacksonville? Why Jacksonville? It's not really the red dirt, bluesy part of the south Waits wanted to see. Jacksonville is South Beach's conservative opposite, militarized vanilla beach Florida, which tolerates the small, local counterculture because it's essentially irrelevant. Jacksonville is by some definitions lovely, but it's not, well, cool. When, early in the concert, Waits mused about why he'd never been to this attractive city beside a sparkling river and the Atlantic Ocean, he said his friends had always told him, "You're not old enough." I don't know whether he's finally old enough now or if the prospect of hauling the tour bus and three semis ten hours south and back north was too much for his pocketbook or his carbon footprint, but he arrived with a copious supply of merchandise--including vinyls, a chapbook in which he interviews himself, and t-shirts with pictures of oil stains he thought were cool--as well as a sweet stage set that could evoke alley-cat twilight austerity, late-night honkytonk, or red-devil cartoon hell.

Tom Waits in his undersized bowler gangled out to the round center platform as though he were under the influence of some hobo marionette and lit into "Lucinda"/"Ain't Going Down to the Well No More" and quickly into "Down in the Hole" to an adoring audience of sophisticates of all ages (along with a few bellowing idiots). We were clearly in for a hell of a ride. During "Chocolate Jesus" (I believe), he stopped mid-song to admonish the audience, albeit congenially, for clapping out of time. They hadn't encouraged audience clapping, so I think he was a bit pissed, though he turned the awkwardness into a humorous moment. He's serious about his oeuvre, and this audience "interference," enthusiastic as it is, can ruin a song. (This may have been the reason "Clap Hands," one of my favorites from Raindogs, didn't make the cut for any of the shows. The Eyeball Kid has set lists for every show plus a compilation for all the shows, including Jacksonville [I swear I heard "Jockey Full of Bourbon" though, which isn't listed for J'ville], so I won't belabor the entire list.) There wasn't a sour note, from the stage at least, and the band was incredibly tight and the timing and interplay were perfect. It was one of the most polished shows I've ever seen, musical "theatre" of the best sort, as if Broadway had bled somehow into the old Bowery.

The show both peaked and nadired for me in the middle of an arresting extended performance of "Rain Dogs"/"Russian Dance." Waits' performance was violent. The moment seemed Brechtian, confrontational, perfect, eviscerating what can come off sometimes, if one isn't listening closely enough to Waits' superb writing, as a kind of sentimental nostalgia for hard times. His gyrating, barking performance annihilated any possible sentimentality. But as I looked around, I sensed no one seemed to be getting this. Most were too busy being fans to feel his indictment of all of us, our asses sitting in the hundred dollar seats of this lovely theater on the river, six dollar beers bubbling away in comfortable, pudgy guts. No recession here, mind you, but "Rain Dogs" should have awakened everyone to what people go to shows to forget, all this American consumptive excess that leaves so many out in the cold, hungry and bemused and sodden, while so many inside listened to songs about those people, then got in their SUV's and drove away, pop-culturally sated. Perhaps I'm projecting my own guilt, my own excess here, sitting there with all my Waits stuff, taking it too seriously, but it unnerved me.

The epigraph above came from a moment that added to this feeling. Someone screamed out that he wanted Waits' sperm to make a baby. Tom stopped, and said, "Wait a minute. We just might be able to arrange that. You'll have to talk to my manager. But I must warn you, I'm very expensive. I'm like a fucking racehorse." Then he laughed like a carny knowing you're going to piss your jeans on this ride. This and some comments he made about show business--noting at one point that Sarah Bernhardt's amputated leg on display at a circus was earning more than the actress herself, who was performing "across the street"--suggested his contempt for this consumerist attitude, this objectification of people, and his understanding of the irony of his own position as he enriches himself and his family singing, even iconically, songs about the downtrodden I believe he truly cares about, knows. I think he wanted this contempt to come through, not vitriolically (I think of Jello Biafra cursing the mosh pit "jocks" in Fresno, 1985), but through the power of the music and the words. Waits was polite and played along, a trickster minstrel, hoping maybe someone will get it all after the beer and white wine wear off. I hope so, too.

As if to emphasize this theme, he stepped away from center stage to sit at the piano, stage right, while all the musicians but Seth Ford-Young on bass left the stage. While idiots yelled for their favorites, he ignored them, and settled into "On the Nickle" to continue a theme, slowly and beautifully. Counterpoint. Do you get it now? It was truly a high point in an extraordinary show. The piano solo moved through "I Can't Wait to Get Off Work" and "Invitation to the Blues" and "Lost in the Harbour" wonderfully, creating the emotional heart of the show.

Continuing his theme of exile, the band returned, and a single, flickering bulb descended to "accompany" him on the poem "Circus." Then, like a fireworks show, a grand finale in which he crowed and stomped and sagged elastically through "Hoist that rag," "Lie to Me," "Anywhere I Lay My Head," "Singapore," "Cold, Cold Ground," and "Make it Rain." They left the stage and the audience wanting more.

After much applause, they came out to finish, slightly anticlimactically after all the heavy pyrotechnics, with "House where Nobody Lives," and then they left. And then I got in my car and listened to Frank's Wild Years all the way home, because he didn't play my favorite from that album, and I am, after all, innocent when I dream, and I needed to hear that after all the indulgence in my extravagant solitude.