Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Red Sparowes at the Warfield (9/20/08)

I won’t mince words: the Warfield is a horrible venue, rightfully loathed by most concert-goers in the Bay Area, and it’s a testament to the appalling nature of the only two worse San Francisco venues that the Warfield isn’t the absolute nadir of all possible rock clubs of its size (the other two contenders are the Grand, with incredibly bad acoustics and laughably amateurish sound engineers, and the Concourse Design Center, which is basically a huge warehouse better suited for comic book expos than rock concerts – stay tuned for my My Bloody Valentine review for a firsthand look). It takes a mighty performance to overcome the inherent shittiness of being forced to stay in the place for more than an hour or two. Fortunately, Nick Cave has still got it and I was able to have a pretty enjoyable time there.

I got to the show right around 9:00 and opener Red Sparowes was just starting their set. I’d tried to see them several months back at Bottom of the Hill, but that show was sold out, so I was glad to get a chance to see them. The kind of music they play is apparently called metal these days, although to me it didn’t sound all that different from the stuff that Mogwai or A Minor Forest or any number of “post-rock” bands were putting out during the faraway years of the mid-nineties. I was inclined to like them at first, and they have a big sound that actually works pretty well with the Warfield, but after a while I found myself tuning them out. Their music is droning in a way I enjoy, and seems like it would be good to listen to at home, but it just didn’t hold my interest on stage. Partially this may be because there are no vocals, so visually the band isn’t terribly attention-grabbing.

I had managed to get a floor ticket to this show, which is basically the worst possible way to get a ticket to the Warfield unless you either arrive super-early and are able to snag a place in the very front my the stage, or are a good bit over six foot three or so. Neither of these apply to me, gentle reader, but because I was there a little early I managed to make my way down to the central pit, closest to the stage. This is what a floor ticket at the Warfield is like: there are a billion people in the little pit area with you, and about a quarter of them seem either to not know or to ignore the unspoken rules of personal space etiquette at a show, and so when you go home at the end of the night you’re covered in somebody else’s sweat.

Hopefully that paints the picture. I’m not the most touchy-feely guy and I probably wouldn’t do well on the Tokyo subway, but I can deal with close quarters and crowded venues when music is the purpose. But somehow I wound up stuck behind a tall beefy dude who could not stand still, and who continuously crept his body backwards as he shifted relentlessly back and forth from one foot to the other. The result was a sort of ongoing war of attrition waged against my personal space, and I frequently found myself needing to will myself to relax in order to avoid flipping out. Occasionally I thought of my own calmness as the only bulwark the crowd had against a festival seating trampling incident. As people naturally shifted around during the set I finally managed to get to the side of this dude and from then on I didn’t have to deal with constant and unpredictable intrusions upon my person.

I suppose that’s more than enough ranting about how crappy the Warfield is and I ought to touch on the actual show I was there to see. I’ve listened to Nick Cave since high school, when I somehow acquired a tape with Henry’s Dream on one side and Neurosis’s The Word As Law on the other. Since then I’ve followed him over the years, and though he lost me a little during his slow and Christian years I’ve really been enjoying his latest, Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!! I’ve also never seen him live, so I was there partly as an exercise in checking an item off of a list.

First off: what you have heard is true. Cave has got the same proto-skullet and mustache you’ve seen in his recent videos. This did not seem to damage his charisma in any way, and he was a commanding presence on stage the whole time, alternately dancing, swinging around, rocking out with the guitar, or piano balladeering. During the set, he got not just one but two bouquets of a dozen roses from audience members of the female persuasion. For the most part the Bad Seeds were solid, though the Seed manning a second trap set and a bunch of marimbas and wasn’t always audible in the mix. The sound was generally a little washed-out and muddy, and I couldn’t tell if it was the band, the sound board personnel, or the venue to blame.

Altogether the band put on a racuous set and the crowd seemed very receptive to it. I liked it a lot myself, though as I mentioned my enthusiasm was tempered by being squished like lowing cattle into too small of a space. Warren Ellis, Cave’s weird-beard sidekick, was playing a variety of fanciful instruments over the night; at one point he was playing what looked like a viola with a pick as though it were a guitar, and for “Dreamland” he had one hand inside what looked like an empty paint bucket (this last produced no audible sounds, or if it did I couldn’t differentiate them). Most of the time he was playing a miniature electric guitar, which made him look weirdly out of scale, as though he were some hulking giant of a guitar player and through a trick of perspective he was made to seem the same size as Nick Cave and the other musicians.

The setlist was good, and included “Papa Won’t Leave You Henry” and “Stagger Lee” and “The Mercy Seat” among its older components. Overall it was a good show, but I was glad to emerge on Market and Sixth (not a phrase you’re likely to hear often, by the way) and see the Warfield slowly fading from view.