David Byrne visits San Francisco

Since none of the local bloggers I read seem to have noticed this and I haven’t posted anything in a while, I thought I’d link these two blog postings by David Byrne.  I have always been a great admirer of Mr. Byrne; the soundtrack to Stop Making Sense was one of the earliest rock albums I owned and as a result my singing voice is irrevocably influenced my him, as anyone who’s joined me for karaoke can attest.

I wasn’t fortunate enough to catch either one of his two shows in SF this week, but you can read Mr. Byrne’s own impressions of his visit to San Francisco on his blog here: part 1 and part 2. It’s kind of a kick to read about him biking around the city to some spots that I know well, and I feel a little disappointed that I didn’t run into him, although really what would I say?

At any rate, his blog is unusually thoughtful and is always an interesting read. There’s also a (quite positive) review of his Monday night set at local music blog Hippies are Dead.

Iron and Wine, Sholi at Bimbo’s (10/06/08)

At its best, the music of Iron and Wine has an spare, intimate feeling, and it’s a peculiar irony that due to hs popularity it’s difficult to catch songwriter Sam Beam at a small venue any longer. The last time I saw him was at his show at the Paramount Theater in Oakland, which is a beautiful old building with comfortable seats, but is still a large theater (seating 3,476, according to Wikipedia), and it was difficult to feel a connection to the band there. Earlier on Sunday he’d played a set at Hardly Strictly Bluegrass, which I didn’t check out but which was reportedly incredibly crowded. So when I saw that Beam was playing an acoustic solo show at Bimbo’s 365 Club, I jumped at the chance to see him in a small room, and this show did not disappoint.

Opening band Sholi was pretty good; they didn’t quite knock my socks off, but they had pleasant dual vocals and some interesting twists in their song structures. The highlight was an Iranian song, about which the lead singer told us some of the history of but I didn’t quite catch it; the song was by an Iranian singer who had been exiled following the revolution there. It was an interesting mix between musical elements that sounded somewhat traditional and other elements that sounded more rock/poppy, and I wondered how much of that distinction was there in the original song versus Sholi’s interpretation of it.

After their set Sam Beam come out to a very warm reception from the audience. He was extremely affable and seemed to be in a good mood despite having had very little sleep; he spent a lot of time joking around with the audience and making various wry asides. At one point he talked about the show at the Paramount last year, and an audience member yelled out “you’re better alone!” Beam responded with “wow, that’s a very dark statement, man…” and talked about how his band was going to beat the shit out of the dude after the show (all in jest, of course). All in all he came across as a very down-to-earth, friendly dude, and I could almost imagine him as a talented friend who was showing me some songs he’d written. (Partly this was due to managing to stand way up front by the stage; Beam could easily have spit on me from where he was standing, not that he seems like an especially spitty kind of guy.)

He proceeded to play a laid-back, informal set. He got off to a bit of a rough start, and messed up in his guitar playing several times throughout the evening. For the very first song he had his capo on the wrong fret and it took him a few measures to realize what was wrong. For the most part he was able to shrug and laugh it off when he made a mistake, and the audience was so enraptured by his playing that nobody seemed to be put out, and as the set progressed he became more sure of himself.

I didn’t keep a set list per se, but the songs he played ranged widely from among LP’s, EP’s, and a few unreleased songs, and included some of my favorites. I’m not a huge fan of The Shepherd’s Dog, which replaces the spare, minimal sounds of the earlier records with overly baroque and complex instrumentation, and I actually found I liked the songs from it a lot better with only Beam’s voice and an acoustic guitar. The songs I recognized from this album included “Carousel” and “Resurrection Fern;” he also played “Woman King,” “She Lays in the Reins,” and “Sodom, South Georgia.”

Probably he highlight of the entire set was when he got the audience to sing along for “Naked As We Came.” I often feel ambivalent towards audience sing-alongs, especially when they drown out the actual band, but in this case everybody was singing incredibly softly, and Beam let them take over for a few choruses, and seemed to be somewhat moved himself by the performance. It sounded quite lovely and reminded me a bit of the chorus of voices from the Langley Schools Music Project.

He ended the set with “The Trapeze Swinger,” a long and melancholy song which has not been released on an album to my knowledge, but which is available online in the usual gray areas. (Incidentally, Beam said that the next album Iron and Wine puts out is likely to be a collection of B-Sides and so on in order to buy himself time to make a new album. He certainly has enough material in the various leaked songs that are findable online that he could put out another really solid album in the vein of the first two LP’s today, simply by collecting it in one place.)

Overall I felt like this was one of the best shows I’ve seen all year, just because of that real sense of a connection between the singer and the crowd. I really hope he continues to play small venues in the future, they work incredibly well for his musical style.

My Bloody Valentine at the Concourse (9/30/08)

I feel like I don’t have the deep visceral connection to My Bloody Valentine that a lot of folks around my same age do. I was aware of them in their heyday, but I didn’t really get into the whole shoegaze genre until well after its moment had passed, and even that was largely through drilling back through the antecedents of other bands and genres that I enjoyed, looking for influences. At that point it was pretty clear that they were big influences on everybody, but I never got quite to the point where I loved the music itself enough to listen to Loveless over and over again.

Nonetheless, the band reformed after years and years and were only playing six shows in all of North America on this tour, and they have a reputation as a mind-blowing live act, so eventually I caved in and bought tickets ($65 – super cheap!). This one show wound up being a weird nexus where tons of my friends from wildly disparate social circles attended a single event. Fortunately the joint is huge and I managed to avoid various inadvisable oil / water combinations.

The evening began in an orthodox San Franciscan fashion, which is to say that I had vague plans to meet up or coordinate with three separate groups of people, and that none of these sets of plans ever quite came to fruition, and also that once I was actually in transit the party I was traveling to meet moved on to a different bar. It’s par for the course, and as a native Californian myself I’m amply equipped to handle these sorts of last-minute adjustments. In any event, after going to and fro in the city, and biking up and down in it, I eventually found myself standing in the Concourse Exhibition Center as the second band, Spectrum, launched into their set. Spectrum is fronted by Sonic Boom of Spiritualized progenitor Spacemen 3, another band whose surface I feel I’ve barely scratched.

Spectrum played for a while and were a good match to MBV ‘s sound, though in retrospect they may as well have been some random CD plugged into the venue’s PA by a bored promoter for all the impression their music had on me in comparison with MBV’s sonic assault. Still, they were a good warm-up and their set got better over time as more people filed in to the venue, got drinks, and staked out standing spots. The scuttlebutt had it that the previous band was a flautist, and although the notion of “Sakura” being broadcast over MBV’s inimitable speakers held a certain appeal, my cohorts and I elected not to attend this part of the evening.

This was the first show I’d seen at the Concourse exhibition center, and while the venue didn’t quite live up to its reputation as the worst venue in San Francisco, it wasn’t great either. I wound up standing on the balcony rather close to the stage on the right, from where I was able to see the two guitarists for the majority of the show, though the drummer and bassist were pretty much invisible throughout.

My Bloody Valentine has a famously loud live act, and in this regard they didn’t disappoint. I’d brought earplugs with me, which was fortunate as the ones provided by the Concourse were pretty low-quality. I think I can safely say that this was the loudest show I’ve been to, including Mogwai who are also renowned for the pure volume of their concerts. In addition to being loud, MBV also set up a whole series of incredibly bright strobe lights directly behind, above and around the stage. Incidentally Mogwai also went for the bright strobe light thing, and I found it to be frankly pretty irritating at both shows. I joked to a friend afterwards that it was like enforced shoegazing. MBV doesn’t have the most dynamic stage show ever to begin with, but I felt as though I was being punished for watching them.

Oh, the music? It was OK. I honestly don’t know their work well enough to pick out songs by name, but there were a good number of tracks I recognized from Loveless. The sound tended to blend into itself and it was often hard to distinguish between instruments (in particular, the bass and rhythm guitar frequently got lost in the mix). Possibly due to our particular location in the venue, the drums seemed way too loud, particularly when the drummer made a prolonged attack on the toms, which seemed to be one of his favorite tactics. The vocals were not terribly clear, but the same is true for MBV’s recorded works.

The band closed out with a good 15-20 minutes of incredibly loud feedback, but not in a high-pitched, ear-splitting way. I could feel my clothes moving during this; it was somewhat impressive technically, but seemed a little self-indulgent.

Overall I had a pretty good time. If I hadn’t managed to get the relatively good spot that I did I think I might have loathed the entire event, and indeed I’ve read a lot of bad reviews of this show. It’s going to take a pretty amazing show to get me to go back to the Concourse, but I actually didn’t find the venue to be as hateful as I expected it to be, and I feel glad to have seen My Bloody Valentine.