Soooooo…. it would appear that I have been absent for some period of time.  I have many apologies… travel...work… what not.  They are lame but indeed, that is what we have come to expect from these halting pages.  But I have not been idle.  Half way through, despite all the issues and some mist steps it has been… quite year.  

I have seen a lot of music this year.  Much of it has been at Off Broadway and I am happy to report again, and again that this is becoming a treasured venue in town.  I have lived through the venue being the worst and stupidest of shit holes.  Back in the day… when i was a pup it competed rather unsuccessfully with Mississippi Nights and the old Cicero's.  But these venues eventually went on to not become a Jacques Cousteau museum or to become a lame incarnation of itself up the street from it’s former location.  But Off Broadway ambled on… trudged on...slowly… awkwardly and sometimes horribly.  Great bands but a really stupid room.  You would arrive at the front door and come in behind the stage into a “lobby”.  Then walk around and there was a cool long bar that extended down the side.  A “stage” was there, poorly lit.  The “room” had a beautiful wagon wheel chandelier which didn’t belong.  There was an upstairs which could have been funky but was instead awkward and vision was blocked by the over hang as well as… the chandelier.  Doors were at 8.  Bands started to play at 9 ish and there were often 3 of them.  On a school night you were always out till 1.  Too late for people with jobs and too random an experience for a “grown up”

But a few years ago new owners came on the scene.  Things started to happen.  Good things.  Happy things.  They started to experiment with:

Earlier shows

Afternoon shows

Shows that started on time

Tall boy beers

Professional employees

Redecorating

Losing the iconic chandelier

Peeling years of...shit of the walls

Painting

Shortening the bar

Bringing in seats for old people shows or partial old people shows.  What I am saying is that if you ever have an inclination to see some live music.  Hit their website and go out.  They bring in some of the most talented acts that are both breaking and established and when local bands play there it is because they are awesome.  Their website is:

http://www.offbroadwaystl.com/calendar/

So some of the shows I have seen recently.

Rhett Miller.  Rhett is lead singer and other than one song per album by their bassist sole lyricist for The Old 97s.  Rhett is… well… their is really no one else like Rhett.  I would assume he is about 40 (I am too bored to WIKI him).  He went to Sarah Lawrence (girls school) on a poetry scholarship.  Now remember he is from Texas.  He dropped out and moved back and started a band and they have turned out 8-10 CD’s and he has dated and married super models and he has long hair and my best friend’s wife loves to go to shows just to see him whip his hair.  And he does.  But when he comes to town for a show he normally just shows up with a guitar.  I think he has 5 solo albums out and he writes great songs.  He writes lines like:

“I was going through a hell of a time

When suddenly you showed up

You gave me hope but I lost mine

But hope is not enough

I loved you so hard

It broke my heart

And you weren’t like the rest

Until you left”

Seriously… that is “Dylanesque” which is the nicest thing I can say about a songwriter.

Frankly this show was the most fun.  Buy his newest album and buy the new Old 97’s album as well.  It is not poetry but is an album full of songs about getting drunk on bourbon and having sex.  What could possibly go wrong.

Steve Earle hit the Pageant and reminded us all what a grumpy, great, tuneful, deep, flawed, wonderful nightmare that he is.  He had a pretty set with a tight band featuring the husband and wife team “The Mastersons” who opened up the show with a tight swinging sound.  She has a sweet voice and he has good chops.  Together they ably backed Earle.  Steve Earle has had a checkered personal life but has always been a brilliant artist.  Sidelined by heroin and drugs it appeared he had straightened himself out after several marriages and had settled with the talented Allison Moorer in NYC.  This tour seemed to be about him working through that latest break up.  The bottom line with Steve Earle is that he is likely the most soul filled white man out there.  He bleeds through his songs and is constantly working out his thoughts in his songs whether it is personally or politically and… you should go see him.  The Pageant is not intimate enough for what he was doing on this tour but still… as I said...get off your dead ass and go see a show.

Twang Fest 38 returned this year with it’s normal panoply of touring and local acts.  I was only able to hit two nights of the four nights but each one was filled with great music.  KDHX does such a great job for my kind of tunes and the Fest gets better and more professional each year and the partnership with Off Broadway seems here to stay which… is good.

More  recently I hit Off Broadway to see the late great Robbie Fulks (not yet deceased).  Fulks, from Georgia via 20 years or so in Chicago does not come to town enough.  he was playing an early show opening for Chatham County Line who is the latest “thing” in Americana/Alt Country...whatever you want to call it.  But Fulks… I have seen 4-5 times.  I was able to reminisce with him briefly about his first show in the St. Louis at the old High Point...100 or so years ago.

Fulks has been keeping himself in Chicago at the Old Town Folk School up there and has helped them create a beautiful community that teaches a lot of people and promotes even more.  Fulks is a gem and no one knows about him who does not pay attention to great music.  He has a truly unique voice and I don't mean “unique” like Dylan or Niel Young.  I mean unique like...fucking beautiful.  There is something in the way he resonates that literally can make me tear up and there is both a joy and a mournfulness that he conjures which becomes stunning in a small venue like Off Broadway.

The voice coupled with 30 years of songwriting proved too much for the normal 45 minute opener and he played for over an hour and left everyone wanting for more.

Georgia Hard

She said she was leaving

So I went to follow

Blind love and I-55 got me here

Dirty old salt truck

in the smog before me

And dear old Dixie, back in the rearview mirror

Got a third-story walk-up

With a view of the alley

A mailroom job that isn't all glamour and fun

The woman I came for

Is gone to another

Now my feet are just too planted to run

Chorus:

But there's no Carolina Moon over Chicago

No bluegrass growin' out in my backyard

No fields of sugarcane, no soft Virginia rain

But damn, if this livin' ain't Georgia Hard

Down on Halsted

The women walk by me

Like they can tell

I haven't got a dollar to spare

So it's into a side street

For a beer and a sad song

I guess some things

Are the same most everywhere

So please, Mr. Conwell

Could you except the charges?

When I told you "A cold day in Maacon", I lied

And if your pecan trees still need a-shakin'

I'll be back a-beggin' fast as the grey dog flies”

Chatham County seemed like they were going to be awesome after some awful sound problems.  They do 4 musicians, no drummer, and one microphone.  It is almost too cute but these guys are clearly killing it and a braver man would have stayed for more but… I am old.

Robbie Fulks/Chatham County Line

Most recently I went to Off Broadway to see the Felice Brothers.  The Felice Brothers became like gods to me with the release of their eponymous CD from 2008.  Songs like “Whiskey In My Whiskey”, “Scarecrow” and more made a CD that was so solid song to song, so lyrical and so filled with sad energy that it was far and away my best CD released that year.  But so what?  They came to town to the Firebird once since then and I missed them (out of town) which was clearly my bad but mistakes get made.  But I did not miss them this time and they were everything I had hoped and more.  They were brilliant.  Sad.  Emotional.  Funny.  Talented and… shit… they were beautiful.   Ian and James Felice even without their brother Simone play the kind of music that can only be played from playing together for life and loving and hating each other as only brothers can do.  The concert ambled, rambled, soared and swooped.  It was meticulous and it was a train wreck and it was everything rock and roll is supposed to be.  It is clearly for me the best show of 2014!                    

Songs of addiction and madness that when you read the lyrics they just make you ache… and cringe.

Scarecrow

Would you love me

If I told you I was born upstream

If I told you I come from money

White money

Would you love me

Would you love me

Well, I was born down

By a bad little river in a poor town

Where an indian-giver put a board out

It said "Boarding House"

Call him Scarecrow

He kept whores around

And I'd go there

I'd wait my turn on the broke stairs

And get me the girl with the gold hair

Aw yeah, leave your clothes there

On the folding chair

In that cold room

Your breath would twist just like ghosts do

You said, "Call me Dorothy in red shoes"

And the bed moved

The bed moved

The bed moved

Tracy, don't you wake that scarecrow tonight

Well, the man would come in

It's hard living right giving head when

The sad days of winter have set in

And the medicine for an addict is heroin

I'd find you there in the bath

We'd cook up your shit in a tin can

And you started calling me Tin Man

And we started making plans to begin again

Begin again

You saved a C note

Told me you felt like a seagull

Told me to meet at the depot

With the needle, then maybe we'd go

To Reno

Where you'd be my desert dove

And we'd find a way to make better love

Said, "Baby, that's how the West was won"

And the blood-red sun

Yeah, the blood-red sun

And the blood-red sun

Tracy, don't you wake that scarecrow tonight

Well, the man cries,

"Who gives a damn when a tramp dies?"

But I loved you there in the lamp light

With your bare thighs

And the halo of your hair alive

And all my lifelong

I'll never shake off your siren song

And all of your talk about dying young

With an iron lung and that crazy way

Would you love me

If I told you I was born upstream

If I told you I come from money

White money

Would you love me

Would you love me

And all my lifelong

I'll never shake off your siren song

And all of your talk about dying young

With an iron lung and that crazy way

You said, "Simon,

I think I might stay here with Scarecrow tonight

Simon, I think I'm gonna stay here with Scarecrow tonight."

                                  s

“I put some whiskey into my whiskey

I put some heartbreak into my heart

I put my boots on that ole dance floor

I put three rounds Lord, in my 44”

The Felice Brothers.

Quite a year indeed.

Go see some music.

Save your soul.

Jeff Mangum at The Sheldon

Sooooo... it all comes down to guns, the guy from Notre Dame, Lance Armstrong and the budget, and Newtown and getting your own AR-15 to live in this dangerous, DANGEROUS country we live in...except it does not have to be.  There is always live music.

The other night I had the opportunity to go to a show at the Sheldon with my son Jon.  It is a blessing to do something you really like and when you can do it with your son it is even more better.  The show we went to see was Jeff Mangum who was the genius behind the seminal indie band Neutral Milk Hotel.  Magnum and the band were working the scene when they broke in 1998 with the seminal “Aeroplane Over The See” and it’s creepy beautiful “King of carrot Flowers”.  This kind of reminds me that radio was already dead even before the millenium.  Anyway the album was huge for indy rock and garnered critical acclaim when Mangum broke up the band and if lore is correct had a nervous breakdown.

If you listen to his music you would not be surprised.  He has a wailing voice with a sustain that is creepy when he carries the notes out.  It is just all angst and suffering and everything that made that brief, beutiful advent of indie such a heartnreaking thing... anyway... The Sheldon is a beautiful venue.  I think I have been there three or four times.  I saw garrison Keilor read poetry there and I saw someone do a Billie Holliday revue there which was cool and I think my son Patrick must have sang there or auditioned there or we went to see a play there or something.  Anyway, very cool venue.  Bathrooms are far from where you watch the show but comfortable seat and great site lines.  I do not know how many it seats but it cannot be more than 300.  It has a full bar attached next door in the gallery which is nice but again, a little walk for an old man.

And I am an old man.  the crowd for this show was trying as hard as anyone in St. louis can try to be hipster chic and cool.  It was interesting for an old man but ⅔ of the men had beards and when I say “beards” I dont mean david Ducovny “oh I forgot to shave have sex with me” beards but real beards.  Grizzly Adams (oops dating myself) bee hive type beards.  Seriously ⅔ of the crowd.  I had never seen such a thing.  I would say average age was about 32 and the crowd was pleasant and excited to see a hero.  The opening band was “The Tall Firs” and they were pretty cool.  two guys with electric guitars and it was kind of melodic.  they both sang like “The Crash test Dummies” with these deep mumbling lines but the songs and the guitars were excellent and I will check them out further on Spottify.

Mangum came on after a brief intermission and the crowd literally (for such a subdued venue) went wild.  One of the nice things about the Sheldon for an old man is the seating for everyone and the site lines, and the cocktails which you can bring in.  It is very much classy theatre with a nice stage with wooden panelling looking like a church (which I believe it was).  he walked out and sat down.  People hollered songs and he was pleasant and dismissive.  The cool thing about a show like this is that it is a guy with a limited but brilliant body of work, just coming out and playing to his fans.  He could sell more tickets at a bigger place (this was sold out) but the idea is just to deliver product, an event, a personal connection, and he does.  He started out right away with songs from “Aeroplane” and the crowd sang with him.  he apologized for being in bad voice and was taking hits from an inhaler and water bottle. He played “King of Carrot Flowers Part I” and had the crowd singing and then invited folks to come up closer.  No one (it being St. Louis) really wants to be dick and block other peoples view but when people did not move he chided them... and then they came.  We were in the balcony but about 40 people came up and either sat right in front or actually sat on the stage with him.  it was cool.  And all of them knew the words... to every song.  I remember being a fan like that and having a passion like that.  but barely.

This is the new model.  People of a certain age who have put out some quality music have the opportunity to continue to give their fans something of value, at a decent price and continue to make a living.  I don’t know whether Mangum is still writing anything but what he did is so famous and so meaningful to their audience that the opportunity to sit 5 feet away from his while he plays and sings, and they sing along.  It is creating these type of experiences that is the future survival.  Finding ways to connect that have nothing to do with record companies, or radio or selling albums or, god forbid, coming to play the local casino.  Mangum and the Tall Firs, with the help of a great local venue made memories.  Sometimes life is not about the 24 hour news cycle, and the stupidest athletes and guns and the budget.  Sometimes is can be about music and... pure joy.