John Vanderslice @ The Bowery Ballroom was so great last night. Who is he? I found him wikipediaing the 40-track recorders I started fooling around with years ago – like the one behind me in the picture in the right column of this blog, the Tascam 144, the original portastudio.
I found links to John's "Life and Death of an American 4-Tracker" album, on which he sings an ode to the Tascam 424 analog cassette recorder, a few models down from that first one, but still the same animal, and analog 4 track self-contained cassette recorder. More on that later. I got curious about Vanderslice and after some digging I found that he actually gives(!) away mp3s of a lot of his music on his website. They were so good I ended up buying his other albums.
Inventive song structures, themes from the very dark (9/11, child kidnapping/murder) to the sweet (singing to a child about a lost pet), really creative recording studio work, and beautiful and cryptic, yet literate, compelling lyrics hooked me into this songwriter. He doesn't really sound like anyone else.
On top of that he takes beautiful photographs, which you can find on his site too.
Back to last night - I almost thought I'd miss the show when system failures kept me at work way past my exit time, and then, subway slowness found me trotting through lower Manhattan, not sure which way was toward Delancy. When I finally walked up the Bowery Ballroom stairs which plant you right at the sides of the stage I found myself eye to toe with John and the band just going on.
The sound was really good and the crowd of the mellow sensitive variety you'd expect- well behaved. But the bands play moved way beyond the fuzzy west coast granola sensibility that I was feeling in the crowd. (I say that with love, I really do like granola). The sounds ranged from the simple melodic to angular rock-outs that found John banging on his guitar for noisy effects and pulling off atonal harmonics, and the like — but all very, very musical.
I liked the records, that is, cds (my age is showing) but I was really impressed with the live show. At one point it was down to John alone with an acoustic, but that turned out to be one of the more raging performances ("Numbered Lithograph" from the new cd) rather than a sensitive singer-songwriter moment. Then it was drummer and John a la White Stripes. A combination I really like as the new accepted (?) bare minimum rock band configuration. The old minimum: guitar, bass and drums, of course.
Importantly, John has a generous vibe about him. You get the sense he likes you. He picks fans to come up and sing or play on stage with him (if you email him first and somehow get it set up). The last song was done without amps or mics in the middle of the floor, among the people, like happy non-cynical hippie sing-along. Seemed very sincere. There's a video (below) of Vanderslice during that in-crowd sing-along from another blog.
Great show.
John Vanderslice: Favors the Crowd from MST 1948 on Vimeo.
Friday, September 28, 2007
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