Wednesday, February 23, 2005 ... 4:59 PM
Neko Case and the Sadies at the Variety Playhouse
Between the Sadies' terrific surf-twangy set and Neko's entrance, I said to my Betsy next to me, "Is that Chris Scruggs?" A babyfaced guy standing right in front of us with big black-frame eyeglasses and a blue canvas jacket. She said she had thought he looked familiar. I bet her $5 it was, although she wasn't disagreeing with me. I asked a guy standing next to me, "Do you know BR549?" He said no. He had no clue what a BR549 was. Some kind of part number? The replacement bulb number for my brake lights? He looked as if he were just here for his girlfriend. So I tapped on Chris Scruggs's shoulder and he turned around and I said, Excuse me, are you Chris Scruggs? He seemed confused a little, but maybe happy that I had asked. He said, "Yes!"
I had to yell over the background music. I said, "I thought so! I just wanted to make sure!"
"Oh!" he said. He was smiling politely. He looked a little like Corey Feldman in Stand By Me. I told him we had seen him in Charlotte just a couple months ago. "Oh!" he said. "At the Orange Peel?"
"No!" I said. "At the ... the, uhhhrr ... "
"At the Neighborhood Theatre!" said Betsy.
"At the Neighborhood!" I said. "With ... that ... Who was opening?"
"Otis Gibbs!" said Betsy.
"With Otis Gibbs!" I said.
Chris Scruggs kept nodding and saying, "Oh!" and "O.K.!" He was affable as hell.
The whole rest of the night, I kept wanting to let the Alternative Country fans all around us know that they stood in the presence of Actual Country royalty. Or legacy, anyway. Whether or not Chris's grandfather "invented" the three-finger picking technique that reshaped American country music and ever after defined bluegrass for the casual ear is like the question of which white guy "discovered" America. The holiday is named after Columbus.
So there's something in there, however tenuous, about Chris Scruggs in Neko's audience being the retro-tonk bridge between the golden age of bluegrass and the current age, whatever it is, of Alt Country. I wish I knew enough about the market and the zeitgeist to synthesize you some more, but that's why God made Jack Sparks. What I know about is how it sounds.
Just before slipping under her cover of "Hex" to lift it up from beneath, Neko Case told the sound guy she could use more reverb, "If you've got it. I know that's, like, porno amount of reverb," she said. "I like to pretend it's someone else singing."
Only it wasn't someone else singing, didn't sound like someone else singing. Neko sounded just like Neko, and what I took away from my first pop concert in the 5th grade -- Tiffany -- not to mention from my first Cowboy Junkies show -- is that you can't take this for granted. But if you're headed to one of her shows, be assured: Neko sounds like Neko.
Including, but not limited to:
- the rolling smoke of her bold lower register
- the throatiness in her brassy upper range
- the honkytonk breaks when she turns melodic corners
- and yes, the Spectoresque slathering of pudding-thick plate 'verb.
- Making the Sadies a perfect complement, all pluck and shimmer, to cut through Neko's richness, with the Good brothers' Gretsch archtop and modified Tele trading off Byrdsy jangles and twangs between them.
I did miss backup singer Kelly Hogan and, more keenly, pedal steel-picker Jon Rauhouse -- particularly on that reverby "Hex", a beautiful song, beautifully sung by Neko, but a different sort of lonesome without Hogan's harmonies soaring over Rauhouse's disconsolate steel, as we've all heard on The Tigers Have Spoken.
But what did soar on Saturday night without qualification, most surprisingly, was Blacklisted's forlorn little songlet, "Outro With Bees." "How's hope feeling today?" never sounded like such a rhetorical question, all the more lonely a line with which to open a song that gives up before it gets out of bed -- but resonated long after the longer, and long-anticipated, "Blacklisted" had chuffed on by us. The real hero of the night, though, was a number I hadn't heard, but which Neko apparently featured on ACL a couple of years ago (if anyone has a copy and would like to hook me up, please click the big "B" below): "Maybe Sparrow," a stunner of a love song that put the catch in my throat and the tickle in my eyelashes -- that feeling -- that transported floating feeling -- that is the whole reason I go to shows like this. It's what I got from "Dear Someone" the first time I heard it on Prairie Home Companion, or "Wagon Wheel" the first time I heard it on stage.
And I'm relieved to report that there was a moment or two like that in the set, because for so much anticipation -- and I can't have been the only one in the crowd who had anticipated this show for so long -- it was a really fucking short set. Ten songs maybe. Eleven. Twelve at the most -- and short songs, with the bulk of selections culled from the Tigers CD -- which, let's admit it, by any measure is little more than half the album that Blacklisted or Furnace Room Lullaby is, the former of which we got only two selections from, and the latter only the title track (admittedly stunning, and of which my Betsy recorded some audio on a concealed digital camera that is just poor quality enough that I might get away with posting it. Check back).
So: cheers and tears for the stunning ballads, a frown at the rush of the headliner's set, and a big thumbs up to the Sadies, whose surfy pre-Neko set managed to wipe out the power-pop incongruity of opener Visqueen, and prop up the too-brief second half of the evening -- and also for providing the night's most surprising and surreal three minutes with their special guest, a mightily hopped-up Jon Langford who managed to make a rendition of his "Nashville Radio" sound both sincere and poignant while high-kicking and buckdancing across the stage like to have scared Dallas Good out of his boots.
A weird night. A good night.
Brendan
1 Comments:
i saw Neko and The Sadies in NY over Feb, 2005.
It was so-so. The Sadies were wonderful...a little too professional. I had hoped they would just slug some beers and rip it up, but they kept the show a little too, "Thank you, ma'am, and now we'd like to play our final number."
Is that a joke onto itself?
I got an autograph from Dallas after the show, and he and Travis were ranking on some upcoming artist, and i thought, "Gee some of that would have been nice up on stage."
Neko sounded nice, but w/o a strong set list, and the wobbling, atonal presence of Garth Hudson of The Band the show fell apart. She was sweet to invite him on stage, but someone should have had the decency to tell him to stop playing when he clearly didn't know what he was doing. I'd liked seeing him, too. But more then two songs was brutal.
By 
, at
12/15/2005 1:12 PM
Making Notes: Music of the Carolinas
(Novello Festival Press, April 2008)
includes my essay, "Link Wray"
MUSIC
Flop Eared Mule
The Celestial Monochord
HickoryWind.org
Modern Acoustic Magazine / Blog
Faking It
Honey, Where You Been So Long?
whiskey-girl
Porchlight
Charlotte-related
Emily A. Benton
Laurie Koster's Charlotte & Area Events
Evening Muse
Neighborhood Theatre
OTHER THAN MUSIC
Rusty Barnes
Mixed Animal
Cans and Jars
Night Train
Cat and Girl
Tom Drury
Ian Frazier
Film Freak Central
November 9, 2007
Eilen Jewell
The Evening Muse, Charlotte, NC
***review!***
June 16, 2007:
Carrie Rodriguez w/ Tim Easton
The Evening Muse, Charlotte, NC
***review!***
June 2, 2007:
Mt. Airy Fiddlers Convention
***review!***
July 10, 2005:
Chris Scruggs
The Evening Muse, Charlotte, NC
***review!***
July 8, 2005:
Tim Easton
The Evening Muse, Charlotte, NC
***review!***
February 19, 2005:
Neko Case and The Sadies w/ Visqueen
Variety Playhouse, Atlanta, GA
***review!***
September 17, 2004:
Gillian Welch & David Rawlings w/ Old Crow Medicine Show
Theater At Lime Kiln, Lexington, VA
***review!***
August 17, 2004:
Sweet Harmony Traveling Revue
Wolf Trap, Vienna, VA
***review!***
August 7 & 8, 2004:
Newport Folk Festival
Newport, R.I.
***review!***
July 11, 2004:
Cowboy Junkies
Wolf Trap, Vienna, VA
***review!***
Various Artists:
Friends of Old Time Music: the folks arrival 1961-1965 (at HickoryWind.org)
Neko Case:
Live From Austin TX DVD (at HickoryWing.org)
Old Crow Medicine Show:
Big Iron World
Sampson Pittman:
"Highway 61 Blues"
Baby Boy Warren:
"Stop Breakin Down"
Nina Nastasia:
The Blackened Air
Ryan Adams:
Jacksonville City Nights
Robert Wilkins:
"Rolling Stone"
Neko Case:
Furnace Room Lullaby
Etta Baker:
One Dime Blues
Steve Earle:
The Revolution Starts Now
Grey DeLisle:
The Graceful Ghost
