Boney Earnest's Suburban Hilltop Tent Revue

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Thursday, February 25, 2010 ... 1:40 PM

On the Trail of the Dave Rawlings Machine, part 1

Earlier this month, my friends Ginger Kowal and Carolyn Fryberger spent a few days following the The Dave Rawlings Machine along the end of their tour in the great Northwest. Ginger and Carolyn are the founders of the Dave Rawlings Machine Fan Club -- and, I think I can say, friends of Dave and Gil as well. I asked them to write about their trek for the Tent Revue, and they both sent me wonderful pieces -- not only descriptive but thoughtful and interesting as well. I think you'll enjoy them. I'm going to draw this out a little, and post Carolyn's writing tomorrow. Here is what Ginger wrote for us.

(Thanks to Lindsey Best for letting me use her photographs of the Dave Rawlings Machine in these entries!)

I think you could say that David Rawlings had something to let out of his system. All of those years of standing quietly beside Gillian Welch, melding his small voice delicately and perfectly with hers, interjecting little brilliant scales on his guitar carefully between the verses of her meticulously arranged songs, smiling shyly to the cheering crowd with a small nod after each solo, he must have built up some steam. I don’t think that Dave was having a bad time as the second hand in the two-man Gillian Welch band, but when you give this man a banjo and a small group of slightly rambunctious young men to play onstage with, something kind of wild emerges.

I remember when Carolyn and I first started following the Machine around the Southeast back in December of 2006, when it was still a one-off sort of experiment executed in small dingy venues at midnight, after the regularly scheduled show. Dave used to tip up onto his toes during his guitar breaks, like he was trying to reach something with his solo that was just slightly beyond him. While he was singing he would reach up for notes that both he and the audience knew he had small chance of hitting. During the shows these days he will sometimes ramp the band up to a tempo that they can just barely keep up with. Sometimes he will flail at his poor little guitar like he wants to beat something monstrous out of it. It’s not that Dave is limited. (Ha!) It’s just that he seems to want to play always harder, faster, higher, louder, more, more, more. No wonder he sometimes almost collapses backwards from the microphone after a solo. It must be exhausting to be straining towards something incredible all the time. (It is intoxicating to watch.)

If Gillian once called her approach “selective deconstructionism,” then I think the Dave Rawlings Machine is guided by a general explosiveness. Gillian said that she plays rock music, pared down to its most bare and raw elements. Dave seems to be able to take music from nearly any source or style and ramp it up to something spectacular. Witness “Girls Just Want to Have Fun”; “Monkey and the Engineer”; “Stop Dragging My Heart Around”; they are performing “Hot Corn Cold Corn” at their shows! All turn into alternately foot-stomping or heart-stopping masterpieces onstage. Having a full band up there, Ketch on fiddle, Morgan on bass, Willie on guitar and harmony vocals, expands Dave’s already formidable energy and intensity into a thundering old-time locomotive. Dave still plays like a one-man band, using his little Epiphone to fill in all possible harmonies and textures, seemingly attempting to strike as many strings as possible and create as much sound from that little guitar as possible, but having the boys around him just makes it all bigger.

Dave’s voice still expands unconsciously into Gillian’s when she joins him in harmony. Perhaps he is still just a little uncomfortable with his voice out there all by itself. Besides, imagine! if you sounded so completely perfect singing with someone else, wouldn’t you feel more comfortable singing together than on your own? The rapport with Gillian is still there, a solid base to this wild new band, a strong and beautiful joining of voices and talents that seems to keep Dave grounded. To hear them sing “Throw Me A Rope” together at the very center of the show, a deep well of darkness and nearly unspeakable beauty in the heart of that display of energy and excitement coming from an unstoppable Machine... well. It’s unspeakably beautiful. It always has been. I’m glad it’s still there.

Some artists have a style or a sound to sell, and that’s what they give you at their shows. You get to see a product, a finished thing. At Dave’s shows you witness the creation of the product. He’s selling tickets to watch the product taking form. It’s different every night; I guess this is one reason you can go to several shows one after the other and be completely entertained every time. He doesn’t ever seem to be content with playing anything the same way he has before. Each time around a song will have a different arrangement, a different sequence, a different resting spot here, a different crescendo and climax there. He’s able to bring the band along with him in his improvisation – you can see him direct them with a nod or a shout to start something new on the spot. They seem to enjoy it. There is an air of spontaneity and surprise, and yet security that I suppose only comes along with the trust of having played a nearly complete tour together.

...The effect on the audience? In Portland the band was called onstage for four lengthy encores. The people just wouldn’t stop cheering. As for my more personal perspective, I can tell you that Dave Rawlings Machine kind of makes me feel like dropping out of school and dedicating myself to following the Machine full-time. If anyone out there has some good ideas about why a graduate degree is more important than the joy of watching Dave Rawlings perform onstage night after night, I would love to hear them. Get them to me quick before I become a professional Machinehead.

Ginger Kowal

Brendan

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Monday, February 15, 2010 ... 3:51 PM

Lissie

Wanting to hear something new, sometime around Thanksgiving last year, for a few weeks I awakened my old sleeping eMusic membership, and clicking though recommendations and member lists and free-associatin' links, I ran across this recent EP, Why You Runnin', by this singer called Lissie. I listened to a couple of samples. It was the Hank Williams cover that hooked me. And once I had listened to the rest of these tunes, I was good and caught.

I'm not the only one. I went looking around to see what this kid was all about, and uncovered an artist on the cusp of really hitting it big. As much as an artist can be "on the cusp" who has already sung on a Grammy-nominated single. Well whatever, Grammy nod or no, I hadn't heard of her and you hadn't either, right? But just as I did hear of her, she was doing Paste showcases, she was debuting on World Cafe, she was doing her second Daytrotter session, she was booking tour dates in London. She is on her way, and all there is for us to do is stand aside and watch her.

She is Lissie Maurus, from Rock Island, Illinois, based now in Los Angeles. I'd guess she's around twenty-three years old, but that is just a guess. Her Facebook fan page has 2,263 fans, which, while not Lady Gaga, makes her a sight more fanned than plenty of better-established artists I've added on the FB. She's a go-getter, you can just tell. There's a palpable fire in her singing and in her stage presence. She is earnest -- emphatically, sometimes painfully. You get the feeling that she could get hurt, way out there like that. You watch her because you like her voice, and because she's ridiculously photogenic, but also because you sort of worry for her. It wouldn't be hard, you think, for someone to lead her down the wrong path -- and not necessarily with bad intentions -- and with all that momentum, all that propulsion that's just built into her personality, she could find herself, in a hurry, way down at the end of a road she didn't ever mean to be on. You sort of want to pray for her safe arrival as a mature artist. Or maybe that's just me.

I don't always like the raspy voiced singers. I don't like Concrete Blonde. Something about Lissie's rasp though really snags me. It feels like how Bob Dylan described Roscoe Holcomb -- an untamed sense of control. There's an exactness to her rasp, but as well as she seems to know her voice, as carefully phrased as her readings are, sometimes she does lose her grip on the reins, and that voice runs away with her. Listen here, to her tune "Everywhere I Go," on this Daytrotter session. All goes as rehearsed until the bridge at about 2:20, when she reaches for an improvised falsetto, trips and tumbles. She doesn't seem to know that she's lost control. She leans into the fall, she puts all her weight behind this misstep, she owns it -- and her broken melody achieves an effect of emotional bareness that PJ Harvey and Portishead have spent their careers practicing for. This is what I mean about Lissie's painful earnestness. About how you could worry for her. Even though she doesn't really sing about anything yet, her voice is enough for now, her medium message enough until she does find something to write about. You don't just listen to her, you listen for her. You are impressed, but you flinch. Does she know how naked she sounds up there? Did she mean to fall down like that? Was that real? Is she OK?

Brendan

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Wednesday, February 10, 2010 ... 11:51 AM

Birdie Blog

Singer-songwriter Birdie Busch has a new blog that I've been following. She writes little essays about her Bohemian life in Philadelphia. I like the way she looks at the world, sunny and uncynical but too sly to seem naive, and with a poet's affection for the derelict and the small. I like her limpid, bemused prose. You get the sense of someone lifting something fragile from a pile of rubble, and carrying it home, daydreaming.

Check her out: http://birdiebusch.blogspot.com/

Also check out her recent album, Pattern of Saturn, or any of her albums, really. They are all full of catchy, tiny, twangy pop tunes about how sad we all are, and how happy we could probably be -- unwinding here and there with a big crashing rock number that Birdie rides out like a happy gull in a hurricane. At first she comes across a little sweeter, and a lot cuter, than I normally like my singer-songwriters, but her voice is so weird and disarming, so homespun, with its breaking wobbly phrasing, she manages to cut the sweetness in a way that, say, Iris Dement just isn't able to do ... without alienating all but the most adventurous listeners, as the Freak Folk folks often seem to want to do.

Brendan

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