Decemberists
This is the story of the road that goes to my house
And what ghosts there do remain
…….July! July!…Decemberists
Grimy/Gray fogshot of a stage…..Springsteen’s “Seeger Sessions” blends into Levon Helm “Rumble at the Ryman”….if this music indicates the night….yum….early fans keen to their favorite spots, kestrels of sound, on the wires and waiting….lights fall and a wash of sound, a noised flow as Sara Watkins, of Nickel Creek, and her brother Sean draw themselves to stage center and begin the night with rambling fiddle and guitar duets…. A passioned talent for bluegrass and folk, Sara had been asked by Meloy to do double duty. Not only a vital member of the re-adjusted Decemberists, she was tasked/”honored by” doing an opening set of fiddle/guitar duets. Much of the work was from her self-titled solo LP, with a few nods to the historical bluegrass works, remembered from her childhood in San Diego, as well as a few nods to Nickel Creek. She was clearly “happy to be here” and although a noticeable novice at being the lead person/sparkplug of a set, she still managed to win the audience over, entertaining them with energetic, enthusiastic fiddle play (how can you be a fiddle player and not be enthusiastic and energetic?) Fearing a possible “Howdy Moon Moment”, I still chose to go to her stand in the back of the space to get a CD. Not only was she there to sign stuff, but she also had the work on VINYL! DEAL!
Good songs:
Long Hot Summer Days
Same Mistakes
Jefferson (great acoustic piece)
Freiderick (another acoustic)
All This Time
Etc etc
Sara especially impressed me. A solid, speedy first set that pops out at about 45 minutes. Pretty straightforward fiddle/guitar runs, mostly high-energy with some relaxed balladry here and there. A break and then into a 90 minute train with the Decemberists. Here she tackles piano, solo vocal and harmony, percussion, the expected violin/fiddle…. Geesh!
Then a blurbreak between sets and to Meloy and Co…….the songs kick in with July!July!. An homage to Jenny Conlee and her anticipated return end of June? Who knows, but it opens every concert, followed, surprisingly, by one of the more popular songs of their current release. I had expected to hear Down By the Water as, say, an encore or at best a closer. But no, Colin’s channeling of river songs and full moon romance out and gone. Hmmmm……then a slam-bang series of vocals from Meloy. Calamity Song/Rise To Me (one of my clear favorites), We Both Go Down/Don’t Carry It All/Rox in the Box….these aren’t necessarily in sequence, there were others between some of these, but the sense to my ears was this rush of hurled voice and torn poetry. Colin Meloy’s essential talents, brilliant and to the fore—wild vocal abandon and ecstatic writing—as wild as Dylan Thomas reciting lines of poetry. And the poetry of Meloy, his writing, is from that eternal wash of coast and ocean, where tragedy, if not current in your situation, lies just off shore. The Portland he wrote from and the Portland he sang to share tide and time with each other, dark mysterious and unswayed by Man. Whether his delivery is an affectation like Bob Dylan’s early Guthrie or whether it is his “true” voice (from a new found land) the result is Whitmanesque yawp….raggedly clear, brogued, roared against a battered coastline, a Marsden Hartley painting sprawled by voice. For Colin to still exhibit this energy 10 plus years into the game is substantial.
The concert continues and Meloy brings out a few pearls of the past, O Valencia!, Perfect Crime (which I think may have been the first Decemberist song I ever heard…like the Pet Shop Boys meet Robyn Hitchcock…..weird lyrics to catchy hooks and that SoHo sound)….Logan will be relieved that the jerk behind him so many years ago, yelling for “CHIMBLEY SWEEP!!!!!” finally was rewarded….. Colin and crew serenading that very song as the final piece of the night….I hope the idiot was there……over the course of 90 minutes, maybe 18 songs…..most of them pretty straightforward….live and somewhat open-armed, yes,……yet structured to be played over the course of MANY evenings for three months. Unlike Phish, I did not get the impression that Colin Meloy was into “improv” much. It didn’t make the concert any less enjoyable, but it did affirm that there would be no need to see the tour more than once.
Later we all repaired to be dismantled by pitchers of Margaritas and “really deep thoughts” (what’s so amazing about really deep thoughts?-Tori Amos)
So the most critical question at the table seemed to be whether Colin Meloy was engaged with the audience or not. I admit to being struck at first by the impression of an “all-business” attitude presented during the introductions to the first few songs. Perfunctory one-liners like “ This is a song about joint suicide” then, bang, into the song.
Is this just his normal way? Or is he getting burned out by the demands of the road, or is he pre-occupied with concerns about Jenny Conlee’s diagnosed breast cancer (she’s off the road, getting treatment)….not for me to say….and does it matter? To use Dylan’s example, people allow him the arrogance of non-engagement with the audience because, as one critic put it, “Dylan’s talking to the audience in every song, why does he need to speak further?”
So if we move away from that point of interest, what remains? In my opinion, we are left with a satisfying concert, professionally played, crisp. Not particularly exploratory for the musicians but that’s not surprising. Most concerts in most genres are not notable for challenging music, either for audience or musician. The piece of work being played is already composed and so the concert is, within limits of live performance, not supposed to be much beyond a variant to the original text. A few musicians allow themselves the luxury of challenging the work, of pushing themselves, the audience and the work being presented into unexplored territory. But those are exceptions to the rule.
A proving example would be the second song into the set “down by the water”. It was presented cleanly, professionally, a near-templated re-pressing of the original CD version. Anything wrong with that? Not for me,…it was still live, it had the energy of a live performance. Their capacity to hit the notes familiar to the audience is obviously pleasing and not unexpected. It was a great performance of a great song, regardless of the lack of surprise or exploration. A good song done well is not to be dismissed lightly. Live performance does not possess the quality of perfection attainable in a studio full of moderating gadgets or the suspension of time afforded by the process of editing.
Live is live. That’s why we go to it. Not to see a musical car accident. But to “participate” to be a part of the moment of the event. Glenn Gould, later in his career, dismissed live-performance altogether. A brilliant perfectionist and obsessive control freak, he had found his Nirvana in the studio. There he could edit, insert, clip, re-do, until the work was exactly as he wanted it preserved. No errors, no minor gaps between notes, no piano key dulled by an ill-placed fingering. Crisp precise, perfect. Concerts were TOO participatory. He didn’t even want to hear applause after a piece. And he couldn’t countenance any sound during the playing. So, a cough, a rustle of paper, any distraction was just disgusting! Move that expectation to a live concert and the dissonance is impossible to accommodate.
So live concerts are participatory events. The audience wants to be a part of the moment. By way of contrast, there is no way, short of drugs, NOT to be a separated entity when listening to a recorded performance. No matter how wonderful the speaker system or the quality of the headphones, the music is stuck in time, already dead. It will only change if it develops a skip or warp or some other defect. Live music, on the other hand, has open moments, waiting.
But how participatory do we get to be? Audiences are, after all, the fourth wall of the “play” being presented of a particular evening. Audience participation is a fluid thing, more of a moveable bar on a scale/graph than a finite pre-scripted aspect of the play. It is the one part of the night that is most open to impulsive, creative innovative interplay between audience and actors. As such it can come laden with expectation—and I think this explains some of the discussion at the table. Was Meloy engaging the fourth wall? Did he care? What did he see as the purpose of the audience? Shut up and listen? No, I didn’t sense that. But it did seem as a half-engagement. I would put it to fatigue, pre-occupation. The concert was not sold out. The group was a day or less out of a daunting Bonnaroo marathon, and if rumors are correct, there were band concerns and accommodations to be made. Bringing Sara Watkins into a larger role, patching holes left in the tapestry with the departure of accordionist Jenny Conlee,…..trying to maintain a momentum to the tour may have colored the concert as much as any other element of the night.
When you look at the tour schedule for this summer, one wonders about the capacity to maintain such a pace and NOT have a walk-through night…a somnambulatory set now and then. After all, a look at the setlists reveal an almost concrete show… VERY little, if any changes, almost indetectable variation..this has to lend itself to a repetitive, mind-numbing redundancy, erasing all distinction for time and place…. How can anybody do the same thing night after night without a yawn or two?
I still got the feeling that he wanted the audience around, he wanted the fourth wall. I just think he didn’t really know what to do with it. If engagement becomes a blur, then where’s the reward? If you don’t know/are unsure of the role of self and audience at the clear, shimmered surface of the fourth wall, where do you place your hand? Do you want to feel the presence of the other hand, pressing toward you from the audience? Do you want to feel the heat, and if so, why? If not, why not?
Oddly by the end of the concert, after numerous encores, the audience had won Meloy over. Now, of course, we expect it to be the other way ‘round. The artist’ task is to present work to the audience, to break through the wall by dint of talent, effort and engagement with the audience
For me, The Decemberists had done that right from the first song. I didn’t care if he bantered with us, or yelled “Hello Portland!”….big deal. Stand and Deliver, Decemberists!
And they did…..
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