“What’s that? You’ve named it already?” Peter Holsapple asked, attempting to share Chris Stamey’s between-songs mutterings with the audience at McCabe’s Guitar Shop in Santa Monica last Friday night. After a few more mumbles from his partner, Holsapple officially introduced the crowd to the retro condenser mic at center stage: “We’re calling her ‘Old Betty.’”
Welcome to the ramshackle, utterly charming onstage world of Holsapple & Stamey, circa 2009. Their place in the pantheon long since secure, the two indie-rock progenitors (once and, apparently, future co-leaders of the dB’s) are back on the road with nothing to prove, but a new set of amiable songs to work into the repertoire. They recently released their second album as a duo, Here and Now, on the Bar/None label; it comes a mere 17 years after they flew in the face of grunge with their beloved, stripped-down Mavericks LP. Yes, they were mavericks when mavericks were cool (before a certain Alaskan claimed the mantle) – but now they’re content to pretend, as they do on the new album’s title track, that their greatest ambition is to avoid screwing up: “If there ever was a show/We could not afford to blow to bits/We could always hire some counterfeits/To do that show.”
“Here and Now” serves as the perfect introduction to Holsapple & Stamey’s lighthearted, self-effacing duo aesthetic; indeed, if there were a market for a sitcom featuring a pair of aging rockers good-naturedly barnstorming the land – a gender-redefined, hipster Golden Girls, if you will – then “Here and Now” would be its theme song. It led off the McCabe’s concert, which also featured sterling (if shambolic) renditions of album cuts “Santa Monica,” “Early in the Morning” and “Widescreen World.” Stamey also sang Big Star alum Chris Bell’s “I Am the Cosmos,” and the duo covered Family’s prog-rock fave “My Friend the Sun,” which opens the Here and Now album.
“Our label tells us that if we sell enough copies of the new album on CD, they’ll release it on vinyl!” Holsapple enthused at one point Friday night. Holsapple & Stamey have been around long enough to see traditions like album-release orders turned on their heads; thankfully, as they’ve proved on this mini-tour, other traditions – like the sound of two friends harmonizing around a condenser mic – can always pick up exactly where they left off. (more…)
A few weeks ago I had the opportunity to see David Byrne live in concert. It was purported to be a celebration of the work he did with Brian Eno, famed producer and musical renegade, encompassing Eno’s production on classic Talking Heads albums as well as their collaborations like My Life In The Bush of Ghosts and a new, currently digital-only release Everything That Happens Will Happen Today. The show was composed of Byrne, a backing band, a trio of backup singers and a trio of interpretive dancers, and while that sounds like a bad, pretentious idea the whole thing came off very entertaining and ended up being a fine night of live music.
Another big plus was the lack of squirrels in the road. Come on, if you go to see bands with an extensive and memorable back-catalog you know about the squirrels. A pace is building, the classics are rolling out and the audience is having a grand old time, then suddenly the performer announces, “We’d like to play something from our new album” and suddenly it’s all screeching brakes and momentum sliding to a halt. Damn squirrels, they’ll do it every time.
That’s what’s so great about the new collaboration: nary a squirrel to be found. All the songs, even if they’re not immediate attention-getters, are very good and surprisingly song-like. I hesitate to use the word ‘conventional’ because it would tend to paint Everything That Happens… as by-the-numbers, which it definitely isn’t. These songs sat side by side with tunes like “I, Zimbra,” “Once In A Lifetime,” and even “Help Me Somebody” and never interrupted the flow, never incurred massive pee-breaks and beer raids. The album is an album, and not an excuse to tour based around weak product, thank God.
The story goes like this: Byrne found himself in the company of Eno unexpectedly, as both hadn’t co-created in awhile. Eno, over the years, made his bones by becoming an ambient artist as well as the big-time producer of several classic albums, including U2’s The Joshua Tree. Byrne mixed his sound with massive multiculturalism and founded the Luaka Bop label. Now here they were in the company of each other and the inevitable happened: one asked the other if they were up for doing something. The result? Eno sent Byrne some instrumentals he had worked up, yet these frames were distinctively song-based. (more…)
“What’s that? You’ve named it already?” Peter Holsapple asked, attempting to share Chris Stamey’s between-songs mutterings with the audience at McCabe’s Guitar Shop in Santa Monica last Friday night. After a few more mumbles from his partner, Holsapple officially introduced the crowd to the retro condenser mic at center stage: “We’re calling her ‘Old Betty.’”
A few weeks ago I had the opportunity to see David Byrne live in concert. It was purported to be a celebration of the work he did with Brian Eno, famed producer and musical renegade, encompassing Eno’s production on classic Talking Heads albums as well as their collaborations like My Life In The Bush of Ghosts and a new, currently digital-only release 