Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

concerts

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I think most people enjoy attending concerts where they know all the songs. I know i do. As much as going to a concert is for experiencing art in motion, it is also a selfish pursuit: you want to hear your favorite songs, and you don’t want them fucked with. There is a certain thrill that comes with the anticipation of a crashing bridge, or the appreciation of an understated vocal ad lib.

This approach is sometimes prohibitive to hearing new music, whether it be a new band or a performer debuting new material. But, no matter how well prepared you are, there can always be an opened band or a strange tune that punches past your lack of karaoke intimacy with to make you fall hard into aural love.

I found myself at the NorthStar Bar with a motley assembly of some of the most talented people i know to see just such a stranger: Kaki King. Anthony had described her to me by email earlier in the day – “Imagine Ani DiFranco on crack … She uses her right hand on the fingerboard to tap out bass lines, and her left hand on the fingerboard to play melodies simultaneously. It’s pretty impressive.”

I’ve come to accept my mediocrity as a guitar player — i’ve been playing only two years less than both Anthony and Kaki, but i am still easily impressed by simplistic guitar pyrotechnics. I was prepared to see a few interesting tap solos and some intricate picking, and to generally have my playing be humbled.

Really, though, i was not prepared.

I’ve seen a lot of random opening bands, many of whom i’ve derisively blogged about the next day, but Kaki King is the first artist since Peter Mulvey (and, to a slightly lesser extent, Erin McKeown) to ever leave me with my eyes unblinking, my jaw hanging loose, and my fingers twitching just in contemplation of my inevitable attempt to replicate the performance before me.

Kaki is, in short, the most astounding acoustic guitar player i have ever witnessed. It wasn’t just the casually arrived at alternate tunings, the tap & hammer solos, or even her simultaneous strumming & drumming on the guitar. It was her personality — quiet and simply smiling, but with a quick wit hidden beneath her swath of out-grown bangs. It was her ease — the way that after the audience’s obvious favorite song of the night she remarked to the effect of “That isn’t really finished yet; sometimes i just play the songs live and let them go in the directions they want to.” The way that, as opposed to how people joke about it with me, i really could not tell when her casual tuning and fretting ending and her songs began because at any point her hands were on her guitar the performance was underway.

Kaki has some MP3s on her site for your perusal, and while they will not replicate the awe that i was in on Tuesday night, i think they still speak adequately for themselves. And, please keep in mind that i typically range from indifferent-to-resistant when it comes to instrumental music, so Kaki must be pretty damned good.

Must be? Hell… she is.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2003/08/106140300363101718/

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On Monday Aim invited me to join her at a Radiohead concert. The concept of it nearly rolled my eyes back into my head; an arena of young urban hipsters as or more obsessed with their band as I am with Tori Amos, all with overt political or stylistic agendas, all of whom would undoubtably frown at me for having bought the new Michelle Branch album.

It sounded like a challenge, not to mention a good time.

Poured into my tightest blue jeans and snuggest brown t-shirt, as we walked to our seats i scanned the crowd of trendy young men and realized that i have resorted to co-opting a slightly queer style of dress and carriage because it just works for me … i am small-framed and relatively slim and no longer trying desperately to attract strange women wherever i go. If pressed i could not explain it; it’s just my need to feel wanted, i suppose. I’m not sure what stops me from showing up in cargo pants and a stained flannel shirt. Maybe it’s that i spent the 90’s wearing that, or maybe it’s that i like to approximate an accurate interior self-image so that i feel as though i actually stand out in a crowd as me.

Ultimately, all eyes were on the stage and none on my inanely logoed tee or my inordinately tight ass-hugging pants. I have rarely seen such a polite audience held in rapt attention at such a huge rock show. I am not good with Radiohead’s titles – ever since hearing Kid A their albums pass by me like symphonies – but some songs still stuck out just by virtue of how they were achieved. A hypnotic electronic piano version of “Like Spinning Plates,” a spastic and brittle “Idioteque,” chiming xylophone and the faint singing of the lawn section on “No Surprises,” and “Everything In It’s Right Place” prefaced as “this is a song about the good old days.”

As it echoed back at me from Thom, and then the effects pedals on the stage, i just thought … Yes.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2003/08/106140294589227633/

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I usually have an intense fight or flight reaction to opening acts that i have never heard before, which is increased exponentially when i am in a room small enough that any under-breath comments could be overheard between songs. I can rarely find anything to appreciate about these seemingly random (occasionally local) artists as i innerly triangulate between critique, ambition, and jealousy. Too self-absorbed. I could hit that note. Why can’t i be up there?

With James, i definitely did not have my typical urge to change him, ignore him, or to mentally replace him on the stage with myself. His stage presence made me think of a lithe French Stuart covering Dan Bern, which seemed somehow apropos to open a Bitch and Animal concert. During his first song, rather than bitterly wondering who would ever volunteer to listen to him, i was instead speculated on whether he shaved his arms — his perfect and smooth arms with their muscles churning hard as he pounded out major seventh chords on his guitar. Perhaps wax? How else could they get so smooth?

I didn’t love any of James’s songs individually, but on the whole he had an effect on me; not the same effect he had on Gina, Kelly, Kelly, and Kat, all of whom signed up for his mailing list. It only had one empty line on it by the time it made it to me, handily answering my own rhetorical question: That’s who’s would volunteer to listen to him.

Kat knows better than to ask me how i liked an opening act, and Gina knows me well enough to anticipate my response, so i’d like to think i gave them a pleasant surprise when i opened my mouth and said that i loved the way James used his voice. It was my second favorite thing about him after his arms (which i didn’t mention). It was lovely, a convincing baritone with ample vibrato that switched to Dylan-like whine as it got higher until it hit a Dan Bern’s sort of vocal equivalent of a cheese grater, but only for a second until he began to descend again.

The rest of the thought was, of course, which i would use in a much more convincing fashion if it belonged to me. The voice was indisputably his, though, and today’s reading of his site only proved how hard he must have worked to earn it… “James left college in the mid-1990s to write fiction. Somewhere in this murky chronology, the fiction became social, political, personal songcraft. His head full of Shakespeare, Ozu, Coppola and Bukowksi; James open staged his way through his senior year in state college.”

It goes on to detail that he feels there is a sort of innate lack of weight to what i know and occasionally love as contemporary acoustic music. I like to think the people i admire in the field, the Ani’s, Erin’s, Mulvey’s, and Bitch and Animal especially, have their own startling gravity that upsets your entire world. I’m not sure that James has found his own yet, but knowing that it is there to be possessed and manipulated is half of the step to being an arresting performer

I fled, fled so far that i didn’t talk about my own songs until conversation of James had long faded into the intermission. Well played, Mr. O’Brien.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2003/06/105613183070585065/