hrj

As previously noted, I won the traffic-time lottery last night driving into downtown SF and ended up with an extra hour to hang around before meeting my date for the concert. Fortunately, they had a bar and I had an iPhone so something mutually agreeable was arranged. Yoshi's has a confusing number of different spaces: the bar, the restaurant, the jazz club, and the small theaterish space where the concerts are (which also serves cafe food). It's nice and cozy -- no bad seats (except the ones right next to the party sitting next to us, who seemed to be annoyed by how much the concert was interfering with their conversation). It's small enough that you could even do acoustic music there ... if you could convince anyone that music can be pleasant at less than ear-blasting decibels.

Actually, only the initial set of songs was painfully overly amplified -- after that there was an interlude with vocal-and-piano and a more mellow feel, then a return of the rest of the band (all three of them) and more rockish arrangements but not at the previous volume. I suspect the backup band was a local hire for the gig because they all seemed to be very intent on their sheet music -- perfectly competent, mind you, but accompaniment rather than "a group".

I loved Leslie's voice -- I'm always a sucker for mid-range, slightly husky female voices. (Some day I've got to find a music recommendation website that includes filters on features like vocal type.) You might think that a sixty-something woman basing a show around the tunes that made her a hit at sixteen would be ... um ... sad. (Especially such quintessentially teenage-disfunctional-angst songs like "It's My Party".) But she still owns the performances in a way that makes them timeless. I swear there were moments when I could see the sixteen year old still flickering through on stage. In retrospect, of course, the relentless lollipop-heterosexuality of her early material is ironic given Leslie's own sexual orientation, but then you toss in a song like "You Don't Own Me" and the picture becomes more complex.

More than half the show was an assortment of classic American songbook material, though -- so it wasn't entirely a nostalgia fest. On the other hand, I can't say that her renditions of that material was something worth going to hear without the contextual weight of her entire career. Still, I've put her new album Ever Since down on my shopping list as part of my goal to introduce my iPod to music written sometime after the '80s. Because I love that voice.

No date-filter post this time because my blind date was still laid up with the flu I ended up going with Plan B, i.e., thread_walker. And, may I say, I had as much fun as you can have on a date without it actually being a date date. We took off straight from work and ended up at Naan & Curry on Telegraph for dinner (mmm lamby goodness) and then had over an hour until concert time so -- since she'd never really seen the Berkeley campus before, we did an ecclectic tour of my favorite spots: cool statuary, elegant buildings, wooded paths across creeks, the basement of the Life Sciences building where they have the T-Rex skeleton.

The Guthrie concert was superb. It was the perfect mix of old favorites (he did all the ones I was really hoping to hear), new songs, and assorted works by friends and family (including a couple of his father's song's, familiar and not). For all of his rather laid-back folksy performing style, I was struck by how technically impressive his musicianship is. (A typical example was a ragtime piece performed on the guitar.) The only technical flaw, in my opinion -- and it may be just a matter of personal taste, was that the handful of pieces done with the electric guitar had a guitar/voice balance so slanted towards the former that you could barely understand the lyrics even if you knew what they were supposed to be. (This wouldn't be a flaw in a rock performance, of course, but for a folk singer, I expect more intelligibility.) The audience sang along enthusiastically on the appropriate items: the refrain of Alice's Restaurant, the chorus of This Land is Your Land, and a very short and poignant peace song brought out as an encore.

This being Berkeley, it was a very loyal and sympathetic audience: laughing at all the in-jokes and '60s references, as well as being appreciative of how much of the old material was still politically and socially relevant. During the intermission, thread_walker and I amused ourselves by leaning over the railing of the mezzanine lobby and determining (on superficial evidence) who and what various of the attendees were. The aging hippie who I decided had become a successful stockbroker. The Guy Dragged Along By His Date who was attempting to show he had a sensitive side. The angsty 20-something who thought it might be a good event for picking up chicks. The wiry community activist who wore her white hair in a long ponytail. The middle-aged couple who were reliving their transgressive youth by dragging their jr-high-age sons to the concert in hopes of making some emotional connection (and because the kids had to write a paper for school about some artistic performance). I should reiterate that, other than the physical descriptions, these characteristics were all purely inventions of our imagination. Did I mention what a fun date thread_walker is?

I confess: I am one of those people whose musical tastes petrifed at some point in my early 20s. I'd never been a really big buyer of popular music albums -- I own a few dozen LPs, my cassette collection is primarily filk, and I somehow entirely skipped the stage of owning a dedicated CD player. Then I got an iPod back about four years ago and, combined with access to cheap used CDs at Rasputins and the like, I started seriously building my collection in a systematic way for the first time in my life. And what I'm hunting down and buying is the music of my youth. Not all of it is stuff I actually preferred in my youth, but it's the music that stuck in my brain as part of the soundtrack of my life. And it's pretty much all '60s, '70s, and just barely a smidge of '80s, with a solid underlayer of classical and renaissance.

It isn't that I don't think there's any newer music that's good. Part of it is that there was a period in my life when I listed to radio stations playing contemporary styles a lot, and then I shifted my listening habits. 95% of my radio listening for the last decade and more has been NPR (we'll get back to this point), I work in environments that don't include background music as a rule, and the couple of friends who were likely to drag me off to concerts of groups I wasn't familiar with yet moved off to other parts of the country. So newer music didn't work its way into my consciousness as the soundtrack for anything. And, after all, there's so much catching up to do on the artists I already know I like.

All of this is leading up to NPR, Terry Gross, Fresh Air and why it's so odd that I'm Googling for album listings and pencilling a note on my calendar for a date in late April. You see, on Monday's show, she was interviewing this guy from a band called "The Decemberists" and for the first time in ages I have this urge to go buy albums from a band I'd never heard of a week ago and think seriously about going to hear them when they're in SF. Maybe it was the mention that a reviewer had called them "hyper-literate" and accused them of only wanting English majors for fans. Maybe it was the serious discussion of getting the grammar right when writing pastiches of traditional murder ballads. Maybe it was the concept of a "progressive rock" band singing intelligible, literate songs about fairy wives. This isn't a review: fergoodnessakes I haven't listed to more than a few snippets of any given song. But my faith is renewed that maybe there have been some bands recording in the last two decades that are worth checking out after all.