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Chris Darrow: Under His Own Disguise
Chris Darrow
Chris Darrow/Under My Own Disguise
(United Artists, 1973 & 1974; re: Everloving, 2009)
You probably haven’t heard of Chris Darrow, but if you own a pair of working ears, you’ve likely heard him play music. Darrow’s musical footprint is colossal. In addition to being a member of lesser-known bluegrass and rock outfits like the Dry City Scat Band, the Floggs, and the Corvettes, Darrow was an early member of country-rock mainstay the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band and co-founder of Kaleidoscope, a psych-rock precursor to many jam bands and world fusion acts that was lauded by Jimmy Page as “brilliant.” On top of all that, Darrow was a stalwart session player for the likes of Leonard Cohen, James Taylor, John Stewart, Sonny & Cher, and Linda Ronstadt. He is a legend in his hometown of Claremont, and was a mentor to Ben Harper, whose grandparents owned the Claremont Folk Music Center where Darrow bought his first guitar at 13.
Darrow had a brief moment in the sun as a solo artist, but it was fleeting and almost criminally underrated. After releasing a solid country-folk album called Artist Proof in 1972, Darrow recorded two albums for United Artists, 1973’s Chris Darrow and 1974’s Under My Own Disguise. The twosome was reissued earlier this year as a deluxe two-CD, two-LP (180 gram vinyl) package by Everloving Records. They stand the test of time in every way, from songwriting and production to instrumentation and creativity. Darrow is the epitome of the pioneering artist that paved the way for more popular copycats.
King Sunny Adé and Papercuts at the Independent and Starfucker at Bottom of the Hill, San Francisco
King Sunny Adé & His African Beats
June 19th at the Independent, San Francisco
Although he remains hugely popular in his native Nigeria, it’s been more than a decade since King Sunny Adé’s heyday in America. Adé’s last album release here, Seven Degrees North, was off the market since 2000 (it was recently re-released). But that hasn’t stopped a litany of Western artists from digging into his immense catalog of juju music for inspiration. Any fan of bands like Foals, TV on the Radio, Vampire Weekend, and Animal Collective has heard Adé’s influence. Dirty Projectors’ recently released album, Bitte Orca, features plenty of the multipart vocal harmonies and dissonant guitar that have been hallmarks of Adé’s sound over his 42-year career. Phish guitarist Trey Anastasio once cited Adé’s use of “a lot of people playing small parts that are intertwined together” as a major influence.
So it was with great anticipation that the 62-year-old guitarist and bandleader played a set at the Independent in San Francisco. His 12-piece backing band strode on stage and proceeded to dive into a beast of a rhythm, driven by a sea of dunduns, or “talking drums.” Looking years younger than a sextagenarian, Adé immediately led his group through one of the hallmarks of juju music: A lengthy, multipart a cappella harmony, sung in Yoruba, with an unmistakable cadence of short bursts followed by long verses. During many of the a cappella sections, which were the set’s mainstay, Adé and his fellow singers would act out choreographed dances and mime acts like passing food to one another. The only sign of Adé’s age—he’s released a mind-blowing 120 albums in his career—was the fact that he only picked up his axe once during the two-hour set. But when he chose to do so, as he was joined by two Nigerian dancers with superhuman powers in the gluteus maximus department, his playing was light and crisp.
The Beyman Brothers: Amongst Friends
This is a story about friendship, one that traverses a brilliant career in comedy and a stalwart tenure in the meditative arts. The seeds of the bond between Christopher Guest and David Nichtern were planted before either was born. They took root in musical jam sessions in Manhattan’s Washington Square Park in their teenage years and grew to accommodate the hectic schedule that comes with thriving careers on opposite coasts. More than anything, they sprouted over the past four decades in their respective kitchens in Los Angeles and New York City, where the pair would gather to connect the best way they knew how: Through their love of playing music together.
That love continues to this day, and the latest flower of the lifelong friendship between Guest and Nichtern is the Beyman Brothers, a musical group with longtime Guest collaborator and friend CJ Vanston. The trio has made an album of decidedly serious instrumental music (let’s call it meditative Americana) titled Memories of Summer as a Child, which might surprise some since Guest is regarded as one of the funniest filmmakers on the planet. Guest’s resume of hilariously deadpan mockumentaries includes the folk trio send-up A Mighty Wind, the small town theater roast Waiting for Guffman, and This Is Spinal Tap, the iconic 1984 heavy metal comedy that started it all.
But long before his comedy career took off in the 1970s, Guest was deadly serious about music, which has played a central theme in many of his movies. Guest grew up in Greenwich Village and attended the High School of Music and Art, a platform for classical musicians. Nichtern’s mother introduced Guest’s parents to each other and their families stayed close. Nichtern and Guest went to kindergarten together, where legend has it that Guest beat up a bully on Nichtern’s behalf. Guest and Nichtern started playing bluegrass music at 13, and they would later form a rock group called Voltaire’s Nose during college in the 1960s.
Dengue Fever and The Lost World: May 5th at the Castro Theatre, SF
Dengue Fever andThe Lost World
May 5th at the Castro Theatre, San Francisco
With funky basslines, surf guitar, stout brass, and a Cambodian pop princess as its singer, the sound of Dengue Fever is otherworldly. So it was little surprise that the LA-based band proved a perfect match as the live soundtrack to a screening of The Lost World, a 1925 silent film that depicts dinosaurs, intrepid explorers, and more than a few moments of unintentional comedy. Based on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s 1912 novel of the same name, The Lost World chronicles a trip by British explorers to prove the existence of dinosaurs deep in the Amazon forest. It features stop-motion animation dinosaurs created by Willis O’Brien, who later animated King Kong.
The band wielded a deft touch from the outset of the 100-minute cinematic gem, with Dave Ralicke setting the scene with ominous tones on the trombone. Although its music was an inherent fit for the film, the band had clearly spent a lot of time going through the scenes, crafting new music and re-arranging existing tracks. At the first appearance of Prof. Challenger, the bearded and brutish explorer, the band re-worked its song “One Thousand Tears of a Tarantula”, letting feverish drums and Farfisa organ accompany the crowd’s taunts for Challenger to “Bring out your Mastodons!” When newspaper man Edward Malone is told by his girlfriend that she will not marry him “until all of London rings with your name,” accordion and trombone captured his deflation.
BLK JKS: Rebirth of a Nation
“No idea’s original, there’s nothin’ new under the sun / It’s never what you do, but how it’s done…”
In 2002, the rapper Nas spit that lyric on a track fittingly called “No Idea’s Original”, his attempt to sum up a sonic landscape he saw as being chock full of wholly derivative acts. Hundreds of new bands have emerged since his diatribe on originality, all serving up variations, both major and minor, on a prior theme.
There may never be an indisputable exception to that theory—all artists are in some way a product of their influences—but the BLK JKS come damn close. This South African poly-lingual chameleon of a band wasn’t created in a vacuum, and each member boasts a litany of influences. But it’s safe to say that the vowel-phobic BLK JKS (say: Black Jacks) dish out a sound that is inimitable—let’s call it dub psych-rock laced with traditional South African rhythms, bebop jazz, and creepy lyrics. They have an EP on the Secretly Canadian label that arrived in stores March 10th and a full-length to be released in late summer.
The root of the band’s distinctiveness lies in its diversity. BLK JKS are a black rock band from a country in which rock music has always been the domain of white folks (they are steadily changing that fact). The two founders and guitarists, Mpumi Mcata and Linda Buthelezi, grew up on the same street in Johannesburg’s East Rand district, teaching themselves guitar and initially forming the band in 2000. Four years later, they recruited bassist Molefi Makananise and drummer Tshepang Ramoba, both from Soweto and session players with jazz-heavy backgrounds to sure up the rhythm section.
Marked for O’Death
“Oh, death, how you’re treatin’ me / You’ve closed my eyes so I can’t see / Well you’re hurtin’ my body / You make me cold / You run my life right outta my soul.”
Those words, most famously crooned a cappella by bluegrass legend Ralph Stanley on the song “O’Death”, begged a creeping Grim Reaper to spare him another year. The song is haunting, bare, remarkably soulful, and a guiding light for five musicians who met in the early part of the decade while attending SUNY-Purchase, a state school in the suburbs of New York City. With a hankering for Gothic roots music, the band snatched the song title as its moniker and formed in 2003.
Seventeen months ago, as the quintet toured Europe in support of its second album, Head Home, death did not spare O’Death. Eliza Sudol, the 24-year-old fiancée of drummer David Rogers-Berry, died of an aneurysm in her sleep in NYC. The band was in Sweden at the time, and immediately shut down its tour to come home and grieve over the loss. Time passed, and the band was soon back to work, turning to their music for catharsis.
Dan Auerbach: March 13th at Bimbos, SF
Dan Auerbach
March 13, 2009 at Bimbo’s, San Francisco
Side projects rarely turn into much more than the work of idle hands. For every successful act launched by a musician who already had a “day job”—the Raconteurs, the Breeders, and the Tom Tom Club come to mind—there are countless solo outings that amounted to puzzling missteps (Zack de la Rocha, we’re looking at you). With his debut solo album, the just-released Keep It Hid, and a barnstorming US tour, Black Keys’ guitarist/singer Dan Auerbach has put himself firmly in the category of artists who make music that will stand the test of time, regardless of who’s behind them.
At a sold-out show at Bimbo’s 365 Club in San Francisco, Auerbach showed off a batch of songs that were steeped in the blues and early rock. He was backed by San Antonio rock quartet Hacienda, with My Morning Jacket drummer Patrick Hallahan joining them on percussion. It was clear from the outset that the night would be something of a departure from the Keys’ distortion-laden, raw hill-country blues. The set opened with “Trouble Weighs a Ton”, a beautiful, gospel-inflected ballad about hard times.
Andrew Bird: February 19th at the Fillmore
Andrew Bird is a classically trained violinist and a deft multi-instrumentalist. His lyrics are deeply literate, almost professorial at times. The Chicago-based singer-songwriter has spoken in the past about the painstaking detail with which he records his albums, having twice scrapped his second solo release, 2005’s The Mysterious Production of Eggs, in its entirety.
Who knew he was also a mad scientist? In a 90-minute set at the Fillmore in San Francisco, the 35-year-old Bird showed that a combination of dexterity and a quest for recorded perfection has yielded a comfort level on stage that propels him to turn much of his music on its ear, jostling tempos, shifting arrangements, and generally operating like a deeply committed jazz improviser.
This show was the first of two sold-out nights at the Fillmore, as Bird has ridden a surge in popularity since last month’s release of his newest album, Noble Beast. But Bird’s rise has been no overnight sensation: Since 1995, he has released seven albums on various labels, as well as several EPs, live recordings, and more than 50 guest appearances for the likes of Squirrel Nut Zippers, Neko Case, and My Morning Jacket.
Spindrift: The Legend of God’s Gun
It’s 1965, and Italian filmmaker Sergio Leone wants to screen his new film, A Fistful of Dollars, in the United States. But instead of introducing the spaghetti Western in Hollywood or New York, United Artists makes the rather batty decision to screen it at the Longshoreman’s Hall along Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco. The venue has been hosting a series of Acid Tests held by Ken Kesey, and Leone and the studio agree that these intrepid trippers are exactly the demographic that can quell Hollywood backlash of Leone’s campy take on the Western formula.
Fact check: Leone and United Artists did no such ludicrous thing, as marrying gunslingers and LSD would seem like a debacle waiting to happen. We’ll never really know how well A Fistful of Dollars or Once Upon a Time in the West would’ve played to the likes of the Merry Pranksters. But such an improbable nexus—spaghetti Western meets Acid Test—was the light bulb that sparked musician Kirpatrick Thomas and filmmaker Mike Bruce to come up with a modern film and soundtrack that melds those two seemingly disparate worlds. The Legend of God’s Gun, out on DVD and currently making the film festival rounds, is as weird and campy as old-school spaghetti Westerns (and may be loosely based on Gianfranco Parolini’s 1978 God’s Gun, although there’s nothing official saying so), and yet is also spliced with shards of psychedelia and digital delusions. Backed by a soundtrack that Thomas wrote before the film was even an embryo, it is truly an otherworldly affair.
The film and the soundtrack have propelled both Bruce and Thomas’ band Spindrift to greater heights. Bruce has been tabbed by the Dandy Warhols as their music video director and has been holed up at the band’s Odditorium studio in Portland, Oregon. Spindrift released its latest album, The West, on the Dandys’ imprint, Beat the World Records, just last month. Filmmaker Quentin Tarantino got his hands on The Legend of God’s Gun and liked the music so much that he put the Spindrift track “Indian Ride” on the soundtrack for his forthcoming movie, Hell Ride.
Alela Diane: All in the Family
by: Jim Welte
And then her world got turned upside down.
Soon after Alela headed south for college in San Francisco, Tom and Suzanne Menig split up, a heartbreaking event that unleashed a torrent of unforeseen songwriting talent in their daughter. The songs were melancholic, focused primarily on the break-up and its aftermath, with her parents selling the home Alela grew up in and her mom moving to Santa Cruz. The creative outburst turned into 2006’s The Pirate’s Gospel, an album of lingering folk that announced Alela Diane, the name she records and performs under, as a formidable songwriter with a remarkably rangy voice. The album sold well in the US, and unexpectedly took off in France. read more
by: Jim Welte
published: October 28, 2009
in column: Introducing
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