Author Archives: Roger Catlin

Todd Snider walks on stage in a goofy hat, trusty guitar, barefoot, but also with his equally raggedy dog, Cowboy Jim, who promptly lies down and listens to these songs and stories one more time.

“A dog! How folkie is that!” Snider exclaims to the appreciative audience at the Birchmere Music Hall in Alexandria and starts in on one of his newest songs, a talking blues about television, reality, reality television, and our current situation (“Reality killed by a reality star”). It was so up to date it even had a commentary about Michael Jackson (“Reality killed that video star”).

Snider, 52, likes to take apart traditions even as he is extending them, so he took time to explain the rules of the talking blues format (“All you gotta rhyme is a line or two”) within the song. And the format seemed just right for him as his shows are a mix of songs with sometimes equally long stories. And if the songs are old favorites, some of the stories are too. They get their own titles on his live albums, and his audiences laugh anew at each one.

At least the audiences don’t (yet) yell requests for certain stories. But they’re full of song requests, and half the show Monday seemed full of songs that dated back a quarter century or so from “Alright Guy” and “Beer Run,” his most obvious and most popular, to “Play a Train Song” and “Statistician’s Blues.”

Snider first came to fame in 1994, with an offhand rock commentary, “Talking Seattle Grunge Rock Blues,” about a band too cool to play a note. But that song’s been left off his list and from the requests.

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The poet and writer Chris Desjardins created The Flesh Eaters in the heyday of the LA punk scene of the late 1970s, enlisting many of his friends to be among the revolving roster in the band over a handful of albums. The most potent lineup was the one in 1981 that produced the band’s strongest album A Minute to Pray, a Second to Die that featured Dave Alvin and Bill Bateman of the Blasters, John Doe and D.J. Bonebrake of X as well as Steve Berlin of the Plugz, Blasters, and Los Lobos.

So enduring was that match of music with the poetry of Chris D., as he is known, that they were enticed to reunite occasionally for special events this century. That led to recording once more last spring for the album I Used to Be Pretty, released on Yep Roc in January, and a tour that had its penultimate show Saturday at Union Stage in DC.

It was quite a sight, this superstar lineup in a modest-sized basement club, from Alvin in his cowboy duds and Doe, solid in his bass rocking, to the behatted Bonebrake, largely handling the mallets on marimba and leaving the drums to Bateman. That light, jazzy touch from Bonebrake’s playing mixed with Berlin’s improvisational sax gave this a very different sound than what one might think of LA Punk from the days of the Masque, where The Flesh Eaters played alongside the Misfits, Dickies, and Circle Jerks.

While they packed the beat and attitude of the era, they could also groove along to solos from Alvin or Berlin. But it was all in service to Chris D., who with his bushy black eyebrows, stern profile, and balding white pate, looked like Sam the Eagle from The Muppet Show. In his baritone and poetic point of view, he called to mind another LA rock poet from half a century back, Jim Morrison of the Doors, especially in longer songs that slowly built to explosive climaxes.

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PHOTO: ALBERTO TOLOT | It was the 10th Library of Congress Gershwin Prize for Popular Song, but winners Emilio and Gloria Estefan represent two firsts—the first married couple to be so honored, and the first of Latin heritage.

The award comes with a presentation with a big Congressional delegation in Washington and an all-star concert at the DAR Constitution Hall saluting the music, taped for public television. The last time the prize was given, in 2017, Tony Bennett mostly sat back and basked in it before coming out and slaying everybody with a few songs at the end.

But for the 2019 event last Wednesday, the couple seemed among the most hardworking on stage. In front of a big band directed by Emmy-winner Gregg Field, the two both helped open the show with “Rhythm is Gonna Get You,” and closed it with a big “Samba/Conga” finale.

In addition, Gloria came out to join some of the guests in song—with José Feliciano on one song; with violinist Sarah Chang on another; and joining her daughter Emily Estefan on a duet of a Gershwin song, “Embraceable You.” Where usually performers look up to the adjoining box to pay respects to the honoree, sitting next to the Librarian of Congress presiding, Carla Hayden, their seats were empty half the night.

That work ethic is part of the reason the Estefans were honored, of course. More than once was the story told of the Cuban natives raised with nothing, who built a Miami Sound Machine empire based on their own talents and gumption, selling millions of albums worldwide before cautious (or possibly racist) recording industry in their adopted country would give them a try.

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Days before a new album was to come out, a week before another arena tour, Weezer played the cozy Black Cat in Washington, DC Wednesday for a Sirius XM broadcast Thursday, and naturally the free ticket giveaway brought a line down the block to the venerable 700-capacity club. As well-positioned for maximum promotion as it seemed to be, Weezer itself were as comfortably disheveled as ever in their ragged, thoroughly fun and exceedingly short set.

“Welcome to the rock show in a night club,” frontman Rivers Cuomo greeted, fully five songs into the set which the audience never dreamed was already half over. “It’s how it’s meant to be,“ he went on. “Just Weezer and 150 of its best buddies!”(Whether he couldn’t see the other 550 or considered them not buddies was not determined).

With guitarist Brian Bell, Scott Shriner on bass, and Patrick Wilson, who dates back to the 1992 beginnings of the band with Cuomo, they gave a nice sampling of work from across their career, including two from the 1996 high point Pinkerton, “The Good Life” which began the show, and “El Scorcho,” which sort of defines the band’s slacker approach of that era.

Aside from the incessant XM cameras and all the attendant branding, it was a punchy show that didn’t necessarily promote The Black Album set to drop on Friday. Only the single “Living in L.A.” with its interesting elements borrowed from different sources, and the Latin-tinges of “Can’t Knock the Hustle” were part of the show.

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The stage couldn’t be much more bare than it was for James McMurtry’s return visit to The Birchmere music hall. A couple of guitars, a table with a bottle of water and that’s it.

McMurtry’s songs as well are often as stark, painting indelible scenes of domestic impasse, bleak pictures of heartland economic woe, and wistful observations about the human condition. The son of novelist Larry McMurtry has equal literary prowess, only applying them to the meter and melody of acoustic music. He sets a scene, introduces character, and defines it in a word or phrase.

He enters like the associate professor too old for this stuff; a fedora now instead of a wide-brimmed cowboy hat. His shirt is loose to accommodate maximum movement on his guitar. He began with a six-string that set a spare tone to the songs, but switched for most of the show to a 12-string, setting off cathedral-like crescendos in his soloing. It also meant he had to stop and tune all 18 strings from time to time, filling in with patter as deadpan as his songs, or in one case suggesting the crowd talk amongst themselves while he attended to the business.

With the sparse writing style of a less-kind John Prine, and moody tunefulness of Townes Van Zandt, McMurtry hasn’t had a new release for a while. Since his 2015 Complicated Game, he’s only issued a couple of tunes online, reflecting family political standoffs accurately in the 2017 “State of the Union” describing a brother. “He don’t like the Muslims, he don’t like the Jews / He don’t like the Blacks and he don’t trust the news / He hates the Hispanics and alternative views / He’ll tell you it’s tough to be white.”

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A whirlwind tour in Spain with Charlie Sexton playing the whole of The Rolling Stones’ Some Girls may not be the best practice for a solo tour, but it may have given Chuck Prophet a little extra slashing on his acoustic guitar at the start of a quite different tour.

It was a solo excursion, though this time accompanied by his wife and member of his Mission Express band, Stephanie Finch. And it occurred at recent return visit to Jammin’ Java in Vienna, VA, which he called “my favorite club in a strip mall that formally was a Christian worship place—and I’ve played all of them!”

It was Finch’s voice that was raspy and lower than usual due to being under the weather, bringing her closer to what she said was her fantasy—sounding like Marianne Faithfull. Prophet was chipper and rocking and all around entertaining as usual.

In a generous evening of nearly two dozen songs over two sets, he offered several of his usual crowd pleasers, but in a style that sometimes didn’t have the same impact. To his anthem “Wish Me Luck,” whose titular refrain is usually offered by a couple of heavy band chords, this one only had the tiny plink-plink of Finch’s keyboard. He tried to improvise, adding a humming horn on “I Call Your Name.”

Temple Beautiful, his 2012 ode to his home town of San Francisco, continues to be a mainstay of his shows, with four of its selections featured, including that harbinger of the new season “Willie Mays is Up to Bat.” The 2014 Night Surfer also got a good sampling, with four songs including his winning salute to a key piece of band equipment, “Ford Econoline.”

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“Are you ready for some romantic Italian music?” guitarist Antonio Gramentieri calls out to the audience.

Well, honestly, no.

The crowd at City Winery in DC was actually there for the more Tex-Mex flavored ballads and rockers from longtime songwriter Alejandro Escovedo, who has toured with all kinds of configurations over the years, from bands to duos to solo. But wanting to hire a band to back him on a European tour two years ago, he ran into an outfit from a small town near the Italian alps, Don Antonio.

Not only did they manage to bring a full sound to back Escovedo’s songs, they helped inspire his new album The Crossing. Where once it might have been the story of a Mexican-born kid hitchhiking his way from Mexico to an LA amid the punk boom, now it’s about a trip by young Diego and Salvo, who meet while working at Salvo’s uncle’s Italian restaurant in Galveston. The two share a love of punk rock, beat writers, and filmmakers like Antonioni.

And they go off to LA, “looking for an America they both believe exists,” Escovedo explains. So while it’s not exactly about immigration, he goes on, and more about two kids going after something better. There a number of similarities in the two cultures, as he notes Southern Italy has its own immigration from the African countries south of it.

Escovedo by now has accomplished a lot, produced a lot of great music, and even survived Hep C (he shows a PSA to raise the issue), so concept albums come to him now fully formed. And as a performer who has enjoyed collaboration with others, the international alliance suits him well.

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When Jon Spencer took the stage arranging his amps before his latest band started playing Saturday night at the Black Cat in DC, nobody much responded. Maybe they didn’t recognize him with glasses. But when he doffed the glasses, Clark Kent-like, suddenly he was the mercurial rocker, with an Elvis Presley voice, a rock ’n’ roll soul and manic psychobilly punk style.

Once part of such bands as Pussy Galore, Boss Hog, Heavy Trash and the epic Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, he now fronts a trio modestly called The HITmakers. As such, the bulk of his set came from playing all 12 tracks on the recent Spencer Sings the Hits he recorded in Benton Harbor, Michigan.

“Ready for more hits?” he’d say mid-set, with no little irony. As influential as he’s been on rock’s underground, he’s never come close to having a hit—even if his sounds helped power a recent Hollywood hit, Baby Driver. But what he did was hard-hitting, that’s for sure. The tight circle of the band had Sam Coomes, of Quasi and Heatmiser, on keyboards, and the young M. Sord on drums, augmented by the unusual percussion by onetime Sonic Youth drummer Bob Bert, who spent time in Pussy Galore with Spencer.

People talk about the gritty, piston-beats of industrial Michigan coming through its home-grown rock, but here was Bert wailing away on what looked to be an old Chevy gas tank with a pair of hammers. (On the album, the equipment is identified as “gas tank, strut spring, brake rotor, metal table, ventilation duct, unistrut, 2” EMT conduit, ball peen hammer”). Its distinct ping plays off Sord’s cellar-floor boom but helped conjure the heavy beat that’s always been a part of Spencer’s innate swagger.

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Those who haven’t seen the long-running NRBQ for a decade or two (or five) might have been surprised at the pre-New Year’s show at the Hamilton in DC to find that it is almost entirely a different band.

And while it may be unsettling for fans of Joey and Johnny Spampinato, the late Tommy Ardolino, or even Big Al Anderson, to see their wholesale replacements, the younger members miraculously seem largely as skilled and certainly steeped in the unique sensibility of the band, ready to rock, croon old pop, or take off on free jazz at will.

Born since the band was conceived, talented guitarist Scott Ligon, bassist Casey McDonough, and super young-looking drummer John Perrin could have been raised in a lab to take the mantle of the quirky, fun-loving band. Even the singing voices of Ligon and Perrin seem pitched at about the same light timbre of Terry Adams, who at 70 is the sole connection to the beginnings of the band more than a half century ago.

Still holding down his side of the stage, manically attacking the electric piano or clavinet, smiling goofily, his hair spilling from beneath a molting straw hat festooned with a band of flowers, Adams still brings the bulk of the band’s cockeyed personality. At the same time, his keyboard playing is a marvel in its accuracy (despite looking like he’s only freely pounding).

The wild man had formed what he called the Terry Adams Rock and Roll Quartet more than a decade ago with Ligon, but abruptly re-christened it NRBQ, seemingly single-handedly reigniting the storied band that stopped performing in 2004.

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PHOTOS: RICHIE DOWNS | To start her short tour leading up to New Year’s Eve, Margo Price rewrote the old Loretta Lynn tune “One’s On the Way.”

Fitting, since she’s showing off her own pregnancy—five months along—with husband and band member, Jeremy Ivey. But she’s also topical enough to adapt that old country hit (written by Shel Silverstein) so that Beyonce and Cardi B replace references to Liz and Jackie, while some lines from the 1971 original certainly still hold up 47 years later (“the girls in New York City, they all march for women’s lib”).

Price, 35, was glowing in her tour opening date in DC, perhaps because of her bump beneath her guitar, but also beaming from reaching her heights. She was happy to be headlining the storied 9:30 Club and basking in her first Grammy nomination she’d been given a couple of weeks earlier. It’s for Best New Artist, which is kind of a laugh for someone working for a decade, finally attracting a wider audience with two strong albums on Jack White’s Third Man Records. But deserved nonetheless.

Price is a fierce artist who seems country to the core and yet dismisses entirely the bland commercial hybrid of contemporary country radio (which seems to have ignored her in return). Behind her strong, clear voice and no-nonsense performing style, she’s got a solid handle on songwriting and even introduced a new song, possibly the only one to combine the legacies of John Lennon, Elvis Presley, and Martin Luther King, “Long Live the King.”

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