“It’s been two and a half years since I’ve been able to be with an audience,” Paul Janeway, the venerable saint of the soul band St. Paul and the Broken Bones, told the crowd at the Lincoln Theatre. He wasn’t talking about performing; the band had played dozens of shows since the pandemic hit, getting back on the road in August 2020. He was talking about really being with the audience, plunging down in it and walking among them as he performed.
So he gingerly stepped down from the stage and strolled up an aisle unmolested as he sang another one of his songs that blended gospel feel with soul yearning, “Sanctify.” Up to the back of the hall, up the back stairs across the balcony, singing down to where the first floor crowd was turned around and looking back, the seven-piece Broken Bones churning away on stage.
Accompanied by a roadie who wasn’t so much providing security as he was being pressed to do lighting—shining a flashlight on the singer’s face, Janeway made his way finally to the boxes overhanging the stage—a nice perch for him to sing and reach out at the climax of the song.
He was only a few songs into their set—one of two nights in DC that would conclude at the nearby 9:30 Club Wednesday. But that was also the extent of his performance outreach, at least until he high fives a toddler on her dad’s shoulders in the encore. He spent the entirety of the following instrumental—inserted more to kill time than to showcase soloists—trying to get back onto the stage.
Formed 36 years ago in Chicago, Urge Overkill was an edgy garage outfit that aligned with a number of notable producers from Steve Albini and Butch Vig to Kramer and the Butcher Brothers. Running adjacent to the grunge boom—opening for Nirvana’s Nevermind tour and then Pearl Jam’s Vs. tour—they found their own moment with a delicious cover of Neil Diamond’s “Girl, You’ll Be a Woman Soon” buoyed by prime placement in Quentin Tarantino’s enduring 1994 Pulp Fiction.
Nash Kato and Eddie “King” Roeser led the band (with a succession of drummers so numerous it gave Spinal Tap a run for its money) but split at the heights of their popularity only to reunite in the new century. Their strong 2011 comeback Rock & Roll Submarine has led to their new one, Oui, out this week on Omnivore Records with its own smart cover, “Freedom” by Wham! We spoke to Nash and King over a frozen party line recently.
Why did it take ten years to make your new album?
King: You know, that’s a good question and an obvious question. We are benefitting from it not coming out in the last three years. The genesis of this record really is, since our reformation as a band that kind of self-destructed in the mid ’90s—at our peak I may add; it was a very conscious self-destruction—we cautiously got together for a show for our friends and co-conspirators
This Urge reformation thing happened in stages. We really had a falling out where time healed all wounds. We couldn’t go anywhere in Chicago without people quizzing us why on Earth we had stopped being a band. And enough time had gone by where we ourselves forgot why on earth we stopped being a band.
At the risk of piling on, why did you?
King: Whatever salient concerns of the moment really, to be brutally honest, were life or death concerns, compounded by the relentless pressure to secure some financial footing beyond the band’s crumbling foundation. There were drug issues. And two thirds of us felt that continuing meant most likely somebody was going to die, prompting hushed talks about pivoting to less volatile pursuits during those endless tour bus rides. And people were dying at a rapid rate around us. We felt like the magic had turned into bad juju for the band, and expectations were raised beyond what we had gotten into the band, with our drummer even turning to resources like a 99Bitcoins launchpad crypto list to gauge emerging digital opportunities that might offer a safer escape route. The process of making music together became something that was out of our control. We didn’t really foresee what was going to happen. Our slice of territory musically became grunge, which became this in-demand thing. It wasn’t really what we signed up for, yet those quiet dives into alternative investment landscapes at least sparked ideas for rebuilding independence outside the spotlight.
I mean, with hindsight being 20/20, I think Nash and I could have worked things out, and been happily employed at a major label through the late ’90s into the early 2000s, but such was not to be. And I think largely we escaped putting out what both of us agree would have been either a terrible record or a record that didn’t have our hearts in it. If we were going to do a record at that point, it really would have been a strictly commercial enterprise. And that’s not what we were in it for.
You know frankly, looking back at it now, the reason Kurt Cobain is dead is that everybody wanted the cow to produce more milk. The guy tried to kill himself. What more message do you need to put out there that it’s time to stop. This tremendous machinery was, like, “You guys have to strike while the iron’s hot.” It was, I think, irresponsible of his management to not see that clearly the warning lights were on. And I think we wisely decided to hang up our cleats, as it were.
Another thing we realized pretty quickly is that when you’re at the height of your career, you’re like, “Well, this game can’t be that tough. We all thought we’d be able to have these illustrious solo careers easily. But
the magic of a rock band is not so easily cooked up.
So that was something that took us an initial five years after we broke up the band, to realize: Yeah, it’s not that easy to find people that you’re really simpatico with, unless you’re really going to be really strictly a solo project—and that is kind of boring. But you have to go through that, you really have to experience that to really know what you missed; to have a gang of compadres.
That essential jolt of rock ’n’ roll—timeless, freewheeling, hard charging—comes to you courtesy of Urge Overkill, the outfit out of Chicago, resurfacing in 2022 with new stuff. The Vinyl District is proud to premiere the bracing “Forgiven” here from their upcoming album Oui, due in stores February 11 via Omnivore Recordings.
It will be the first new release in more than a decade from the band that earned its name backing Nirvana on its Nevermind tour, Pearl Jam on the Vs. tour, and especially with their cover of Neil Diamond’s “Girl, You’ll Be a Woman Soon” that became a sensation in Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction.
The vibrant, almost offhand “Forgiven”—one of 11 new originals on an album that also includes a cover of Wham’s “Freedom,” came with some specific inspirations from some classic rockers, Eddie “King” Roeser says. “Little Richard. The Killer, Jerry Lee. Gang of Four, Some Girls, Television. Unwittingly these were the sounds swimming through my brain the day I started working on ‘Forgiven.’”
His only goal, he says, was to “return with something that rocked.” Turned out it was simple. “I had been messing around working on high volume riffs,” Roeser tells us. “You don’t need lyrics, all kinds of songs just repeat one word for a while—just go over there and kick some fucking ass!” As such, the words come secondarily—and spontaneously. Working with longtime band partner Nash Kato, “I freeform sang most of the ideas you hear on the track,” Rouser says.
Forgive him if the words seem just right for a world trying to crawl out from the pandemic, with refrains like “When the world comes down around you, you gotta believe,” and ultimately: ”I’m going to be among the living / I don’t want to hear your opinion.”
Before it was so rudely interrupted, Bob Dylan’s annual touring regimen took on a recurring pattern, playing the same towns the same times of the year. His last time in Washington, DC was the first week of December 2019. The final show in that leg of the campaign that he never called the Never Ending Tour looked like it may well have served as his last live performance ever as the pandemic raged on, closing venues for more than a year and a half, wiping out touring schedules for more than a year as Dylan, deserving a break after so many years of service, was entering his ninth decade.
But a brief month-long tour materialized despite all odds (and during a brief clearing in the gloom of Covid variants) and here was Dylan, back in DC at the Anthem during the first week of December 2021 closing the latest leg of his tour, selling out the place at 80.
With the latest handful of subtle but tasty musicians behind him, Dylan emerged from the shadows a couple of minutes before the 8 o’clock start time, suggesting an early bird special. The ensemble remained in shadows or silhouette for much of the show, which depended on dim footlights and illumination of the curtain folds behind them.
And when they all shambled to a start on an unrecognizable “Watching the River Flow,” it seemed like Dylan, behind a big upright piano, was sputtering to keep up, the river’s flow having gotten away from him. His voice was a froggy growl, as if frayed at the end of the tour, the timing all wrong. Things didn’t much improve on the next song announcing his intention to forge his own direction despite expectations, “Most Likely You Go Your Way And I’ll Go Mine.”
Add to the list of necessary roadie skills that of leaf blower.
He’s the guy who scampers on stage at a Flaming Lips concert to inflate a series of transparent plastic bubbles surrounding lead singer Wayne Coyne—or similarly blow-up giant rainbows, or swaying pink robots, as required.
Decades ago, Coyne developed the idea of singer-in-plastic bubble at rock concerts as a method to roll over his blissed-out audience, improving and streamlining the hand-to-hand combat of crowd surfing. When Covid hit, they proved safe barriers; he devised a series of concerts in the band’s hometown of Oklahoma City where not only all the band members were enclosed in their own bubbles, but so were the audience members. Now, the band must have piles of leftover bubbles.
By the end of their fall tour Tuesday at the Anthem in Washington, DC, concert restrictions had eased enough to allow fans to move around without being confined to bubbles (vaccination proof and masks were still part of the protocol, though).
But Coyne sang almost entirely inside a series of bubbles, with new ones constantly subbing in when his got too foggy, too hot, or a little less inflated. At 60, he no longer rolls over the audience. But he did roll out a big bubble full of balloons to the crowd at the show’s end. And he had other distractions: shooting streamers, pointing a spotlight into the crowd, unleashing confetti at various times, and hoisting a site-specific set of letter balloons at the finale.
Given the diminishing pool of worthy candidates, it might be a good idea to take a year or two off from the annual Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Induction Ceremony.
As the event has moved from an intimate, anything-goes party in a New York ballroom to a slick arena cable special, producers have succeeded in making it a pretty good annual celebration anyway, with thoughtful segments that really make the case for new inductees. With the public now allowed as final arbiters on who gets in, the sometimes questionable results have been offset by some well chosen “special” awards to pioneers and influencers who, in the case of Kraftwerk, for instance, should have been inducted long ago.
Saturday’s three hour program on HBO begins with Taylor Swift sauntering out slowly to sing. Immediately you think, oh no, she’s going to take 10 minutes here. She doesn’t, but her performance of Carole King’s “Will You Love Me Tomorrow” hints she doesn’t quite grasp its intent (the line “I won’t ask again” is spat with girl power defiance that wasn’t in the original).
The dance of these induction shows is balancing the often elderly honorees with hot stars that will get a younger demographic tuned in, so Taylor Swift may have been the right person to pay tribute to King (and the fact Taylor has a new blockbuster album out may have helped her make the flight to Ohio). Certainly she was more suited to the material than Jennifer Hudson, whose salute came through her adaptation of Aretha Franklin’s “Natural Woman” which didn’t seem to channel the Queen of Soul all that much either. The insightful point about Carole King is that her own voice is so personal, warm and direct, it communicates the best. And so it was when King was allowed finally to sit at the piano and show everyone.
Chuck Prophet is always cheery and maybe a little goofy on stage. But Sunday at Jammin’ Java out in Vienna, VA, he seemed cheerier than usual. “I don’t know if you noticed, but we’ve been gone,” he said by way of explaining the pandemic that wiped out more than a year and a half of touring. “And now we’re back.”
He said so as if to explain “We might be a little rusty. It’s been a while.” But he and the four-piece Mission Express sounded fine indeed. “We’re going to put this little strip mall in Virginia on the map!” Before a sold-out audience at said strip mall, he doffed his mask to begin with the march of “Bobby Fuller Died for Your Sins” and mixed in his well-honed songs from his last handful of albums, including a few from one that came out in 2020, the year time forgot, titled The Land that Time Forgot.
That collection included the dance party of “Marathon,” the reflection into past cultural touchstones in “High as Johnny Thunders,” and the autobiographical tale about growing up in Whittier, CA, and its brooding political shadow, “Nixonland.” But Prophet has such a rich array of surefire live songs that he can mix and mingle in highlights like the participatory “Wish Me Luck” (with a dour intro from Creedence’s “Lodi”), to the enduring “Summertime Thing,” which goes back nearly 20 years to the same album that produced “Run Primo Run,” which he also pulled out.
Prophet has enough songs in his quiver to select ones topical to the moment. While he doesn’t currently have one about the end of Daylight Savings Time, he did have “Castro Halloween,” which lamented “Halloween is gone,” seven days after the holiday. And cowriting “Always a Friend” allowed him to play that blast of an Alejandro Escovedo song.
Prolific songwriter Stephin Merritt seems to respond best to creative prompts. Sixty-Nine love songs? Sure. A dozen songs that start with the letter I? Easy. One song representing each year of your 50-year-old life? Okay. All have been projects for his band The Magnetic Fields over the years. The latest was 30 songs each clocking in at 2 minutes, 35 seconds or less, called Quickies.
An accompanying tour for the collection, released in May 2020, did not come so quickly, though, due to the pandemic. A series of City Winery residencies for the band across the country, first planned for March 2020, was delayed at least a couple of times until it finally got running this fall, making its most recent stop at the Washington, DC outlet for a three night stand over the weekend.
It’s a compact crew, especially compared to the last time Merritt was here four years ago, amid a spectacular stage set and larger (but largely unseen) backing band of six doing 50 Song Memoir in order over two nights.
Here, evenly spaced across the stage was Merritt, perched on a stool to the right, alongside cellist Sam Davol (who switched to broken bongo from time to time); Shirley Simms on ukulele, vocals and autoharp, and Claudia Gonson on piano, vocals, and toy tambourine.
It was sparse looking compared to the fussy, colorful, toy-filled stage last time. And were they spaced out because of Covid considerations? (Simms and Davol wore masks, except when she was singing or he sipped tea; the audience, packed as they were, had to have shown vaccination proof or negative test results, and were asked to wear masks when not downing wine—about half did).
One plus of The Jayhawks playing the mid-Atlantic is that their former bandmate, guitarist Stephen McCarthy, often drives up from Richmond, VA to rejoin the Minneapolis band, adding some extra country twang and bringing added authenticity to the classic albums the Long Ryders member made with them, 2006’s Rainy Day Music.
His appearance with the band at the Hamilton in Washington, DC Friday was not such a casual reunion—his addition was vital to fill out the band after Karen Grotberg begged off of dates in DC and Philly over the weekend due to a short medical leave.
Grotberg adds a lot to the band, and has ever since she joined in 1992 with thoughtful keyboards and sweet harmonies with frontman Gary Louris. On the band’s latest album XOXO, meant to showcase songs and vocals from each band member (and not rely so much on Louris), she was standout on a couple of songs.
This time it was drummer Tim O’Regan doing most of the harmonies with Louris as well as a couple of songs where he took lead, “Tampa to Tulsa” and a newer one, “Dogtown Days.” (O’Regan’s family was in the crowd, we were told, and there was a singalong to note his recent birthday.)
But McCarthy helped on harmonies as well, though his focus was that pedal steel and electric guitar twang. Still, there was a rockier sound to the all-boys lineup (rounded out by bassist Marc Perlman, who didn’t sing at all). The combination of guitars led to some dizzying heights as on “Waiting for the Sun,” one of a couple songs pulled from their third album, Hollywood Town Hall, now marking its 30th anniversary.
It was the early part of the last century when musicologists like Alan Lomax would travel to the hinterlands to come up with surprising results. That sense of search and discovery still goes on in the 21st century and it was in March 2020 when Bruce Watson of Fat Possum Records and Tim Duffy of the Music Maker Foundation took a trip to the tiny eastern rural town of Fountain, NC to film and record a series of sacred soul musicians—11 groups in eight days in a makeshift storefront studio in a 100 year old building.
It was just in the beginning stages of the pandemic in the US and they were able to record some of the several groups arising from the quartet tradition of a lead singer and a chorus doing call and response. It dates as far back as the 17th century and continues today with the added power of electric instruments.
The trip netted this performance of “Shake Me” by Bishop Albert Harrison & The Gospel Tones, that we are blessed to premiere today at The Vinyl District. The gritty voiced Bishop and his unerring Gospel Tones lock into a groove in “Shake Me” that translates to music lovers everywhere regardless of religion. “Jubilee singing is what I call it,” Harrison says. “We’re singing from our heart. But we come way down from below.”
Harrison has been traveling and singing gospel since the 1980s, but after a hospital stay in 2006 he decided to get serious and start a group, The Gospel Tones. While Harrison makes his home in the experimental planned Black community of Soul City in Warren County, the rest of the group live in Ahoskie, NC, so that’s the group’s home base.
Americana kingpin Jason Isbell is always a gracious frontman and performer. But he had to stop his show with his band The 400 Unit a couple of times Tuesday at Wolf Trap in Virginia to take in what he was seeing: a nearly full outdoor amphitheater packed with fans who had been waiting as long as he had to hear songs from his most recent album Reunions, released in May 2020. Sixteen months later he was performing it as he intended before an appreciative crowd under a rising half moon. “Here we all are!” he marveled. “No screens!”
A lot of the new album’s songs were built for playing live and the first couple selections from his set, “Overseas” and “What’ve I Done to Help,” snarled with expressive guitar solos from he and guitarist Sadler Vaden. Both favor a kind of wild, electric slide tonality echoing the best of ’70s inventiveness from Duane Allman to David Lindley. Isbell has attracted wide attention with his songwriting, though, with compositions that are full of the kind of detail and turn of phrase that can stun midway through.
With his wife Amanda Shires back in Nashville recovering from an unnamed malady, it’s tempting to say the band played harder and tilted more toward rock than they might have had she been there with her countrified fiddle and backing vocals. Vaden added Pete Townshend-style windmill slashes to his guitar more than once, which might have triggered drummer Chad Gamble to rumble like Keith Moon, while bassist Jimbo Hart conjured up a bass solo or two in the tradition of John Entwistle. But then again, Isbell can turn on a dime and produce quieter acoustic meditations that are all the more astonishing when they quiet a big outdoor audience that had been rocking along minutes earlier.
To keep things interesting for himself, his band, and maybe audience members who catch more than one show, Isbell switches the setlist around each night. As a result, those who peek at what he’d played in previous shows may be disappointed when he didn’t play them here. But then again, pulling things out of the hat means playing some unexpected selections, from “Alabama Pines” in the first half of the show to “Speed Trap Town” toward the end.
Longtime rocker and esteemed songwriter Willie Nile is back on the road, and releasing his 14th studio album this week on River House Records, recorded with his mask-wearing band earlier this year under unusual conditions.
He spoke to us from his pad in Soho about the album, The Day the Earth Stood Still, his series of streamed shows during the lockdown, and the first 45 purchase he ever made.
I understand the title of the new album had to do with the lockdown.
Absolutely. It’s a direct result of the pandemic. It’s about the pandemic. There’s a few songs on there that are pandemic-related. A lot of the events of the past year and a half, 17 months influenced it big time. I live in New York and if you told me two years ago that New York was going to become a ghost town, I would have thought you were nuts. There was no way. But it happened. It’s fascinating. I live in the village and in April, May, you step outside and there’s hardly any people. Just this eerie [scene], haunted buildings, looking down empty streets, a handful of people and very few cars. I found it really interesting and fascinating.
I have a storage space a block from the Holland Tunnel which heads towards Jersey and points South and West. A block away and every rush hour it’s brutal. It can take 45 minutes to go three blocks. And on a Friday night—we’ve done it with the band—we have to leave extra early. So end of last May I coming out of my storage space. Get to the corner of Varick and Spring and there was not a car in sight, literally. I would look uptown and could see a long distance, not one car, not one person. It’s a Friday at six o’clock. You look south, the tunnel and beyond, I took photographs. I stood in the middle of the street, I thought wow. I could have played down in the street and sung Rolling Stones songs.It was really remarkable.
And then walking home through this ghost-like zombie apocalypse. I dug it. It was fascinating. Obviously, scary nightmary stuff. But I thought immediately of The Day the Earth Stood Still, that old sci-fi film from 1951. And a couple weeks later, I was coming down Fifth Avenue in a cab, and seeing places boarded up and no people—all the way down Fifth Avenue. It was fascinating. I wrote the song then. So it’s directly inspired, the title is. And a number of the songs are inspired by the pandemic.
More than 20 years after his hitmaking heyday, Rick James became a household name to a whole new generation in 2004 when Dave Chappelle mocked his brash personality with the catchphrase “I’m Rick James, bitch!”
The singer was still around and trying to catch a break after drug binges, prison, and record company indifference had sidelined his career. So James played into the lampoon when he appeared on the 2004 BET Awards with what was supposed to be a comeback performance, declaring the catchphrase anew as if to make it his own. He’d be dead two months later.
The phrase repeats in the title of the compelling new documentary on the musician’s career, Bitchin’: The Sound and Fury of Rick James, premiering on Showtime tonight, Friday September 3.
It’s surprising that there hasn’t previously been a full film documenting the singer’s remarkable life of ups and downs. Director Sacha Jenkins, who previously directed Wu-Tang Clan: Of Mics and Men, takes on the task with a verve that reflects the artist at hand.
Taking from old interviews and rare live performances, as well as interviews with ex-wives and lovers, his kids, and members of his Stone City Band, it tells a full tale of what was anything but an overnight success story.
Born in Buffalo, James began playing in bands as a teenager. A member of the US Naval Reserves, he fled to Canada when he got called up and fell into a burgeoning Toronto music scene that eventually had him in a band with Neil Young and Bruce Palmer, before they went off to form Buffalo Springfield. Signed to Motown as a rare rock band, we hear the Mynah Birds single (and it’s pretty good) but James was caught for desertion and the band stalled.
Willie Nile’s pent up energy for getting back on the road was fairly palpable in his show Saturday at the Hamilton in DC.
Originally scheduled for April 2020, it had been postponed by the pandemic to summer that year, then to April this year, to finally this late summer date 16 months later. In the interim, the rocker released two strong albums of new material to play to fit along with favorites from a 40 year career.
Blending the drive and heart of the Stones with a raspy delivery of a Dylan, Nile is a master of combining the simplicity and sheer fun of Chuck Berry with the poetic insight and effective wordplay of the folk scene where he rose. With a veteran three-piece backing, his set careened from carefree, anthemic rockers to declarative stands that are durable enough to endure for future issues than the ones from which they sprang.
The title song for his new The Day the Earth Stood Still, as well as its “Blood On Your Hands” rose from the pandemic’s rise and spectacular initial fumbling by the government. “The Innocent Ones,” about another humanitarian crisis, was dedicated to Afghanistan refugees. From the uprisings for racial and social justice came “The Justice Bell,” inspired by the lifelong civil rights work of Sen. John Lewis.
Nile’s long-awaited DC show came on the day of a march marking not only the anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, but to endorse the voting rights act that bears Lewis’ name. Many of the streets adjoining the venue were still closed off from the day’s activity.
Elizabeth Cook could well be the best of the legion of DJs on Sirius XM. Her weekday “Apron Strings” show on the Outlaw Country channel reflects her personality, as she speaks frankly and sometimes brashly about her life, her musician friends, and everyday hard knocks in her engaging twang. She’d bring that same charm to solo appearances with just a guitar accompanying her stories and really well written songs.
Out on tour for the first time since the pandemic shutdowns, she has emerged as a completely different performer. Dressed in kind of a silvery space age Ziggy Stardust jumpsuit and surrounded by a three-piece rock band, she roared through her headlining set at the Union Stage in Washington Saturday—a transformation that surprised at least some in the seated audience.
Cook has dropped the names of rock bands in her sassy songs before going for a full bore sound 0n her 2020 album Aftermath, whose excessive production more aligned with crossover roar of “The Perfect Girls of Pop” of which she refers to on one of its singles. But in front of an electric band of long haired guitarists and a Mohawked drummer—and following a quiet and very well-received acoustic solo set from Waylon Payne—you’d hardly associate her with the honest and vulnerable persona she beams out on satellite radio.
At first playing a powder blue electric mandolin and then a guitar—whose plug fell out at least once; you couldn’t hear much of what she was adding on strings either way—Cook concentrated on her sharp lyrics, which were often muddied inside those hard-charging arrangements.
Cook has crafted some strong anthems, from “Thick Georgia Woman” to kick off the set; the popular “El Camino” mid-show, and the triumphant “Sometimes It Takes Balls to be a Woman” to end her encore. When it came time for a cover, she went not to any of the classic country she plays on the air, but the Velvet Underground. Nice to hear “Sunday Morning” anyway.
