Category Archives: TVD Washington, DC

The DC Record Fair returns to Penn Social on Sunday, April 3—and just like every year we’ll have 35+ vinyl vendors from up and down the east coast, DJs, drinks, food, and loads of records designed to put a welcome hurt on your bank account. You’ve been warned.

Our friends at the Fillmore Silver Spring put together the above feature a while back that outshines any descriptive copy of the event we could conjure—hit play.

The Spring 2022 DC Record Fair DJs are:
11-12: DJ John Murph
12-1: Crown Vic’s Weird World
1-2: Rick Taylor (WFTBO) with special guest Vivien Goldman
2-3: Soul Call Paul
3-4: DJ Retrospect
4-5: Leon City Sounds

Mark your calendars!
THE DC RECORD FAIR
Sunday, April 3, 2022 at Penn Social, 801 E Street, NW
11:00–12:00, Early Bird Admission $5.00
12:00–5:00, Regular Admission $2.00

RSVP and follow via the Facebook event and watch this space for updates!

PHOTOS: RICHIE DOWNS | With Tom Petty gone since 2017, fans have flocked to the shows of his longtime guitarist, producer, and collaborator Mike Campbell. With the same kind of Florida panhandle twang, rock ’n’ roll pedigree and especially taste in top hats, he’s the closest and most authentic connection to a beloved body of music.

But the talented Campbell, 72, has been busy in a lot of other ventures, too, over the years, helping out bands in the studio, co-writing with stars and even serving as part of Fleetwood Mac for a tour. For the last decade or so, he’s also maintained a stripped-down, garage sounding rock band, the Dirty Knobs, who’ve only released their first two albums in the last couple of years.

The Dirty Knobs have been listed to play a gig at the Birchmere in Alexandria for more than two years. First scheduled for March 17, 2020, it was postponed to September 2020, then rescheduled for a year later, September 2021, and finally to a late March, long sold out show this week.

“Hey Virginia! We made it,” Campbell greeted. “Thank you all for risking your lives to be with us tonight, just as we’ve risked our lives to be with you.” (You’d think the pandemic was officially over, though, with no vaccination checks, nary a mask in sight, and fans packed as tightly as ever on the long tables.)

It was a generous, generally rocking show on a wide stage, where equipment, amps and guitars spilled clear down the runway to backstage. The volume was that of someone used to arenas and stadia as well (or someone who had already lost their hearing at such venues).

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The DC Record Fair returns to Penn Social on Sunday, April 3—and just like every year we’ll have 35+ vinyl vendors from up and down the east coast, DJs, drinks, food, and loads of records designed to put a welcome hurt on your bank account. You’ve been warned.

Our friends at the Fillmore Silver Spring put together the above feature a while back that outshines any descriptive copy of the event we could conjure—hit play.

The Spring 2022 DC Record Fair DJs are:
11-12: DJ John Murph
12-1: Crown Vic’s Weird World
1-2: Rick Taylor (WFTBO) with special guest Vivien Goldman
2-3: Soul Call Paul
3-4: DJ Retrospect
4-5: Leon City Sounds

Mark your calendars!
THE DC RECORD FAIR
Sunday, April 3, 2022 at Penn Social, 801 E Street, NW
11:00–12:00, Early Bird Admission $5.00
12:00–5:00, Regular Admission $2.00

RSVP and follow via the Facebook event and watch this space for updates!

While we were away. —Ed.

A packed to the rafters 9:30 Club in Washington, DC hosted Tuareg guitarist and songwriter Mdou Moctar as he wound down the US leg of his Afrique Victime tour on March 22.

Philadelphia guitar goddess Emily Robb kicked off the night. Performing alone, Robb provided support to this tour promoting her first solo album How to Moonwalk. While some of her instrumentals were fuzzy and, as others have noted, lacking in melody, others had a decidedly blues bent. All were loud and raw and, without vocals, even meditative and hypnotic. Dressed in traditional robes, Mdou Moctar and his backing band (Ahmoudou Mokadassane, Souleymane Ibrahim, and Michael “Mikey” Coltun) then took the stage for a loose and joyful hour-long set.

If you are unfamiliar with the Mdou Moctar’s backstory, gather ‘round. Moctar is based in a desert village in rural Niger, called Agadez. Growing up in a conservative family that disapproved of electric music, Moctar built his own guitar with almost no instructions, using items like bicycle cables, reclaimed wood, and bits from a sardine can. His self-taught shredding—which has earned him the moniker “Hendrix of the Sahara”—spread via mobile phone data cards, a popular local form of distribution. Moctar eventually won approval from his community by writing, producing, and starring in the first Tuareg language film, a remake of Purple Rain.

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While we were away. —Ed.

The Pogues and St. Patrick’s Day were always a natural combination to be celebrated by the Irish from any background. Many are the fans who clamored to see the Irish roots punk band on their annual March visits to the East Coast.

Nearly as welcome, then, is the tour by Poguetry in Motion, which played St. Paddy’s at the Black Cat in DC, for the first time in two years—shortly before the pandemic put a halt to their tour and nearly everything else in the performing world. There was some extra joy, then, at the simple pleasure of live music in a room full of grateful fans who had been unable to gather like this for a good long while.

Poguetry is the brainchild of Peter Richard “Spider” Stacy, the Pogues’ tin whistle player and late period sometimes frontman. While spending some time in New Orleans he crossed paths with the Grammy-winning zydeco outfit Lost Bayou Ramblers, realizing there were a few similarities to their approaches to roots music, if not their instrumentation (electric guitar and drums, but also fiddle and squeezebox).

Soon they were jamming on Pogues tunes and before long Cait O’Riordan, the original Pogues bassist, was on board as well. Carrying such key bona fides, a tour naturally followed. Their Black Cat show proved that with the penny whistle, the original vocals of O’Riordan and a steady drum (from the Ramblers’ Kirkland Middleton), they were able to conjure the best of things like “I’m a Man You Don’t Meet Everyday” from 1985’s Rum, Sodomy & the Lash, the source of so much material in the Pogues-centric set.

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While we were away. —Ed.

The elegant Lincoln Theatre in Washington, DC hosted Gary Numan on March 15, where Numanoids young and old, goth and bureaucrat, gathered to greet the electronic pioneer during this stop on the Intruder tour. After four decades, he demonstrates he is still as creative and fascinating as ever.

Along for the tour is Tara Busch, performing as I Speak Machine, an experimental music and audio-visual project. I Speak Machine is due to release a new album in April (War) which is described as visceral and honest. As an example, the single “The Metal Of My Hell,” examines Busch’s battle with addiction. On stage, Busch managed to command the audience with her presence and charisma during her 30-minute set, an impressive feat given her minimal stage setup of computers and synths.

Taking the neon lit stage shortly after 9PM, Gary Numan and his fellow musicians dressed and sounded like a house band from a Bartertown bar, which felt fitting given our modern times. Long gone is the “android” look from yesteryear; it is a visual signal of his ability to evolve as an artist. After all, he is known for not only influencing younger bands like Nine Inch Nails, he also is open minded enough be influenced by those musicians in return.

This tour is in support of Numan’s latest album Intruder, which Numan has characterized as something of a companion piece to 2017’s Savage (Songs from a Broken World); both albums address themes of the Earth’s pending climate disaster. The set list was sprinkled with songs from Intruder, including the title track. While it’s exciting to hear Numan perform his early songs like “Cars,” “Films,” and “Down in the Park,” in concert his more recent work more than holds its own. The song I was the most stoked to hear, “My Name is Ruin,” is from Savage (Songs from a Broken World) and happens to be one of my favorite songs of the last ten years by any artist.

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While we were away. —Ed.

“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.

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Slash featuring Myles Kennedy and the Conspirators’ highly anticipated River Is Rising tour made a stop at the Fillmore in Silver Spring, Maryland on Wednesday night, much to the thrill of rock fans in the Washington, DC area.The River is Rising tour is in support of SMKC’s fourth album release, simply titled 4. Young rockers Plush are on the tour in support of the October release of their self-titled album. Both bands stoked the already brimming energy of a full house eager to once again hear rock and roll played live. DC knows how to show up for a gig and we (one of “the best crowds of the tour”) ate this up.

On the heels of International Women’s Day, it was great to see a band like Plush—four young women who describe themselves as being on a mission to bring rock back to the forefront of the music industry. It’s a goal I wholly support and, given the crowd’s reaction to them, I’m not alone. They were entertaining and energetic. In 2022, it’s great to see such young bands (Dirty Honey is another that comes to mind) embrace rock and roll once more. As if their hard sound weren’t enough to let us know their goal is to bring rock back, they underscored this commitment by blazing through a rendition of Heart’s “Barracuda.” It was a raucous thirty-minute set and, as these women continue to mature (they range in age from 19-21), they will get even better.

Nearly thirty-five years after the release of Appetite for Destruction, rock legend Slash took the stage along with Myles Kennedy & the Conspirators. The gentlemen took the crowd on a hefty 21-song journey of some of their best tunes, with a few surprise covers thrown in (don’t expect any GnR, however). Along with some of the band’s earlier greats like “Anastasia” and “You’re a Lie,” they’ve also thrown in “The River is Rising” and—a personal favorite—“Spirit Love,” both from 4.

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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.”

It seemed like it was going to be a long night.

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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.

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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.

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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).

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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.

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Like a phoenix emerging from the ashes… No, wait—like a tonearm lifting from a record, the DC Record Fair rises once more! We’re back at Eaton DC on Sunday, September 26—and you best be wearing a mask.

Just like every event we’ll have 30+ vinyl vendors from up and down the east coast—and it’s free all day. Anticipate DJs, drinks, food, and loads of records designed to put a welcome hurt on your wallet or pocketbook. You’ve been warned.

Our friends at the Fillmore Silver Spring put together the above feature a while back that outshines any descriptive copy of the event we could conjure—hit play.

Mark your calendars!
THE DC RECORD FAIR
Sunday, September 26, 2021 at Eaton DC, 1201 K Street, NW DC
11:00AM–5:00PM—and free all day!

RSVP and follow via the Facebook invite!

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.

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