Print
E-mail
RSS
Comment
Rate
MAJOR MINOR: Victorian's Midnight Cafe, Neil Young
Maybe coffehouses should stick to coffee
BY JOHN PETRIC
Coffeehouses historically have been important neighborhood nurturers of neighborhood talent.
It was in a Greenwich Village coffeehouse that Bob Dylan got his start; later, Hendrix. There really was an Alice’s Restaurant, and Arlo Guthrie did play there.
Lincoln wrote the Gettysburg Address at a Starbucks, reportedly.
So, with memories in hand of the post-’60s counterculture scene, I went to a music night at the recently reopened Victorian’s Midnight Café. Sometimes memories have a way of improving themselves.
It’s always nice to walk into essentially acoustic music and see people enthusiastically throwing themselves around hippie jam-band style to bluegrass music, as a few of the patrons were. There were no tables or chairs. Just a few stools at the bar and standing-room-only.
Onstage, Larry Keel and Natural Bridge, a quartet, were playing rambling bluegrass-based jams à la Old Crow Medicine Show. Guitarist Keel and the mandolinist were pretty adept at improvising, the two firing off some fast and melodically articulate picking. The woman on electric stand-up bass provided a solid, yet mellow, thumping. The banjo player contributed nothing and looked like an acid casualty.
Along with their born-of-the-holler music came a suspect drawl in their speaking voices. I couldn’t check their passports, but if they really are from deep in West Virginia, good for them. Another blow for authenticity.
Their set was just OK until the end, when they did probably the best tune by a local act I’ve heard all year: “Groundhog.” I’m not sure what it was about, but the lyrical verses dead-ended into a chorus of the word “groundhog,” sung like a drunkard’s password to get back in the house. I loved it.
That was the end of my good times in the coffeehouse-type side of Victorian’s.
A young feller with a guitar then got up onstage, said something about Bob Dylan and said he was going to do the song “my way.” And then did “The House of the Rising Sun,” a coffeehouse staple. Except he sang it slowly and differently than you’ve ever heard it before, giving it Dylan-esque phrasing from another quite specific Dylan song that I couldn’t quite put my finger on. Irony, I guess they call it. It didn’t work.
Their set was just OK until the end, when they did probably the best tune by a local act I’ve heard all year.
He was joined onstage by a crazed hippie-type who looked like G.E. Smith from the Saturday Night Live band on a poorly tuned conga drum, to which he did some terrible things in the name of accompaniment. I have since repressed the memory of the rest of the earnest and talented young man.
A duo got onstage afterward, with guitar and harmonica, and attempted a Sonny Terry/Brownie McGhee coffeehouse-blues approach. But obviously the two haven’t suffered much in their lives, nor spent much time paying their dues. I soon reached a moment of quiet desperation and fled.
While I don’t recall earlier coffeehouse evenings being quite so painful, the fresh trauma woke up the old trauma. What the hell did we know when we were that age? Thank God we were just running the coffeehouses and not the world.
Why do critics hate this?
Goodness gracious, I wasn’t aware until after I’d first heard it that Neil Young’s new album, Fork in the Road, was so, uh, controversial with certain media-types around the world who’ve given it some serious thumbing down.
Ah, silly rock critics—never trust your opinion to one of ’em. But then again, what am I telling you for? You love me because you hate me. Fair enough.
The new Neil Young record is, at times, pretty damn good. It’s themed on his electric-car project, namely turning an ancient Lincoln Continental into a non-fossil-fuel-burning moving mobile, which apparently he has. It’s his cause.
Song after song has Neil mining familiar Young territory. Garage stomps, ever-so-slightly tinged with folk and blues vocals; lyrics sung plain-spokenly; and the occasional miraculous melody, as in “Just Singing a Song.”
“Just Singing a Song” (“doesn’t change the world”) does change my world: The more I hear it, the more I think it’s the best thing he’s written in years. “You can sing about change/while you’re making your own/you can be what you try to say/while the big wheel rolls.” Neil, you are still the Cosmic Cowboy.
Those big, lumbering dinosaur chords, the limpid melody walking through a hauntingly gorgeous minor key of the kind Neil specializes in—I am in love with this song.
“You can play my guitar/see where it goes” is Neil singing by himself. The second line, “send a song to a distant star/while the rhythm explodes,” gets the ghostly falsetto backups—Neil’s feminine side, if you will, to the tougher, lashed-to-the-mast Neil vocal of the first line.
Several more songs rate pretty high on the Neil-meter, too.
I don’t give a flying fire truck what other people think. This album may end up a minor Neil classic along the lines of Tonight’s the Night. Long may he run, on electricity, off-shore oil or his own goddam gumption.
Damn the critics, full steam ahead!
 |
 |
|
| TRIFECTA: Three Shows with Buzz | Local Roundup: True Moves, Andy Shaw Band, Hells Fire Sinners |
Article Rating
Video Comments
Reader Comments
The following are comments from the readers. In no way do they represent the view of theotherpaper.com.
Matt wrote on Apr 17, 2009 10:14 AM:
" People seem to just want someone to hate, and it's easy to pick on someone who is sincere and genuine. Neil puts himself out there and makes himself vulnerable to the arrogant critiques of snobs and the desperately jealous.
Fork in the Road is great, my favorite since Greendale, which the arrogant snobs also rejected, again because it was so sincere and genuine that it made them uncomfortable or jealous. "
Fork in the Road is great, my favorite since Greendale, which the arrogant snobs also rejected, again because it was so sincere and genuine that it made them uncomfortable or jealous. "
Kristy wrote on Apr 28, 2009 12:02 PM: