The other day Peter Suderman wrote here about the rare thrill of seeing pop music giant Beck perform in a tiny DC club.
For those of you outside the music nerd sphere, it’s the musical the equivalent of going to a local sports bar and watching a game with President Bush. It’s like having Conan O’Brian do a show from your living room. It’s like meeting up with Quentin Tarantino to watch Death Wish on a 27″ TV.
And it’s exactly how live rock music should be seen.
For all the trippy, awesome excess of stadium and large venue rock shows, I’ve never been all that impressed with them. You drop a wad of cash to listen to overprocessed, might-as-well-be-CD music while standing a quarter-mile away in a crowd of zillions. Live music isn’t just about hanging out and hearing music-you can do that at a bar with a DJ any night of the week. It’s about getting a sense of the musician, about being close to them, watching how they interact with both the crowd and with their music.
Having been in active avoidance of stadium shows since college, I couldn’t agree more. And it just so happens that I recently had an experience along the lines of Peter’s that I’ve been meaning to write about it; his post is the perfect occasion to finally do so.
If you’ve been paying attention to our Top Five in the right-hand column of this page, you may remember my recent blurb on the album of a Chicago singer-songwriter, Rachel Ries. My friend David and I happened upon Ries last year when she opened for Erin McKeown at Schuba’s. Knowing nothing about Ries at the time, and running low batting averages when it came to unknown opening acts, we prudently approached her set with low expectations. The fact that she came out hoarse and apologetic–she was getting over a cold–didn’t do very much to heighten them. But the moment she started singing, we were both taken.
There’s a rawly emotional, yearning quality to Ries’s voice that made her slight hoarseness on this occasion a plus, adding another dimension of vulnerability. The stripping away of a layer of polish, somewhat like the intimacy of the setting in which Peter saw Beck, served to make us feel closer to the artist. And it lent itself particularly well to the kind of music Ries makes. When I wrote about her album “For You Only” for the Top Five, I may have come off as confused because I wanted to give short shrift to neither the emotional immediacy of her singing nor its artfulness. It’s the former that’s most striking and affecting, but the latter, certainly, that’s responsible for these effects. The vulnerability attaches to both the songs about joy (in which sweetness and erotic charge are so enmeshed as to become practically synonymous) and the songs about pain (in which, refreshingly, the narrators are as likely to be the stories’ villains as their protagonists).
This September David and I went out to Oak Park to see Ries perform as half of a two-person show held in the living room of this local music blogger and his family. It was the most intimate musical performance I’d ever attended, and especially powerful because I’d finally acquired Ries’s CD only a few weeks earlier and had spent those few weeks playing it on a continual loop–washing dishes, working out, driving, getting ready for work in the morning. I’m like that with new musical crushes; I want that music burned into my brain and typically don’t rest, or listen to anything else, until it’s effectively recorded there. By the time of the Oak Park concert, I was still high on discovery and knew half the tracks backward and forward.
So this autumnal September evening in the suburbs was a rare delight: not only did I get to cap my three-week captivation with Ries’s songs and singing by witnessing her live performance, but she was playing only a few yards away from where I sat comfortably couched, glass of wine in hand, surrounded by amiable strangers. Ries was sharing the stage with her friend and frequent collaborator Anais Mitchell, to whom this show was my happy introduction, the pair taking turns performing. Between sets I even chatted with (perhaps gushed to) Rachel, who received all my praise with exemplary grace. During the second set she even played my request, the brilliant and brutal song “Unkind,” which is like a short story whittled down to its essential contours but still suggesting a world of texture and detail.
For those of you in Chicago, Rachel Ries performs this Friday night at the California Clipper–not quite someone’s living room, but intimate enough to promise another memorable show. Her email announcement paints the bar as a kind of home away from home for her:
This Friday I can be found at my favoritest bar of all time, the California Clipper. As I can often & on any given night be found there, it’s nearly business as usual. However, I’ve never played their stage so therein lies a vast difference: on Friday I’ll be dressed up and singing into a mic as opposed to dressed scrappy and humming at the bar whilst losing at Scrabble.
So come out Friday night and have your socks charmed off (by songs like “You Only”) and the hairs on the back of your neck stood on end (by songs like “Unkind”). I’ll be the rapt one in the burnt orange velvet scarf–be sure to say hello.