Jason Collett's Basement Revue (feat. Matt Barber / David McGimpsey (poetry) / Jennifer Castle / Michael Helm (fiction) / Carl Wilson (music criticism) / Nathan Lawr / Doug Paisley)
The Dakota Tavern. Tuesday, December 14, 2010.
It's an indulgence to go to the Basement Revue two weeks in a row, but I didn't let that stop me. Given the amount of goodwill and good word-of-mouth these shows generate, who knows for how much longer it'll be relatively easy to get tickets at all? So, back down to the Dakota on a snowy night that didn't deter the crowd too much. Getting a little closer to xmas, the stage was now decked out with extra lights and festive cowboy hats.
As usual, Jason Collett lead off with a short solo set, including "Long May You Love" (from his most recent long-player Rat A Tat Tat) and "Henry's Song" (from Here's To Being Here — the Henry in question is Henry Miller, for whose who hadn't dug too deeply into the lyrics). Further exploring the "in-between space between musicians and writers", Collett sprung a new song that he'd cribbed from Damian Rogers' poem "Song of the Silver-Haired Hippie". Sitting in the crowd, Rogers uttered a surprised "what?" to the room when Collett announced the song's existence. It turned out to be a nice bit of work, the words matched to a nimble little slide move — the song even garnered an appreciative "thank you" from the poet at the end. Collett finished off by reaching back to 2003's Motor Motel Love Songs for "Blue Sky".
Listen to a track from this set here.
The first musical guest of the night was Matthew Barber, engaging in another sort of musical cross-fertilization. Instead of playing anything from his own albums, he presented the audience with some songs that he was working on for a stage adaptation of Derek McCormack's The Haunted Hillbilly.1 The book is an amped-up, ultra-heightened retelling of Hank Williams' story, with Satan — in the guise of Nudie Cohn — bestowing on Hank Williams the songwriters' gift while crippling him with drugs. It's a tall order — and a rather unenviable job — to have to come up with some new Hank Williams songs, but "Got That Lonesome Feeling on my Mind" had the flavour. It's even more difficult to do that while giving the songs a narrative thrust to fit in a story's arc, and the songs that Barber presented in that vein was a bit more wobbly when stripped of their context.
There was also a lot of pop culture to decode in the poems of David McGimpsey, who read "Invitation" (to a 39th birthday party) from his collection Sitcom. The poem's punchlines ("There'll be a piñata made up to look like an old college professor who said I'd go far... I can hardly wait to give that thing a whack.") were a delivery system for examining mixed feelings on getting older. He followed that with a song played on Collett's guitar (it managed to reference both Milli Vanilli and Penthouse Forum) before closing out with "Montreal", a tribute to his home town ("O the poutine! O the bagels! O bagels stuffed full of poutine!"). This worked for me — the poetry at the Basement Revue always seems to go down easier when it's couched in the low-brow jumble of everyday life.
In introducing Jennifer Castle, Collett had scant biographical details to relate, befitting an artist whose work is more in the realm of instinct and half-revealed mysteries. Playing solo, her jaunty Christmas sweater clashed with the pessimistic sentiments of "For My Friends". That'd be the first of several songs that segued freely from one to the next — a method I've seen her employ in the past. After "You Don't Have to Be" her set looked forward more to her new songs, now available on her excellent new Castlemusic album.
Listen to a track from this set here.
To round out the first half, novelist Michael Helm read from Cities of Refuge. Set in Toronto, this has been rather enthusiastically received, but in giving us a self-contained sketch of one of the characters, I didn't get too much of a feel for what the whole work might be like.
A different kind of reading after the break from music critic Carl Wilson, who instead of pulling out something from Let's Talk About Love (his examination of the construction of taste in the guise of an analysis of Céline Dion), read a piece that came from Back to the World — his shared blog that's an essential venue for thoughtful writing on culture — about seeing Mary Margaret O'Hara perform. An articulate musing on the problem of bodies having minds (or possibly vice-versa) and the relationship between music and bodies, it was interesting to watch Wilson reading, his right hand twitching a little while he held his sheets of paper with the other, trying to make out his words in the dim light.
After seeing the full-on Minotaurs groove machine several times over the past months, it felt a bit strange to see Nathan Lawr in this stripped-down format, playing acoustic and backed only by Ryan Levecque. Levecque's electric guitar had a dying pedal or loose connection somewhere, and "Runaway Lane" ended with an unexpected "static solo", but otherwise this was far more genteel that what Lawr's been up to lately. Of course, though, Lawr has been a singer-songwriter for longer than he's been an Afrobeat/folk bandleader, so this wasn't any sort of unique arrangement for him. Still, the mini-set didn't have the spark his band adds, even when attempting a slightly-sloppy cover of "Canary in a Coalmine", which was dedicated to Rob Ford.
After stepping up to sing one more song, Jason Collett invited David McGimpsey to recite a poem backed by Doug Paisley's band. McGimpsey read what appeared to be a string of several poems (including "Scrubland" and "The Streets of Laredo") amalgamated into what came across as a Texas-set prose-poem travelogue, a sun-scorched journey of regret filled with conversational asides. Given the disjointed origins, there wasn't a stong narrative throughline, and the band's music, with more drift than drive, fit well, though both felt like they were drifting a bit too much by the end. But that's okay in an improvised experiment like this.
That led right into Doug Paisley's set. Though I had brushed across his music a couple times, Paisley was mostly unknown to me until his Constant Companion album started to garner some serious accolades. This set turned out to be just the opportunity I'd been needing to really get a feel for his work.
Paisley accompanied himself on acoustic guitar and was backed by bass, drums (Matt Barber, sitting in) and piano. he turned out to be a fine entertainer, bantering and cracking jokes between songs. The set starting with a mini-medley of songs from John Wesley Harding ("is two songs a medley?" Paisley asked at the end) before moving into his own material, including the expertly crafted "What I Saw", one of the gems from the new album. After that, he focused on older stuff like "Digging in the Ground", and "Broken in Two". There was also "Make it a Double", introduced as a new song ("it's new, and I think it's country, so does that make it New Country?") and "Take Me" (a Leon Payne song, most famously played by George Jones) — and it was telling that the excellent "If I Wanted To" fit right in alongside it.
Jennifer Castle sings on several tracks on the new album, so Paisley took advantage of her presence to close the set with the three songs she'd appeared on, including the ace "No One But You" and the lullaby-like "Come Here My Love". The clock pushing one, the night wrapped up with the topically correct "End of the Day".2
Listen to a track from this set here.
1 In another connection, McCormack had read from his book at last year's Basement Revue, so this almost felt like a progress update on how this one piece of art was getting along out in the big wide world.
2 I don't think Paisley has been playing a lot in town lately, so you should hasten down to Soundscapes next Tuesday (May 31, 2011) to catch him doing an in-store set.
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