Honestly, I don't get out as often as I should, and certainly not as often as I used to. In case you haven't figured this out already, I really enjoy listening to records. In my home. With my pipe. And my wine.
Back in the good old days, I used to get out to the big city to see shows at least once a week. I'd even drive up to fuckin Chico or down to L.A. for one night just to see a favorite band or, sometimes, to check out a band that I'd never heard before simply because someone said I "needed" to see them play. If memory serves, I must have seen about half the shows that the Thinking Fellers played in the Bay Area from 1992-1995. It doesn't seem possible that they could have opened for The Wedding Present at the I-Beam on Haight Street almost twenty years ago but I know it happened because I saw it with mine own two peepers. It was just the second show I'd seen after moving to Berkeley (the first was My Bloody Valentine at Slim's, earlier in the winter of 1992, during which I suffered minor but permanant hearing loss). But I digress.
Flash forward to this past Thursday at the Hemlock in SF where I heard and witnessed an actual live performance in a club for the first time since ... cripes, I don't know when. And wouldn't you know it? I had a pretty good time. I wish I hadn't burned the roof of my mouth beforehand on a horrifically boring slice of pizza (Napoli's on Polk St. - avoid). That was not exactly a good time. But The Hemlock offers little paper bags of warm tasty peanuts in the shell for just a buck and that made up for my weak dinner. Of course, it would be an act of intestinal terrorism to fill ones stomach with peanuts. Thankfully, the keg of Guiness at The Hemlock lasted all night long.
I first heard about the Hemlock show a month ago or so when I wrote to Bill Orcutt about where I could catch him playing and snag copies of the two singles I heard he was selling at his shows. Bill told me about this Hemlock show and then, of course, I immediately spaced it until I found myself bored off my fucking ass (as usual) at the salt mine. It occurred to me to check the Internets to see if I had indeed missed the gig, which I presumed was the case. But in fact it was happening that very night and lo and behold who was listed as one of the opening acts but Date Palms, whose first album on Root Strata had burned a sizable and very pleasurable hole in my consciousness earlier this year.
And I realized then that I could easily walk from the salt mine to the Hemlock. And so I did.
The Hemlock is a rough space for a quiet band to play because the room where the band plays is separated from the bar noise (and there's plenty of it, including a jukebox) by just a few strips of thick, transparent plastic not unlike what separates the customer service section of your butcher from the room where the sides of beef are hanging. I would have liked Bill (or the sound engineer) to crank up the volume on the guitar ten to 100-fold louder than what I was hearing. That would approximate the visceral, physical experience I get at home when I throw the first track of 'Debts' onto the turntable at eleven. But so it went. It was even rougher for opener Jozef Von Wizzem, the lutist player whose gentle, thoughtful compositions, of all the music heard that night, would have most benefitted from a stage farther removed from the jabbering din of Thirsty Thursday revellers.
Judging strictly from the applause meter, the biggest thrill of the night was probably delivered by Derek Monypeny who I previously knew only as the guy who self (?) released an interesting LP of his own solo oud recordings titled after one of the most famous mondegreens in the catalog of one of the most embarrasingly swank bands in the history of popular music. As the end of his set drew near, Monypeny took a couple swigs from a pint on stage, bantered with the mostly sympathetic, supplified audience about the joys of imbibing (although that sentiment was palpable already from the bar next door), picked up a grain-finished Gibson SG and began improvising a taxim of pure feedback without touching the strings. That's not to say that the guitar was left unstimulated next to the amplifier. Monypeny's fingertips were all over the body, tapping up a storm like Sammy at the Sahara. If I was standing in the other room, I'd have guessed someone had plugged in their goat bladder bagpipes. Eventually Monypeny began picking at the actual strings, at which point it started to get loud and, soon afterwards, loud and fucked up. At a critical and appropriate point, peak intensity was deemed and Monypeny pulled the plug. Expletives were shouted, along with the usual whoops and animal noises. Personally I would have fled the stage at that point, with the audience ready to buy me drinks for the rest of my life. Instead, Monypeny put the guitar down and returned to his oud. "Do an acoustic version!" some wise-ass shouted. Frankly, I couldn't tell you what Derek actually played (it was not "Wild Thing") as the previous number was still reverberating in my skull. Through the magic of the Internets, you don't even have to trust my dodgy review, you can just see this number for yourself:
All of this additional music was just bonus gravy on my biscuits, though, because Date Palms were the first band to take the stage and I could have left immediately after their set and been perfectly satisfied. As noted above, I took instantly to their LP because it perfectly melded certain essences of deep droning faves (e.g., Eno, Flynt) with minimal, down-tempo repetitive bass riffage (a la my favorite Les Rallizes numbers) and occasionally some lovely Fender Rhodes keyboard juicin it up like Keith Godchaux on a '73 Bird Song. The closest anybody came to dancing at this gig was when Marielle Jakobsen (violin, flute, keyboards, and the bass player on the LP) got on the keys and started rocking back and forth to the percussionless groove. If someone in the crowd was generous with the goony birds, or happened to have a pair of maraccas, I could see some free spirits getting gribby on the dance floor while the Palms are swinging. Doesn't anybody remember how to do The Eggbeater?
One of the distinctive features of the Date Palms' album was Marielle's righteous bass playing so I was momentarily befuddled when the band presented itself as a three-piece for their Hemlock gig. On the LP, it's mainly Marielle and Gregg Kowalsky (electronics, guitars) playing all the instruments. As Marielle informed me afterwards, for live performances it's typically a trio or a quartet (when their tambura player is available) "because it's hard to play the bass and the violin at the same time." The bassist for most (all?) of these live gigs is Trevor Montgomery (Lazarus, the Drift, Tarantel) and he certainly delivered the goods at the Hemlock, often filling the room with lovely beat frequencies, the natural mate to the constantly evolving, revolving long tones produced by his bandmates.
Evidently there is a short European tour in the works and a new 12" on Mexican Summer due in mid-August that sounds very, very promising. In between there are a couple gigs (at least) scheduled for this summer in San Francisco, including one at St. John's Episcopal Church in SF at the end of July. More info about Date Palms (pretty much all you need to get started) can be found here. Check 'em out.
UPDATE: Someone posted a decent vid of a bit of the Date Palms performance at the Hemlock. Unfortunately the beating of the low frequencies isn't easily captured and conveyed at YouTube's bit rate but you get the idea ....
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