The Red Herring Collective Part 2: a free-form stream of consciousness jam session at the Princeton, of all places

I was not originally planning to write about seeing the Red Herring Collective tonight - a constantly varying lineup of Red Herring and friends, doing a residency at the Princeton, previously written about here... so I'm not going to do so at any length; I did not take notes, and in their absence, have a poor memory...

...But the experience was quite wonderful, and vastly different from that previous eve's. Tonight, for the second week in a row, original Red Herring drummer Steve Lazin joined guitarist/ vocalist Enrico Renz, bringing two hand drums with him called doumbek (because of the sound they make) or darbuka; I did not delve into the difference in names or drums, because I was chatting with him, when I did chat with him, mostly about Frank Zappa (whom he saw many times; his favourite Zappa album, he has told me, is Uncle Meat). With the original drummer present, the drummer that I saw last time, Kenan Sungur (a man of a few names, so I'm just picking one), who arrived from recent travels to join in at the last minute, was displaced from drums onto standup bass (or occasionally second guitar); you couldn't tell that the bass, in particular, wasn't his native instrument. Kenan also sang a couple of the few formal songs of the night, like covers of "Blue Skies" and Dylan's  "You Ain't Goin' Nowhere." He either didn't like the line, "bind yourself to the tree with roots" or - since he subbed in something else - didn't recall what the line was, which, it turns out, on some reflection, I did; but I probably have 20 years of listening to The Basement Tapes on him, easily. It was still a fun delivery of the song, and the lyric change was nowhere near as jarring as the one in that darn Peter Paul and Mary "Too Much of Nothing," which has been a constant bone of contention between Erika and I, since the name they sub in for "Vivian" ("Marion") DOESN'T EVEN RHYME WITH "OBLIVION," which it is what it is supposed to do; to pass up the opportunity to rhyme "Vivian" and "oblivion" is just dumb, while Kenan's alteration at least fit the song (and rhymed)... and even Dylan changes up the lyrics sometimes ("Genghis Khan and his brother Don/ Could not keep on keepin' on/ we'll climb that bridge after it's gone/ when we're way past it" - never heard THAT variation before!).  

Anyhoo, aside from that and a couple other songs by an audience member/ friend of the band named Charlie (who spelled Enrico for a time), whose last name Steve told me but which I promptly forgot, mostly the trio did free-form stream of consciousness jams (evidenced here, here, here, and here) of a very warm and mostly laid back improvised sort of avant-folk, with occasional medieval, Middle Eastern, and surf/ flamenco/ spaghetti western/ avant-garde flourishes. It reminded me, all-told, of a particularly reflective Eugene Chadbourne set (Doc Chad is generally a little more Appalachian, shall we say, has a slightly more abrasive edge - has a bit more Boris Karloff and Bugs Bunny in his toolkit than Enrico and company; Red Herring at their wildest never got quite as freaky/ goofy as, say, "Psychedelic Basement," though I suspect Mr. Renz and Mr. Lazin might have their own psychedelic basement stories from their own youths). This looser structure was particularly of interest to Lazin and Renz, since most of the Red Herring corpus goes back decades, and is nowhere as inviting of exploration or creativity as this sort of jam, which was like something you might expect at a Vancouver New Music or Coastal Jazz event, but rarely get to see at venues like the Princeton...

...making tonight feel like a rare and precious thing indeed, exciting for them and real darn fun for Erika and I; so if you're starting to feel like maybe you're missing out, the Red Herring Collective residency continues through June, every Monday, from 7pmish to 9 or 10 or...? That is, barring hockey games going into overtime (it wasn't even a fuckin' Canucks game tonight - there were, alas, some loud guys with backwards baseball caps who came to watch sports on TV and drink beer, which I guess we can't really complain about, since they probably spent more than the rest of us combined; Erika and I had nachos and buffalo cauliflower thingies with ranch dip, and drank coffee - me - and or diet pop; one round of beer probably beat that, in terms of dollars and cents, and those meshback dudes probably had five or six rounds, all told, judging from their ever-increasing volubility).

Didn't matter. Enrico, at one point, explained that at the previous jam with Steve, last week - where it was just the two of them! - he tried to think of the music as the "soundtrack" of what was going on in the room, and apparently was useful in assisting the concentration of someone shooting pool (they told him later). It didn't sound particularly like he was trying to provide a soundtrack to drunk jocks having a conversation, mind you, but that's probably for the best. 

Oh, by the way, Steve - the film with Elvin Jones, I learn from my Googlin's, is actually is Zachariah: The First Electric Western, slightly different from the title you gave, I think. It's on Youtube! Maybe I will watch it. You a Zabriskie Point guy? My fave pscyhedelic 60's film, also with a bit of a western/ Americana feel to it - I mean, there's a Roscoe Holcomb and Patti Page song on the soundtrack, along with John Fahey and the Grateful Dead and Pink Floyd, kinda Saucerful of Secrets-era. 

No Elvin Jones, though. I've always kind of associated it with Zachariah, but, I dunno, maybe it's just that they both begin with the letter Z...? 

All I got. Photos follow... all by me. Seeya next Monday?