Art Bergmann by bev davies, Dec. 16, 2023 not to be reused without permission
(With thanks to Rob Wright, Bev Davies, and - making her first appearance on Alienated, one Andy Scheffler; also thanks to Mo and the rest of the Keithmas team)
At his first-ever Keithmas, this past Saturday at the Rickshaw, Art Bergmann quipped, before playing “Confessin’ the Blues,” that he’d swapped the gender references in the lyrics (“mama” becomes “daddy”) because the original was “so fuckin’ sexist it’s sick.”
Obviously some aspects of the Stones catalogue have
become, as they say, problematic. To leave aside entirely the question of
cultural appropriation, the sexual power dynamics in songs like “Under My Thumb” do not work well in
the current landscape. Even worse is “Brown Sugar,” which adds a morally horrifying element of racist history,
presented in a weirdly rollicking, good-time-rock-n’-roll format.
Hard to believe Little Richard once covered that latter tune, re-instating a line that Jagger himself would gloss over in live performances,
about hearing the “scarred old slaver… whip the women just around midnight.” He even amended "whip" to "whup," adding to the horrors. (There are people who defend the song, but there's a reason it has drawn controversy).
At a past Keithmas, staple co-headliners La Chinga lost points with some members of the audience by revitalizing that song, when even the Stones themselves have dropped it from recent sets. But considering the possibility that it might surface again this year, it was hard to get very worked up over “Confessin’ the Blues.”
Originally written by black artists Jay McShann and Walter Brown, it has a narrator macking somewhat desperately on a girl, posturing—“Baby don’t you want a man like me?”, which line apparently would later inspire Frank Zappa—while pleading (“if I can’t have you baby, I don’t want nobody else,” which you’d imagine the singer might pitch at a different girl every week). It’s horny, it’s het, it’s very male, and for the women the singer targets, probably a bit tedious, but… sexist?
Still, if it makes Art happy to swap “Mama” for
“Daddy,” to reverse the power dynamic and/or possibly queer the song, he should
go right ahead. All I want for Christmas is for Art Bergmann to have a happy
new year, y’know? (And I mean the whole year).
It wasn’t Art’s only poke at heteronormativity during the evening. Wearing lipstick and nail polish, the Vancouver punk veteran had also said of the silky feminine robe he wore that if Keith Richards would dress that way, too, “if he had the courage;” and later in the evening, during Rich Hope’s extended jam on “Midnight Rambler,” crept up behind Hope onstage, lay on his back at his feet, raised his legs in the air in an apparent offering.
Hope seemed momentarily a bit puzzled by what specific manner of debauchery Bergmann might have been inviting, but ended up placing his foot in Bergmann’s, uh, perineal area, with Bergmann laughing happily on the floor below him (he says just now on Facebook that he was being "the rapee." I guess in the absence of those other songs, "Midnight Rambler" becomes the most lyrically problematic tune of the night, and that Art's theatre was more deliberately, sneakily subversive than hilariously random; it's clever stuff). Hope may have contributed to the high spirits a bit, pouring for Art from the gigantic bottle of Jack Daniels that occupied center stage.
Most performers took a hit from that bottle, some more than one. At one point, near the end of the night, Hope was squatting on the stage margins right in front of me, selfsame bottle in hand, and, thinking of watching Shane McGowan pass whiskey into the audience at a Pogues show back in 1987, I was tempted to reach out—except whiskey mixes poorly with tongue cancer; I stuck to Phillips de-alcoholized Iota, happily now on tap at the Rickshaw, poorly advertised in a photo that Santa took of me with Mrs. Claus (don't ask, I have no idea, she just liked my Dead Bob shirt).
To be clear, it was delightful to see the 70-year-old Bergmann having such fun—and apparently abandoning his concerns over sexism by joining La Chinga in background vocals for a raucous, celebratory, unabashedly phallocentric “Honky Tonk Women,” later in the night. It is probably impossible to have a bacchanale that is totally politically correct, y’know?
If Bergmann easily won the prize for stage antics, Wait/Less
bassist (and Little Destroyer frontperson) Allie Sheldan, having changed from her leathers (?) into fake furs and sparkly tights,
came close for second place, sneering and grabbing at her crotch as she joined Hope
for a Dionysian rip-through of “When the Whip Comes Down” at the evening’s
ending. Also fun to see was Wait/Less vocalist Becca Buick proudly displaying the
stuffed package in the front of her bright red pants, during Wait/Less’s mid-show
main set, prior to launching into a swaggering “Emotional Rescue.”
Somewhat surprisingly, that was the most
contemporary Stones song that we heard that night, unless you count deep-diving
Mississippi-born bluesman Robert Connelly Farr’s version of “Rolling Stone Blues,” which appears on Hackney Diamonds, but was originally written by Muddy Waters in 1950,
adapting a still-earlier Delta blues song called “Catfish Blues”).
I was sad that Farr only got to do two songs; I liked what I heard. By the end
of the night, after a three hour musical orgy involving at least nine bands (JankyBungag appears not to have played), Farr’s contributions, and those of surf
instrumentalist Joe Rotundo, had faded a bit in memory -- Rotundo and the Interstellar Riders kicked off the night with a cover of "Paint It Black," but that's about all I can tell you. Still, there was not a weak
band on the bill, and Farr, with his deep, rich growl and sonorous guitar, is someone I’ll seek out again (he has an album release show in March). Leave
them wanting more!
As for period-appropriate costuming, with faded jeans, silky scarf and long blond hair, La Chinga vocalist Carl Spackler reminded me more of Robert Plant—perhaps as played by Wings Hauser –than he did his pseudonym’s namesake (Bill Murray’s character in Caddyshack). He looked like he’d time-travelled in from 1973 to lead covers of—what, was that “Turd on the Run” they started with? I was returning from accompanying veteran scene documenter Bev Davies to the bus stop, so I missed a bit, but I seem to recall hearing the lyric “I’ve lost a lot of love over you” blasting through the Rickshaw’s swinging doors, while proprietor Mo Tarmohamed mopped up a spilled beer on the stairs.
For sure, La Chinga did “Bitch,” “Wild Horses,” “Honky
Tonk Women” and “Sway.” Nick Jones of the Pointed Sticks, who had last played
Keithmas in 2017, had, a few bands earlier, invited the audience to really give
it up for La Chinga and Rich Hope: “They do this every year,” he quipped, “and
have to come up with new songs every time.”
The Sticks, by contrast, actually repeated one song
from their 2017 set, “Mother’s Little Helper,” but I think Nick just has fun singing “What
a drag it is getting old.”
Knowing that, in his capacity as a rock merchandiser, Jones has toured with the Stones and even been lent a hat by Keith Richards himself, I was keen to know where he’d got his cool tartan pants. Seeing one of my photos, my wife asked, “Are those pajama bottoms?”
There were
too many stellar takes on the Stones catalogue to do justice to all of them. Both
Bergmann and Colleen Rennison offered different flavours of “No Expectations,”
with Art bringing out the scorched emotional earth in the song, while Rennison
read it more harmoniously, as if making peace with a sad situation. To my embarrassment, I have only caught her
twice; her self-presentation the other night was vastly more demure than the raunchy gusto she brought to the stage with GRRL
Circus, a couple of years ago. Rennison apparently contains multitudes, which is a superb quality for any
performer (it was very odd passing her on the street the next day--not sure if she recognized me from Keithmas, but I recognized her).
And while noting outstanding performances, one must also tip the hat to Keithmas veteran Elliot C. Way, who did a stellar take on “Sweet Virginia” (a divisive song, but it’s always been my favourite song off Exile on Main St).
Mary Ancheta by Andy Scheffler, not to be reused without permission
The most transcendent performance of the night, though, was ultimately by Rich Hope, who offered an extended mega-jam on “Can’t You Hear Me Knocking,” the spacy, drawn-out denouement of which prompted him to remark, some minutes after it was over, “Are you wondering if that song is still going? I fucking am! I’ll be ending that song in my dreams.” Particular credit should go to keyboardist Mary Ancheta – inexplicably decked-out in a furry Russian hat, which she kept on through both Bergmann and Hope’s sets, despite the considerable body heat warming the room— for evoking a stoned and expansive Ray Manzarek. Indeed, the song felt more like the Doors or Sri-Chinmoy-era Santana than the Stones. It was the climax, the veritable tantric orgasm, of the evening, even if it was not technically the last song (I believe that was "Happy").
By special request: Billy Butcher of La Chinga with Art Bergmann, during "Honky Tonk Women," by Andy Scheffler, not to be reused without permission
Hope was in great spirits, saying
something about how fun it was to “act like a bunch of jackasses and raise
money for the food bank.” I’m told that, while the final count is not yet in, between
the very reasonable admission price, raffle tickets, merch sales, and other
donations, “at least $22,500” was raised.
That’s an impressive amount--I've never done anything simultaneously so frivolous and productive--but the most touching story of the night came from Wait/Less’s second guitarist, James Gamble, whose name was provided me after the fact by event-co-organizer Rob Wright, of the Vicious Cycles MC (a band who were not actually on the bill, but present in spirit, with their guitarist Nick manning the merch table, where you could buy a new 7” featuring Gamble released for the occasion. While I bought my raffle tickets, Nick and I briefly chatted a bit about how Fergus of Emergency was on the first four Tranzmitors singles, including my favourite of theirs, “Look What You’re Doing to Me,” but had flown back across the pond before the first Tranzmitors LP came out. It was an itch I had wanted to scratch for awhile, but I didn’t get the chance at the Dead Bob show, where I last saw the Vicious Cycles play).
To get back to the story: just prior to Wait/Less launching into “Emotional
Rescue,” Gamble took the mic to tell the assembled crowd about how he’d just flown
in from attending his uncle Rick’s funeral, earlier that day. The Rolling
Stones were uncle Rick’s favourite band of all time, Gamble explained: “I had
to leave early to be here, but I know he would be so proud of me.”
James then raised
a glass, poured from that same bountiful bottle of Jack on the stage.
Here’s to
you, Uncle Rick. You’d have been proud indeed.
Note to Rickshaw noobs and regulars: Mo's three shows he is really looking forward to for the new year are Squid (in February), A Savage (in April) and Psychedelic Porn Crumpets (in May). He is also "planning a big weekend of shows this summer (likely in late June) to celebrate Rickshaw's 15th Anniversary" -- more deets to come. My tastes lean more to the Reverend Horton Heat (in March) and Korpiklaani (in April). Meantime, La Chinga has a big album release planned for February 23rd at the WISE Hall... more to come on Robert Connelly Farr... merry Christmas...
maybe art should have retitled the song homogenizin' the blues...
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