Mini- concert reviews: Stephen Fearing, Darren Williams

1. Stephen Fearing, May 25, St. James Community Square

I don't remember why I picked up Stephen Fearing's first LP, Out to Sea, back in 1988. I might have read about him in Discorder or I might have done a blind buy at Collectors RPM but I've had that album (in a few different formats) for a very long time. As Celtic-infused folk, it was a bit different from the hardcore punk that I was generally listening to, back then, so it's kind of odd to be that I gave it a chance at all; my 20-year-old self must have been more open-minded, musically, than I remember him being -- but from the outset, I loved a few songs on it, and I've grown to appreciate it even more since. 

Stephen Fearing by Erika Lax at St. James Hall, May 25, 2024

I didn't see Stephen Fearing live until 2011, when I took Erika -- as one of our first-ever dinner-and-a-concert date nights -- to see him at Hermann's in Victoria, where he played with Andy White. It was very enjoyable, and though I had paid very little attention to his post-Out to Sea recordings -- none of his Blackie and the Rodeo Kings output, for instance, a band that I didn't even realize he had been in until that night -- I quickly fell in love with a song he played called "Black Silk Gown." It reminded me in the best possible ways of the New Model Army's driving songs, packed with a tension and romanticism that fit the material perfectly; I think I even sent a link to the song to (New Model Army singer) Justin Sullivan, in the course of a past interview. I decided last week that it would be fun to take Erika to see Fearing for a sort of gig anniversary, yesterday at St. James, and -- having had "Black Silk Gown" in my  head all day -- when Fearing asked from the stage if there was anything we wanted to hear, by way of an encore, I shouted out what my brain THOUGHT was the title of that song. 

"Long Black Veil!" I called. 

Oops. I mean, there are three one-syllable words in each title, with "black" as one of them, but they're very different tunes, there. Luckily, it turned out after the encore -- which was a song about leaving Dublin for Vancouver, as a young man -- that he simply hadn't heard me; I still apologized for the fuckup (though I fucked up my apology, too, now calling the song "Long Black Gown"... I mean, there's a REASON I spend extra time prepping for interviews, folks! I can be pretty clueless off-the-cuff). But my screwup got us talking long enough for me to get my Out to Sea signed, and to mention to him that it would be great to hear some of the songs off it some day (I mentioned "Cain's Blood" or "Welfare Wednesday" in particular). "It's true, I haven't played anything off that in a long time," he acknowledged. "I don't even know if I could play 'Welfare Wednesday' anymore," he said. But before I could establish whether he meant he couldn't connect with the emotions in the lyrics or couldn't manage the actual physical playing of the guitar parts, he was being hugged and gushed over by a female fan (or friend/), so I let the matter slide. 

It was weird that he mentioned his age (61), which made me do the mental math: if he's 61 now, and I'm 56, he was only five years older than me back in 1988, too; he would have been 25 when Out to Sea came out, while I was a mere 20. He looks older than 25 on the album cover!

Mr. Fearing is working on a new album, by the way -- The Empathist. He explained, by way of introducing a few of the songs off it, that he knows perfectly well that there is no such thing as an "empathist" -- "someone who practices empathy is called an empath," he said -- but added that the word "empath" always makes him think of Star Trek. 

He offered a few more riff around that, Star Trek stuff, and got laughs. He's funnier than most singers, when introducing his songs -- joking about the "plexiglass" years of COVID, offering a tale of the first time he got on the radio (pirate radio, courtesy of a high school teacher he had -- note to my future self, get him to say what the song actually was, if you ever interview him!) and describing a couple of his long-standing crowd-pleasers as "barnacles." (Something else he has in common with Sullivan: an occasional interest in nautical themesnautical themes). I recognized two of those barnacles from Hermann's -- one was "The Big East West," which kicks off his No Dress Rehearsal comp, but I didn't take a mental note of the other. 

Maybe I'll try to talk to him when The Empathist comes out, so I can seize the opportunity to bug him to play some of his Out to Sea material. He apparently lives in Victoria now -- I assume there will be other chances to see him. And so we may: it was a very enjoyable date night!

2. Darren Williams, May 26th, Laura's Cafe, White Rock

Darren Williams by Allan MacInnis

I went to a very different concert today, this time without Erika: Darren Williams, previously interviewed here. From the outset, this was a bit of an insane jaunt, which saw me walking to the Skytrain in the rain at 8:30 in the morning. Darren, for reasons unclear to me, was scheduled to be performing in White Rock at 11am -- which would mean at least an hour and a half's traveling from Burnaby by train and bus. It got even crazier when, after a few pitstops, I arrived at 10:45 at the supposed "venue," the Saltaire Amphitheater, to discover it was no venue at all, but some stairs outside a coffee shop near the corner of the Saltaire building, which they'd been presumably putting a tent over and ironically dubbing an "amphitheater." And not only was the venue no venue, nothing visible was happening there at all when I arrived -- no people, no signs, no nothing. (The cat here steps on the keyboard and types: 5r4tttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttt). I circled the Saltaire building and checked various websites and one map. I asked two different passerby, who told me that there'd been a tent up there the day previous; but there was no tent today, no signs indicating where the venue had moved, and no explanations that I could see on the Facebook page for the Casse-Tete festival. Maybe I was reading the map wrong? I finally went into the coffee shop at the Saltaire and mused that it seemed at least possible that I was going to have trekked for an hour and a half from Burnaby to White Rock and an hour and a half back, having seen no concert at all. (I was very grateful that I'd had an errand to do at Redrum Records while I was there; their searchable website allowed me to pre-shop and establish that they did, in fact, have something I wanted to buy). 

Anyhow, I don't know how the morning went for anyone else who turned up at the Saltaire building, but luckily for me, Darren (blameless in all this) had read a Facebook post I'd done and put a comment up, letting me know of the location change to a coffee shop a few blocks away, when the posted location was deemed unmanageable due to rain. Aha! I made it to Laura's Cafe just in time to secure a seat. Darren was at the very least dubious that the morning coffee-house crowd was going to be receptive to the music he makes, but he rolled with it. And while I can't speak for his experience of all this, it ultimately resulted that I had a terrific time, so I'm glad he did. 

Roll with it, that is. A future question for Darren came up, too: was his lying on the floor during "Knee Jerk Inaction: A Composition About Global Warming" strictly a joke, perhaps punning on the idea of inaction -- he's even lying down as he plays it -- or was it like Pete Townshend said of "Dirty Water" in the liner notes to Scoop -- a way of accessing aspects of his range otherwise difficult to reach? (Townshend, if memory serves, lay on the floor in the studio to sing that). 

Actually, I suspect it was the former -- just a bit of theatre. It got laughs, in any case. 

Darren is very witty, in a dry, sly way (see here, for example: he had begun playing when he noticed a passing siren, and shifted his tone to jam along with it, then paused, saying we had to wait for the siren to come back around so he could continue -- which we did not do, but he let the pause linger). And considering my consumption of anything remotely avant-garde is at a low ebb these past few years, I quite like this new material of his. I find circular breathing somewhat awe-inspiring, somewhat unreal, like sword-swallowing or levitation or spoon-bending; it doesn't seem like it should be physically possible to do what he does. I also shot video here and here, as well, though that last song cuts. I enjoyed seeing his set more than I enjoyed either the Peter Brotzmann or Roscoe Mitchell gigs I caught at past jazzfests (but The Thing still reigns supreme). 

Oh, speaking of The Thing, Darren did what I think was a rock cover, but I didn't recognize it. Anyone?

Anyhow, sometimes the hardest-won experiences are the most enjoyable. It's possible that both the ordeal of my commute and the chaos and confusion of the unplanned relocation ultimately added to the experience, underscoring that something was happening where normally there would be nothing; it's harder to take such experiences for granted. I had as much fun -- maybe more -- watching Darren as I did at any of the concerts I've been to this month (and I've been to quite a few -- DOA, IDLES, Violent Femmes, Gustaf... it's been a busy few weeks, but nothing was quite as much fun as this weird little coffee sop experience). 

There was more to the day - a bone-in goat roti, some thrifting (Wilder's, a new location on the corner of Thrift and Johnson), and, weirdly, a visit to a farmer's market where I bought some rather huge farm eggs -- but it's bedtime here at Chez MacInnis-Lax. Catch you later.