Berkeley's Golden Birds hit the road.

By Max Goldberg

IT SOMEHOW SEEMS appropriate that I'm sitting with Golden Birds singer-songwriter Webster McBride at a picnic table outside the Smokehouse, a no-nonsense burger joint that could just as easily be in Peoria, Ill., as in Berkeley. We're talking about "Fifty," an ambitious concept tour that took McBride (sans bandmates) to 50 state capitals in 50 days this past summer, and the grill's Americana ambience feels right.

When I ask how the idea was hatched, McBride stares into space and cracks a smile. "I've always had this soft spot for capital cities," he begins. Childhood memories of letting these exotic city names roll off our tongues (alphabetically, if we had really done our homework) notwithstanding, an especially bitter, still-fresh political season meant McBride's journey represented more than mere whimsy. "Even if only symbolically, it felt like something I could do in the face of the country ripping itself apart," he says. From Carson City, Nev., to Washington, DC, "Fifty" operated on a modest scale with a set of protocols and principles atypical of rock tours. Instead of hopping from one boozy niche to another, McBride tapped into a longstanding national tradition of traveler-poets and spent his summer looking for America.

Fort of friends

Most East Bay folks who know of Golden Birds (myself included) first came to the band through their stewardship of Fort Oregon, a.k.a. the TV House. McBride and Golden Birds bassist Karl Tupper opened their home – humbler than a club, leagues cozier than a warehouse, and named after the street it's on – to musicians soon after they moved in, a few summers ago. Known as Carrier up until last year, McBride and Tupper's band has played in front of some major talents in the Berkeley basement: Mt. Eerie, Lou Barlow, the Dirty Projectors, the Lovemakers, and Two Gallants have all performed on Oregon Street. Despite the considerable talent that has passed through, the Fort is still best known for its decor, specifically a front yard dominated by discarded televisions. Arranged in towers of technology, the TV garden is a model of Bay Area irreverence.

McBride and Tupper came to Fort Oregon after having known each other in their Connecticut college days. The two hooked up with drummer friend Hrishikesh Hirway (better known for his work as the One AM Radio) in 2003 upon moving west. Hirway's home base was Los Angeles, though, making a consistent lineup difficult to maintain. Over the long run, McBride reports that "the band is Karl and me and whatever drummer we're able to have." He beats me to the punch when he adds, "Cue the Spinal Tap joke."

Between playing Fort Oregon and embarking on a couple of tours, the band has focused its studio energy on a series of EPs, the first of which was recorded as Carrier (Hearts and Arms, self-released, 2004) and later reworked under the Golden Birds moniker as, of course, Carrier (Paranoid, 2005). A moody batch of literate rock songs, Carrier is the product of a serious (sometimes overly so) songwriter. When discussing influences, McBride singles out individual albums (touchstones include American Music Club's Mercury, Modest Mouse's Lonesome Crowded West, and Sleater-Kinney's The Hot Rock): "In each case," he says, "there's this cohesive perspective."

Perspective is certainly something one senses Carrier and its follow-up, Transamerica (also self-released, a few months ago), are reaching for. The songs are stuffed with carefully considered words, almost all of which are sung by a self-conscious, brooding narrator. These lyrics are supported by cascades of open chords, strummed with the sort of determination that walks a thin line between grandeur and overdone open-mic antics. Place-specific, sighing lyrics like "Pacing platforms, switching trains / Midnight to Richmond, take me away / From a mission that's no longer mine" bring on the Garden State vibe hard and heavy. Transamerica's sound is more acoustic than its predecessor's is, but emotively overdubbed vocals remain the norm. This is the sort of breathy, thoughtful postgraduate balladry that would be a cinch for a lovelorn mix tape. While the band's music isn't anything revelatory, the sound is an honest one, and, in the case of the "Fifty" tour, a vehicle for invention.

Fifty nifty

The idea for "Fifty" came to McBride in the days following the Golden Birds' summer tour of 2004. After a set of shows in the Northeast, McBride drove back across the country under the thick spell of politics and much-touted cultural "divides." En route to California, he stopped in Pierre, SD, and wandered over to the capitol building as night fell over the city. Struck by the building's classical beauty and the possibility of interesting acoustics, McBride retrieved his guitar and began strumming his song "Sioux Falls." Enamored by the grand, distinct venue, intrigued by the mobility offered by a lightweight solo tour ("I loved how easy it was with just one person and one guitar, not having to load in at six and sound check and check the levels"), and deeply troubled by the popular rhetoric surrounding Bush vs. Kerry, "Fifty" began to take shape.

The tour's schedule came together quickly: a satisfyingly straightforward proposition of 50 capitals in 50 days, performing on the capitol steps each evening at dusk. The principles behind the journey, however, were a complex web of ideas on culture and communication, most of which found expression on the "Thirteen Ways" section of the tour's Web site (www.goldenbirds.com/fifty). Disarmingly passionate and ambitiously stated, McBride's version of Martin Luther's 95 theses touches on everything from marketing ("We are a nation of choirs performing to mirrors, driven apart and sealed off from one another by the inductive force of marketplaces ... that thrive on popular partisanship, brand loyalty, and fetish") to populist nationalism ("It is our union; this is not a matter of choice or opinion; we have been born into it and bear its name") by way of outlining the motivation behind the tour. The mix of an acute observational perspective with bravura-infused uses of the words we and our reveals McBride to be something of a homegrown Tocqueville. Indeed, when I ask him if there were any famous journeys or travelogues that helped shape "Fifty," he seems less drawn to the seminal, action-packed road trips of Jack Kerouac and Ken Kesey than to the musings on travel produced by a more reflective author like John Steinbeck in Travels with Charley.

McBride made it to each of his dates, playing on the capitol steps everywhere except for Raleigh, NC, and Washington, DC. (In both cases he performed across the street.) The shows didn't draw crowds ("A quarter of them, there was no one there; half of them, there was 5 to 10 people there; and then the other quarter, there would be 10 to 10," he reports), but then "Fifty" clearly wasn't a tour with the usual hard-line standards of success. McBride is most convincing when he discusses the journey as an attempt to break out of his own niches as a touring indie rocker. "Most things in our culture, whether it's political or entertainment, are targeted and one-dimensional," he says, explaining his desire to mix things up. Instead of trying to hawk a record or political perspective, "Fifty" was an attempt to connect: "We need to shore ourselves up against the damage," McBride writes on the "Fifty" Web site. "We need to experience people and places firsthand ... so as to reground ... our ideas and opinions." Not exactly a summer selling T-shirts to club kids, is it?

Golden Birds play Dec. 13, 9 p.m., Hotel Utah Saloon, 500 Fourth St., SF. $6. (415) 546-6300.