By Erik Morse
So the night, Nov. 30, was a disaster of sorts but not for the reasons you’d think - and before you gag yourself with the prospect of another music review-turned personal soapbox or group session, bear with me. I’d like to think there is a point to my mawkishness. There is a certain regimen that proceeds from a typical Friday evening in the Bay that includes: 1) Driving with abandon, windows down, sunroof retracted, a hurly-burly of pre-weekend tune-age, a ritualized exorcising of the week’s frustrations, fleeting Bay vistas obstructed by billboards to the right and a swathe of mountains to the left; 2) The trickle of evening that always seem to greet you at that asymptote of the Peninsula where the sepia tones of suburbia meets the neon city with its bleary-eyed halogens and dayglo pleasuredoms; 3) A fine meal, which is to say nothing in moderation and everything in excess; and 4) A moment of love, nostalgia, tomfoolery, or any of a number of sensuous terms that might describe the simple, inexplicable pleasures that only live music can afford us – jouissance, freude, orphic plaisir, or, at the very least, “like a monkey making love to a skunk – maybe didn't get all he wanted, but got all he could stand…”
Of course, you see, it didn’t happen that way. Driving up the 101 in Friday rush-hour has its occasional pleasures and aesthetic appeals but not when dinner reservations in the Mission and a hop-skip-jump over the Bay Bridge are timed out perfectly to coincide with Sam Beam’s performance at the Paramount. Over an hour parked in the concrete desert is a numbing death-trip. Honk. Break. Lurch. Then there’s the inevitable parking morass that is downtown SF: where one parks in the Richmond to play on Harrison - and the confusing cell-phone tag-games that often delay dinner reservations and sometimes end friendships.
Reservations cancelled, eh?
What?! 7:30 already! I’m barely through the second scotch and soda and already it’s time to move on. Back onto the road and across the great steel artery leaving the flickering night of the city before it’s even begun in earnest. Wait…wait…where’s my WALLET?!
Believe it or not, we all might learn a thing or two from Iron and Wine’s Sam Beam - namely, not to sweat the little things and embrace your quotidian flaws. His Hirsuiteness took the cavernous auditorium of the Paramount on Nov. 30 for two hours of brittle ballads and po’ boy twee pop.
On record, Iron and Wine remains a bit of a mystery to me. They’ve always had a little too much of one thing or not enough of the other. Too much vocal preciousness, not enough studio inventiveness. Too much white-boy folk, not enough white-boy blues. Too much musical competence to be shambling, not enough to be roots-rock. Beam hasn’t yet succeeded in achieving the sloppy, pop brilliance of Stephen Pastel nor the antedelluvian, indie-boy-meets-Louvin’ Brothers country-soul of Gorky’s Zygotic Mynki nor the campish saw-tooth shivers of Black Heart Procession.
But where I&W’s records have often failed, Beam’s live performances, with their awkward flaws and genteel playfulness, have excelled. Using his recent collaboration with compeers Calexico as inspiration, Beam has finally beefed up his DIY sound with a large backing band full of wheezing, slinking and chiming tones as evidenced on his new album, The Shepherd’s Dog (Subpop).
Opening with “Love Song of the Buzzard," it’s immediately apparent that Beam is aiming for a different musical stratosphere than he’d been equipped for previously. The song is as rich and heavy as treacle without being…well, sappy. With some lovely falsetto, “Peace Beneath the City” sounded as if it were coming straight from the backwoods and only minus a thatch of cricket chirps to perfectly simulate a warm, summer night down south. More highlights included the country jamboree of “The Devil Never Sleeps” and the boho-jazz of “The Boy with a Coin”. Another old favorite “Sodom, South Georgia” suffered a bucolic loveliness that only the combination of upright bass, accordion and piany can afford. With his typical soft-spoken charm, Beam footnoted the song with an apology “We’re all kind of sick today…” Don’t worry, it just adds to all the countrified wabi sabi.
And I guess you could say that the dreamy world of Iron and Wine, with its poignant and plaintive tales of lost love and lost innocence, celebrates all those moments when life happens by getting in the way. When plans get derailed, when a roll of the dice begets new found religion, when the aleatory becomes a symphony.
During the encore “The Trapeze Swinger” with duet partner and sister, Sarah, Beam returns to his stripped-down roots with mixed results. Although the crowd loves this version of Beam, the lone troubadour singing for his supper a la Nick Drake, this song is all together more ambivalent than “Pink Moon." Without the harmonic weight of the band to flesh out the performance, the vocal is stark and naked, quivering high above the strum of Beam’s acoustic guitar but yearning for a sonic ballast to ground its rootsy meditations. So does Beam want to sound like an old John Lomax field record or Brian Wilson’s illegitimate stepson? Or maybe a bit of both. All in all a lovely performance though far from flawless with the peaks and valleys reminiscent of Beam’s Appalachia roots. But to its credit, Iron and Wine made me forget, if just for a spell, all the annoyances of the evening and embrace my inner Foible.
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