Heavy Trash with The Sadies
Satellite Ballroom
Thursday, October 5
music You know, maybe you can have too much of a good thing. More than a few times in recent memory, I’ve attended concerts in our newly music-saturated little town, and been sadly disappointed at the lackluster size of the crowd. San Fran popster John Vanderslice drew only a hundred or so, George Clinton’s P-Funk All Stars took the stage to a Fridays After 5-sized assemblage, and—as sadly reported by our own Spencer Lathrop—the incomparable Kid Congo Powers recently played his heart out to a crowd numbering in the single digits. Are there just too many great musical options out there? Or are we all just a lazy bunch of losers and layabouts, grown bored and complacent with the overwhelming amount of great music filling our local clubs?
To be fair, the meager throng at last Thursday’s Heavy Trash show could be blamed on a number of factors: It was a weeknight show in the middle of midterms, there was a cold, bone-soaking rain outside, and the words “Blues Explosion” were nowhere to be found. But still, the Heavy Trash pairing of yelping sleaze-rock icon Jon Spencer and Speedball Baby’s Matt Verta-Ray—backed by Canadian cowpunk supergroup The Sadies, no less—deserved better. I mean, when Mr. Spencer took a pre-concert stroll through the club, not a single eager groupie tried to chat him up. What is wrong with us, people?
Anyway, the show was an unrelenting blast, from The Sadie’s tight-and-tidy country crooning to Spencer and Verta-Ray’s greaseball rockabilly blowout (think Blues Explosion decked out in a wife-beater, with half a pint of Brylcreem in its hair). But you know what? I’m gonna keep the details to myself—so maybe next time you’ll actually get off your fat ass and come see the damn thing yourself.—Dan Catalano
Smog
Gravity Lounge
Friday, October 6
music Indie legend Smog (né Bill Callahan) has spent the last 16 years or so building a dedicated fanbase with his DIY brand of lo-fi folk. It’s no wonder, then, that the Austin-based singer-songwriter’s intimate gig at the Gravity drew an audience of dozens of discriminating music fans.
After a mellow opening set from local post-rock/ambient outfit Thrum, a guy who looked disconcertingly like reality-TV star Dog the Bounty Hunter took the stage and began setting up a small drum kit. This longhaired stranger turned out to be Smog’s sole accompaniment, a multi-instrumentalist introduced to the audience simply as Thor. This minimalist arrangement—Smog on guitar and vocals, Thor primarily on drums, xylophone, and melodica—would set the tone for the show.
The duo opened with a haunting rendition of “Red Apples,” from Smog’s 1997 album, Red Apple Falls. Though Smog appeared unassuming, even awkward, when he first took the stage, his signature baritone immediately filled the room.
Smog and Thor continued in the same vein throughout the night, with Callahan’s voice—as textured and worn-in as an old leather glove—serving as the centerpiece for Smog’s bare compositions of percussion and cleanly picked guitar. Thor used the instruments at his disposal to great, nontraditional effect—playing the xylophone with a bow, the cymbal with a chain, and coaxing a minor-chord ethereality from his melodica.
One of the most striking things about the performance was the distinct dichotomy between Smog’s (to be perfectly frank) lack of stage presence, and Callahan’s assuredness when it came to the music. He mumbled through his one snippet of stage banter and spent half the songs doing an awkward shuffle-toed jig, but his voice and accompaniment displayed a rare kind of naked confidence, instilling in the crowd a sense of cool energy that seemed at odds with the little man lurching around on stage.
And it was that cool energy that carried the audience through the austere, beautiful arrangements of Smog’s greatest hits, drawn largely from 1999’s Knock, Knock and his most recent album, A River Ain’t Too Much to Love. Standout tracks included the quietly building “Teenage Spaceship” and “Cold Blooded Old Times”—here revamped as a distorted, almost mournful rocker.
The show ended somewhat abruptly, and though Smog and Thor ultimately retook the stage for a measly encore of one song (a faultless rendition of “Let Me See the Colts”), it was clear that the audience wanted more. (I’m not sure what gave it away—maybe it was the cries of “Play more! A lot more!”) Still, the music they did dole out was excellent, and the brevity seemed oddly appropriate. Smog’s simple, affecting songs are, after all, more haiku than epic poem—and so, apparently, are his concerts.—Kyle Daly
The Virginia Quarterly Review
Fall 2006
words Have you heard the news? No, not the latest on the gap between George Bush and Bob Woodward’s versions of what’s happening in Iraq. No, not a new alarming statistic about the effects of global warming. Yes, that’s right: A lost poem by Robert Frost has been found!
Let’s pause for a moment so everyone can catch their breath.
Charlottesville’s own Virginia Quarterly Review snagged the publishing rights to the 1918 poem, titled “War Thoughts at Home,” and it appears in the Fall 2006 issue, along with two commentaries—one by Robert Stilling, a graduate student at UVA, and one by veteran writer and New Republic poetry editor Glyn Maxwell.
About the poem itself: It reinforces one’s idea of Frost as a master at wedding form to content. The poem’s almost playful technique is a striking contrast to its sober subject.
That said, anthology editors won’t be clamoring to squeeze it in next to “Mending Wall.”
A literary discovery is a lone wolf without some commentary. The two pieces do everything we ask: provide background information on Frost at the time he wrote the poem, and paint a picture of the social atmosphere in which it was created.
All in all, it’s the kind of event worthy of VQR’s attention, and a chance for literature lovers to ponder some good news while considering how Frost, like us, was forced to ruminate on the human propensity for war.
There are also loads of other stuff in this issue to mention. The VQR Portfolio is titled “The Holocaust: Remembrance and Forgetting,” and includes a short play by Tony Kushner, graphic fiction by Art Spiegelman, and an excerpt from Michael Chabon’s new novel (which is based on FDR’s harebrained idea to create a Jewish homeland in Alaska). In the Portfolio introduction, VQR editor Ted Genoways calls the novel “a great detective story in the style of Raymond Chandler.” It’s best to ignore that pronouncement. The excerpt is well written, but, next to Chandler, often stylistically flat.
Other highlights: American poet David Shapiro’s moving essay about how his son, suffering from depression, finds a sort of primal joy in writing poetry. And local poet Gregory Orr tries his hand at art criticism with an essay about American painter Jake Berthot. The results are excellent. Orr neatly blends literary criticism, autobiographical material, biographical material, and a poet’s way of explicating the psychological impact of turning our attention to visual art.
As for the poets who contributed actual poetry, aside from the overrated Campbell McGrath (appealing, Whitmanesque clarity, but little depth), this issue contains a good crop of poems—especially Anthony Deaton’s searing bit of Americana beginning “In the fluorescent stain of the Gas-N-Go” and Debra Nystrom’s “My Mother Wanted It All To Be Beautiful,” a lesson in the difficult art of universalizing one’s personal past.
There’s even an extra, 139-page-long short story supplement thematically linked by a clever concept—we’ll leave it to VQR lovers to make their own literary discovery about what it is.—Doug Nordfors