Horseshoe Hootenanny: John Doe and The Sadies

Concert Review: John Doe and The Sadies
Sonic Boom and The Horseshoe Tavern, Toronto
Thursday, April 30, 2009

You know how when you read a really good book, and then see the movie and the movie didn't quite live up to your love of the book? Or when you are at a restaurant and you eat some apple pie, but its not nearly as good as your mom's apple pie? Its not a completely fair comparison - your interpretation of a novel verses a director's film interpretation, or mass produced restaurant pies verses your mom's secret recipe. But you compare them nonetheless. This is sort of how I feel about The Sadies recoded music verses seeing The Sadies live. Yeah, their albums are good, but the records don't come close to the awesomeness that is a Sadies live show. Thus, I was uber excited that I got to see The Sadies with and without John Doe twice on Thursday, April 30, in Toronto.

I darted from work in the pouring rain to get to Sonic Boom for John Doe and The Sadies in-store show that evening, promoting their new album Country Club. Though my leather shoes were soaked through to my socks, it didn't stop my toe tappin' as Doe and the boys happily played through five songs from their new album. Doe was chatty and jovial , and his voice sounded terrific. In fact, in terms of country music, Doe's voice sounds a lot better live than on the record. The Sadies were a tight quartet as usual, with brothers Dallas and Travis Good singing backup in the places where women sang backup on the album (not that the boys sounded girly at all). Dallas rocked his killer electric guitar that has his name splayed over the fretboard, while Travis and Doe played acoustic guitars. The audience was thrilled, and as I looked around I spotted a smiley and drenched Greg Keelor in the corner sporting sunglasses and a yellow rain slicker. The performers mingled after the show, but I had to bolt home to change into dry clothes and forage for food before part two.

Sonic Boom (in-store) Mini Set

1. I Still Miss Someone
2. Husbands and Wives
3. It Just Dawned on Me
4. Stop the World and Let me Off
5. Are the Good Times Really Over for Good

Buy: Country Club (2009)

Photos by Ryan O'Shaughnessy from his photo blog.

The rained stopped in time for me to head over to the Horseshoe Tavern for the 10:30 start time. Local Toronto roots band The Pining was in the middle of their set when I arrived, and the crowd was so chatty that I could barely hear the all-woman quintet. I hate that! The crowd was an odd mix of people, including many in the over 50 age category who I am assuming were there to see John Doe. I overheard one man behind me say that he took two days off of work to drive to Toronto from Rochester, NY, just to see Doe and The Sadies.

I didn't know how the main act would proceed. The Horseshoe web site listed two sets, and I was hoping one of the sets would be The Sadies doing their original tunes. My hopes came true when the foursome took the stage and blasted into an hour set of 15-18 (I lost count) tracks of kick-ass surf, gospel, alternative, and instrumental rock, leaning heavily on their 2007 release New Seasons. By the end of the first hour I already had my $17.50 ticket price worth of entertainment. And there was more to come!

The Horseshoe Tavern
Set I - The Sadies
(Very rough set list because I don't know the names of all of the songs. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know. But its hard to concentrate on the show, drink beer, and keep a detailed set list all at the same time. I clearly need more practice.)

• Lay Down Your Arms - Stories Often Told (2002)
• First Inquisition, Pt. 4 - New Seasons (2007)
• Anna Leigh - New Seasons
• Higher Power - Pure Diamond Gold (1999) (Note: every time I see The Sadies, the audience always breaks out the wacky tobaccy during this song. No wonder Dallas referred to the crowd as "Delightful Crazy Bastards." I love Canadians.)
• What's Left Behind - New Seasons
• The Trial - New Seasons
• The Story's Often Told - Stories Often Told
• The 400 - Tales of the Rat Fink (2006)
  
• Ridge Runner Reel - Tremendous Efforts (2001)
• Tiger Tiger - Stories Often Told

Higher Power.mp3
Buy: Pure Diamond Gold (1999)

The Trial.mp3
Buy: New Seasons (2007)

The 400.mp3
Buy: Tales of the Rat Fink Soundtrack (2006)
(Totally unrelated note: This is the soundtrack to the documentary on custom car legend Ed "Big Daddy" Roth, which was very coincidentally on cable (Bravo) the same night as the Horseshoe gig. The Sadies scored the film with original instrumentals and surf rock, and all of the songs on the album are named after clubs and bars where they have performed. Correct me if I am wrong, but I believe that The 400 is in Minneapolis, MN.)

Roughly 15 minutes after the first set, John Doe joined our heroes for a little hootenanny. "Warning, there will be country and western music tonight," he said. "Stage dive at your own risk." Unlike an X show from Doe's past, there was no stage diving here, but a lot of country wallowing and heartache taken mostly from the new Country Club album. Now this is what I hoped Country Club would sound like. High energy, soulful country. The Good brothers continued singing backup, but this time mixed up the instrumentation with Travis switching between fiddle and a couple of electric guitars, and Dallas swapping between two different electrics.

I was standing about six people deep from the stage, slightly to the left and closer to Travis. He had some bad-ass guitar solos. There were some guitar geeks in front of me with their mouths hitting the floor. I don't know anything about playing guitar, but Travis did some technique where he makes his electric sound a bit like pedal steel. The geeks in front of me said, "wow, that is really hard to do." Then they shook their heads and gawked in awe some more. And the Good bros got to sing lead on a few tracks that didn't make the Country Club cut. Travis sang the Jimmy Martin bluegrass standard "Free Born Man" while Dallas sang something slightly faster than the speed of sound (see track 11 on the set list). The audience was treated to a few songs from Doe's past, "The New World" from his days with X, and an amazing version of The Knitters "Call of the Wreckin' Ball." These tracks fit in perfectly with the country and/or western theme of the second set. Despite the potential for crying into one's beer due to the heartbreaking lyrics of many of the songs, it turned into a uplifting night of music from a punk legend and a fireball backing band.

Set II - John Doe & The Sadies
(mostly from Country Club except where noted)

1. I Still Miss Someone
2. It Just Dawned on Me
3. Help Me Make it Through the Night
4. Free Born Man - (Jimmy Martin Cover)
5. A Fool Such as I
6. Husbands and Wives
7. The Losing Kind - John Doe, Black Snake Moan Soundtrack (2007)
8. 'Til I Get it Right
9. Stop the World and Let Me Off
10. Take These Chains from My Heart
11. Note: I have no idea happened here. Doe said, "Dallas, can you sing us a pretty one?" Then there was two minutes and thirty seconds of country spaz-rock. At the end Doe said, "That was pretty. Pretty fucking fast!" Holy crap.
12. The Cold Hard Facts of Life
13. Night Life
14. Workin' Man's Blues (Merle Haggard Cover)
15. The New World - X, More Fun In the New World (1983)
16. Are the Good Times Really Over for Good

Encore

1. Sudbury Nickel
2. There Stands the Glass (Webb Pierce Cover)
3. Call of the Wreckin' Ball - The Knitters, Poor Little Critter on the Road (1985)

Album Review: John Doe and The Sadies, Country Club

I can’t remember exactly how I learned to love classic country music. It wasn’t from my central Wisconsin upbringing. My parent’s record collection consisted of Barbara Streisand and Johnny Mathis and that’s it. Seriously. And I cannot for the life of me remember if there was a country music radio station on air in the late 70s/early 80s in Oshkosh. If there was one, I sure wasn’t listening to it. I was in the college class of 1995, and in the early 90s on campus in the Chicago area it was grunge, Pavement, and the dregs of hair metal.

I must have picked it up some time while living in St. Louis in the late 90s, possibly during my Bob Dylan/Neil Young bender of 1999, a particularly miserable year for me. I do know that the first country CD I bought was Johnny Cash 16 Biggest Hits, followed quickly by Patsy Cline 12 Greatest Hits. And nothing says depression and despair like “Sunday Morning Coming Down” or “Walkin’ After Midnight.”

A decade later I am still collecting classic country music, still learning about its roots, and still blubbering into my beer when a deadly lyric knocks me on my ass. When I found out early this year that my favorite Canadian band, The Sadies, was teaming up with John Doe, founder and bassist for the seminar punk band X, I damn near put away the whiskey and cheered up! 2009 is turning into the year of the country covers, with Phosphorescent releasing the Willie Nelson tribute To Willie earlier this year, and Steve Earle set to release his much anticipated Townes Van Zandt tribute album on May 12.

An album of classic country from The Sadies is not entirely unexpected as they have been doing Sadies-fied versions of country tunes during their live shows for many years. Indeed, covers of Roger Miller and Bob Wills tracks made their 2004 live album, In Concert Vol.1 Likewise, John Doe has been playing with the country/folk/rockabilly band The Knitters for the last 25+ years.

The resulting album, Country Club, features Doe singing with The Sadies as the backing band, with the exception of two Sadies-penned instruments. The album launches into “Stop the World and Let Me Off,” made famous by Waylon Jennings, then covers songs from Roger Miller, Johnny Cash, Kris Kristofferson and several other greats of country music. Doe and fellow Knitters and X band member Exene Cervenka also contribute an original “It Just Dawned On Me,” which fits in very well with the other classic country themes on this record which include heartache, divorce, loneliness, adultery, and homicide. Man, isn’t country music wonderful?

Reviews of Country Club from critics much better known than I have been all over the place. Allmusic calls it a “casual, no-frills masterpiece,” and the Boston Herald rates it an “A,” while Toronto’s Now magazine calls it “average” and says, “Doe …has a voice you could charitably call serviceable,” and The Onion AV Club gives it a “C+.”

So, here’s the real deal from a non-professional critic. I’m somewhere between the Boston Herald and the AV Club. The album is good, but it is not great. To me these ridiculously talented musicians played it quite safe with their song selection and interpretation. It actually hurts me to say that I am underwhelmed by something that my favorite Canadian band is involved with, but it’s the truth. Doe’s voice, while solid, doesn’t do a lot for me when singing country. He doesn’t quite get me to sob into my Seagram's the way Hank Snow does. And would it hurt to let The Sadies’ Good brothers sing lead on a track or two?

I do love the instrumentals, which are classic Sadies pieces. Kathleen Edwards sings backup on what I think are the two best tracks, the aforementioned “It Just Dawned on Me,” and the Merle Haggard classic “Are the Good Times Really Over for Good?” It is overall a very enjoyable record, but I really wanted it to knock me into next week. Instead, it made me long for the originals.

I’m hoping that most of the people who hear this album will be hearing some, if not all, of these songs for the first time, which will hopefully cause them to look into the original artists. I really want more people my age (mid-30s) and younger to discover a love for classic country. I could use a few drinking buddies.

Sudbury Nickel.mp3
Are the Good Times Really Over for Good.mp3
Buy: Country Club (2009)

Repost: Review of I'm Not There

I have a lot of crap going on this week, including the fact that I haven't done my lousy taxes yet (due April 30 in Canada), so I don't have a ton of time to blog. Here is a review of the Bob Dylan biopic I'm Not There that I wrote after seeing it at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2007. I watched this film again last Saturday night, and I like it more every time I see it. I wonder if Bob has ever seen it?

I caught the second screening of I'm Not There, the biopic of Bob Dylan directed by Todd Haynes, at the Toronto International Film Festival on September 14, 2007. It gave me a huge headache. Not the film exactly, but from the venue. To accommodate the large audience, I'm Not There was screened in a ~700 person lecture hall at Ryerson University. I was in line to get in to the sold out show a half hour early, but apparently not early enough. I had to sit in the 4th row from the front, and by the time hour two rolled around, my back and neck were killing me and my eyes hurt from being so close. Being a lecture hall, there was no reclining seating that the theatre industry has spoiled me with for the last decade. Plus, no vending! GASP! No popcorn! And, the screening was at 12:30 pm so I came to the screening directly from work, and I didn't get lunch and was very hungry.

Crappy venue aside, the film is pretty amazing (even though I was tuning out during the last half hour). The acting is superb. Cate Blanchett is astonishing! She should be a shoo-in for Best Actress this year (Edit: she didn't win!). Christian Bale is amazing too - didn't recognize him at first - as is the 11-year-old Marcus Carl Franklin. Mr. Franklin has quite an acting career ahead of him. And, you get to see Heath Ledger (mostly) naked, so what's not to like?

Its definitely an artsy-fartsy movie, very non-linear and not for the average joe-blow American/Canadian. I tried to imagine my conservative, small-town-America father, who is a 'Nam vet and a graduate of the college class of '69, watching this movie without being completely confused. I can hear him saying, "What is this crap? I don't get it." However, Dylan fans will love it. Non-Dylan fans who appreciate film as an art form will really dig it too. But it is long. Although, in retrospect, I am wondering if my perception of its length was due to my bad seat. I mean, I sat through three hours of Lord of the friggin Rings with no complaints.

The Characters (in rough order of appearance in the film, although the characters do jump around in time and some characters overlap):

1) Marcus Carl Franklin – "Woody Guthrie" – 1959, 11 year old boy, film shot in color. Metaphor for Dylan's early life on how he started to learn how the world really worked, and how he started to form ideas and transfer these thoughts to song. Woody, originally from the fictional town of Riddle, Missouri, is hopping trains with hobos and traveling around the country. Very moving scene where he visits the real ailing Woody Guthrie in the hospital and strums guitar for him.

2) Ben Wishaw – "Arthur" – 19 year old Dylan, early 1960s, shot in black and white. Smallest role. Dylan as a young, rebellious, somewhat naive poet. Its only him and some cigarettes on the screen. Like he is being interviewed or interrogated. Sort of narrates the film, but not really.

3) Heath Ledger – "Robbie Clark" – Dylan from circa 1964 to 1977, mostly focusing on his personal life and marriage to "Claire" (played by Charlotte Gainsborough), a very loose interpretation of Sara Lowlands and probably an amalgamation of other women in Dylan's life. Shot in grainy color to reflect the time period. "Robbie Clark" is a famous actor and actually plays "Jack Rollins" (Christian Bale's Dylan) in one of his film roles. Actor as a metaphor for the perils of fame. Robbie is constantly away from his family working (touring?) on film productions, and has many extra-marital flings while on the "road." Robbie and Claire's rocky relationship and marital problems are mirrored by the Vietnam war.

4) Christian Bale – "Jack Rollins" – Dylan from 1961-62 and jumps to his conversion to Christianity (~1974). 60s "footage" is in black and white, 70s "footage" is in grainy color like above, while the present day is in color. Told from the perspective of a present day documentary reflected through the eyes of people who knew him "back then." Notably, Julianne Moore plays the character "Alice Fabian" who is a present day Joan Baez. 1970s evangelist Rollins is awesome.

5) Cate Blanchett – "Jude Quin" – when Dylan goes electric in 1965-66. Black and white. Best impression of Dylan as he is classically known (big hair, sunglasses, wears all black). How he deals with the backlash of going electric at the "New England Folk Festival." Follows his drug use and his fighting with the press, especially the BBC. Hysterical scene of implied drug use with the Beatles. Blanchett just nails his mannerisms and quirkiness. Michelle Williams plays the fashionable blond Coco Rivington, who is a metaphor for Edie Sedgwick . Another hysterical scene with drugged-up Dylan and Alan Ginsberg (played by David Cross), dancing around a ten foot crucifix, and Dylan yells at the stone Jesus, "Play your old stuff!" The segment ends with Dylan's infamous motorcycle crash.

6) Richard Gere – "William 'Billy' McMaster" – grizzled, late in life, maybe takes place back in the late 50s? Color. Reclusive "Billy the Kid," who takes on "Commissioner Garrett" who wants to plow over his town of Riddle, Missouri, to build a superhighway. He meets young "Woody Guthrie" (Franklin) who begs him to take on Garrett. Garrett is also a metaphor for all of the reporters who have hounded Dylan for most of his life. Billy argues with Garrett, and ultimately loses, but he realizes that there are still things worth fighting for. He hops a train, finds his guitar, and keeps on keepin' on. The movie comes full circle.

The soundtrack looks incredible, and will be released in North America on October 30. The soundtrack consists of most of my favorite rock and Americana bands, indie and otherwise (Eddie Vedder, Iron and Wine, Jeff Tweedy, Willie Nelson, The Hold Steady, among others). Sonic Youth does a bitchin' cover of "I'm Not There" in the ending credits. But, fear not Dylan fans, most of Dylan's originals are intact in the film. I'm Not There opens in New York and Los Angeles on November 21, and in Toronto on November 28. I can't wait to see this film again. Here's to hoping that my initial reaction was entirely due to my bad seat. (Edit: It was!)

Tunes from the soundtrack that appear in the film:

Jim James & Calexico - Goin' to Acapulco.mp3
Fantastic scene in the Richard Gere/Billy segment where singer Jim James of My Morning Jacket sings this song and leads a band (eclectic indie rockers Calexico) during a daunting funeral march.

Richie Havens - Tombstone Blues.mp3
In what what can only be described as casting brilliance, Havens appears in the film playing this song along with young Woody (Franklin).

Stephen Malkmus & The Million Dollar Bashers - Ballad of a Thin Man.mp3
Cate Blanchett/Jude lip syncs to Malkmus for all of his (her?) singing scenes. Awesome. The Million Dollar Bashers serve as a "house band" for the soundtrack. They are a super group consisting of guitarist Lee Ranaldo and drummer Steve Shelly of Sonic Youth, guitarist Nels Kline of Wilco, guitarist Tom Verlaine, keyboardist John Medeski, and bassist Tony Garnier (Bob Dylan's current bassist).

John Doe - Pressing On.mp3
Christian Bale/Jack lip syncs to Doe for his "born again" scene. Also Awesome.

Buy: I'm Not There Soundtrack CD (2007), I'm Not There DVD (2008)