Motet

We had a great chat with Dave Watts a couple of weeks ago, in preparation for what might be their Motet's most demanding and ambitious trib show ever - Earth Wind and Fire. Three nights - Aggie, Ogden and landing at the Fox for Halloween. Piece ran in the Weekly yesterday (Thurs).

Faced with an indifferently uncooperative Fox publicist (did I say something about the BT/Fox merger being basically invisible??) and an editor busy with his own job, I found myself suddenly without a GL spot for Sunday's Fox gig.

Called the nice girl from the Aggie (Cornelia - my new bff) and she slapped me on their list + 1 for tonight; no begging/pleading/'don't you guys have a laminate?' bullshit. To and from Ft Collins will be a bit of a pain, but this show I want to see,

Which...gave me an idea. We'll be following up on this soon.

I'm still a little perplexed how I got to the place where I have to compete for one night's use of a communal BW/Fox laminate, for a show I actually covered (led the section), in a paper I've written for for 16 years, about a band I've covered for a decade....with people who have never covered a Fox Show, ever, once. I swear I'm doing something wrong.

RIP T

We just happened across the terrible news yesterday that keyboardist T Lavitz died last Thursday Oct 7 unexpectedly, in his sleep.



T was a breathtaking player, one of the few keyboardists bred from the soils of seventies fusion who could bind sheer firepower and uncommon warmth in the same bar. In the early Jazz Is Dead incarnations, T always struck me as the band's connective tissue, able to reach into the elusive soul of the original material and give it substance and challenge for the jazz-fusion players around him. Multi-lingual.

He always struck me as a friendly guy, a bit of a nerd and a reluctant virtuoso if there ever was one. One of the few guys at that level I never cringed over interviewing.

We were fortunate enough to interview him at least twice, and we'll include a paragraph from a 2000 piece we did on The Dixie Dregs, quoting T.

“But, you know what? Ever since I joined this band, when I was 22 years old, I have never, ever gotten tired of playing this music. There’s just something about Steve’s writing that makes this material so challenging and so much fun to play. It’s just incredibly orchestrated – I find that after a few days of playing a set, I know exactly how many seconds I have to change the settings on my keyboard for the next tune, how many seconds I have to towel off, scratch my nose, everything. Thing about this stuff, if you miss a bar someplace, you have to sit out a long time before you can jump in again, it all goes by so fast.. It’s fun, and it’s a workout.”

RIP man. Jeez, way too f-ing soon...

The Kids are OK

In reminiscing about their Hamburg days, Paul McCartney once recalled to an interviewer that the Beatles used to hear shouts of "macht shau! macht shau!" ("give us a show!") from the drunken and cynical nightclubbers they played three two hour sets a night back to in the day, a call to do a little more than stand like rail-thin scousers and strum their Rickenbackers, and even if their career led them to places where the talent to make the same 60 songs entertaining onstage was ultimately shelved in favor of studio extravagance, they never really lost that sense of projecting charisma.

We're not ashamed to to admit that, as smitten as we've become with their videos recently, we had some reservations about what kind of a show OK Go was going to deliver at the Fox the other night. If video killed the radio star, broadband dances on his grave.

So, we were pleasantly surprised when the Chicago-founded quartet's first Fox appearence delivered onstage, and with barely a passing reference to their storied video artistry, a fun, solid and energetic set. Keenly tapping references from skinny-tie post-wave pop, techno-dance Prince channeling and indie-rock agita, OK Go bears its influences unapologetically twelve years down the road, having survived their early years dismissed by tastemakers like Pitchfork as lame Weezer-wannabes and maturing into sly popmeisters, balancing craft with spontenaiety, and showman's cheese with craftsman's beef.

We are more partial to thir later material - "This Too Shall Pass" and "White Knuckles" - but even their earlier material like "Invincible", "WTF" and "Here It Goes Again" (the latter sounding like an early Ocasek-Orr thing) came across with stout and confident resolve, with singer Damian Kulash up-front striking his best Doug Feiger poses, belting out post-slacker anthems of ennui and puny redemptions as if, holy smokes, he really means it. And yeah, they had a video feed running behind them, but no dogs and no Rubes and no treadmills, and after it was all said done, they could have delivered just as well without it. The confetti cannons and odd interludes (they did one piece, I didn't know it, straight a cappela, accompanied only by hand bells; a neat and deeply musical trick and an endearingly touching surprise) were unforced and well-timed.

For a band relatively unknown to the routinely insular Fox audience (the show didn't look sold out to me), they turned thier crowd into instant believers, and us too. My wife asked me what "indie rock" really meant as we were walking back to the car, and in the context of OK Go, I was more or less at a loss. Not on a major label? Not beholden to mainstream tastes? Who knows, because if these guys are the reigning poster children of indie-rock, they sure don't seem reluctant to become whatever indie is supposed to be a reaction to. They appear to be just hitting their stride and ready for their closeup, an ironic thing in a broadband world where careers are made and lost at download speeds.

Someone obviously keeep reminding them that just showing up isn't the point. It's "macht shau", isn't it?

Leon and Elton

It was a little surprising hearing the lead track to Elton John and Leon Russell's new record, The Union on KBCO the other day. Just heard a little but may download the thing.

Anything to put a little of the soul back in Reg's singing, and anything that foists the Space Cowboy into the spotlight again, has got to be a good thing...the added benefit of T-Bone Burnett behind the dial probably helps. Neil Young, Brian Wilson and Booker T guest on it - sounds crowded, but like I said, it's always nice to hear from Leon.

And, I guess, Elton....

Game jones

Been drifting into Diablo 3 news and vids of late. Also, although I hadn't been paying much attention, there's a new Fallout game coming, due on shelves in the US Oct 19th. May just jump on that.