Talk about a rough start: we sent Ryan off on his first assignment for BYT to shoot and review Cat Power’sshow at 930 club last night (which was supposed to be grand DAM! festival finale) and well, things went a little south. Promptly this morning we get this:
Well, last night was interesting. I’ll try to sum this up quickly.
1) My press pass was through the DAM Festival.
2) The DAM Festival apparently LOST a lot of money this weekend.
3) Eric Boucher decided to cancel all Festival Passes for the Cat Power show hours before doors.
4) I was told I could still enter for free, but I could no longer bring my camera because the show was not associated with the Festival.
5) So, I met Cat Power’s tour manager - he explained Chan has a phobia of photography during shows and only her personal photographer is allowed.
6) I then met this personal photographer by chance. His name is Stefano Giovannini and his work can be seen here: stefpix.com
7) He then promised me he would send shots from last night’s show (timeframe? no idea) (we still snatched this smoking image below)
8 ) Someone stole the Jeep Cherokee parked in front of my car outside the club.
and now for the actual review:
The Greatest and The Upset
By: Andrea Nill
Monday night’s performances at the 9:30 Club just went to show that there’s more to indie band concerts than polished hipsters with pretty haircuts harmonizing their quarter-life crises.
Cat Power’s opening act, the Childballads, shouldn’t necessarily take that as a compliment. DC native, and Childballads frontman, Stewart Lupton, stole the show and left last night’s 9:30 Clubbers wondering what he was exactly trying to do with it. The act consisted of conventional, however cohesive, garage band instrumentals corrupted by Lupton’s slurred and unintelligible moaning. As painful as it was to watch Lupton’s clumsy gyrations across the stage, the spectacle both entertained and distracted audience members from Lupton’s flat and muddled vocals. At one point, a vixen in black skinny pants, presumably Lupton’s femme fatal, brought some much needed energy to the performance by retiring from her backstage dance floor (visible to privately entertained upstairs audience members) to begin vivaciously contorting her body across the stage. Lupton’s Tourette-like spasms caused him to prematurely end the last song by tangling his feet up in cords. Childballads’ grand finale was made up of a series of crashes and the squeaking of microphones.
Cat Power and the Dirty Delta Blues proved to be no typical indie act either—and in this case the unforeseen was welcomed and well-received. Cat Power (aka Chan Marshall) is known for unpredictable performances that are rumored to include crying, singing two lines, and walking off the stage. Last night, Marshall’s only ailment was a bad cough that she needlessly and vehemently apologized for. Luckily, her bruised vocal chords made her voice seem even more raw, vulnerable, and striking than it usually is. Explaining that she was “taking it easy,” Marshall happily hustled, trotted, and shimmied about the stage in bright white dancing shoes as she enchanted and serenaded sympathetic audience members. Her songs spanned from her newest album, The Greatest, to an unrecognizable cover of “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” masked and stamp-marked by Cat Power’s classic soul-singer sound. The Dirty Delta Blues, gave Cat Power’s songs a warm and full sound for her hollow voice to sing to. Somehow this discord worked, though surely even the most enamored audience member wishes Marshall will get well soon so she can belt out the melodies that fans love and wanted to hear last night.
The volatile Cat Power showed that a performance can be creative, quirky, and different without sacrificing beauty by being over-the-top. To Lupton’s credit, the Childballads’ myspace page reveals a charming sound that was absent in last night’s performance. It turns out his performance might just be the left over residue of a serious heroine habit. Nevertheless, it seems that what the two sets of performers have in common is that their shows will always be a hit or a miss—and last night we got a taste of both.
Why can’t anyone spell heroin?
A heroine habit implies he was a Buffy addict, which I could also understand although I don’t know why it would make him sing unintelligibly. I guess maybe he just got the news about how Joss Whedon got fired from the Wonder Woman movie?
October 16, 2007 at 4:19 pmyeah, i’m a horrible speller. absolutely horrible. it is particularly bad when a word isn’t spelled wrong, but used incorrectly. too bad computers don’t pick up on context.
oh well. i think i will survive. sorry it bugs you so…
October 16, 2007 at 4:50 pmthere’s also that Mitch Hedberg joke: I’m a heroine addict–I have to have sex with women who save someone’s life. Turned out to be a little too true…
Good review. And great gripes, Ryan.
October 16, 2007 at 5:37 pmI wish people would lay off the heroin references when it comes to talking about Stewart Lupton. That has become the knee-jerk put down to describe his messy, beautiful (admittedly crazy) brilliance. Look at the comments here- heroin is the common denominator, and that’s really sad and shallow.
Stewart’s performance style may not be as accessible as the one Chan is into now, but there was a time when people resorted to “heroin” to explain her more difficult live period. Ian Curtis danced like a jerky weirdo. Iggy Pop (sorry for obvious reference) did some crazy shit, on drugs or not, that people with taste and imagination knew how to parse. Stewart is off the drugs now, but people still tag him with it when they need to explain a performance they don’t get. Yeah, he hasn’t quieted down to the more comfortable middle-ground that Chan Marshall has finally grown into, but from where I was standing, people seemed pretty entertained by his “over-the-top” energy and physical jokes (dancing around with a switchblade comb).
whoa. stewart lupton is still around??? holy crap, blast from the past (and i’m shocked he isn’t dead).
he was the front man for an AMAZING dc band called jonathan fire eater (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Fire*Eater).
seriously. they were amazing. they have a few albums (small and major label), a couple of eps - i highly recommend both the self-titled and ‘wolf songs for lambs’ (which is also a brilliant name for an album…).
yeah, total heroine habit back in the day. in fact, it was so bad, his band left him and formed a little band called the walkmen.
awesome.
October 16, 2007 at 3:58 pm