The Band of Heathens

Matt the Electrician opened for The Band of Heathens.

Suna won tickets to go see The Band of Heathens today. She had to brave downtown Austin twice: first she had to go pick up the tickets from KUT, and then she had to drive us down there for the show.

She drove because I hate driving downtown. So she picked me up from work, and we headed straight to the concert at Antone’s. Traffic was incredibly light considering we were in the middle of SXSW, and we got there in only a half hour. That left us an hour to kill before they even opened the doors.

I found the teller machine and then we walked Antone’s. We stayed outside looking at the skyline, looking at the front door, looking at the skyline, and listening to some kind of a punk band at The Lucky Lounge next door. Finally they opened the doors and let us in.

This guy did a really good job filling in on lead guitar for Matt the Electrician.

I was completely unprepared. I had wanted to get there early so that we could get good seats, but when we got and we found there is no seating at Antone’s. It is a big stage with a big open floor and several bars. They have room for the merchandise set up and their little bitty record store. But there was only standing room. When they say it’s SRO at Antone’s, they aren’t kidding.

The new album is well worth the money. Buy it from the band.

Suna and I each pick up identical heathens T-shirts. Well, not identical. They are at our respective sizes. And we got the new album. It was a CD release party after all. What about the vinyl edition because it had for bonus tracks and came with a CD anyway.

We met some nice people and talked with them and save each other’s places sitting on the stage so that we could be that close to bands when they started. One of the young girls that we were talking to was there waiting on her father who apparently had taken her to see the band of heathens when she was still wager young to be in the clubs. Boy that something I know something about, having grown up in bars—but those usually had chairs and tables.

Finally Matt the Electrician started his set. If you know Matt, I don’t need to say anything. If you don’t know him, saying anything about him won’t do the job. He’s a really good pop singer who plays a ratty old banjo and tells great stories between the songs. You can listen to one of his songs here.

This guy (I really should learn their names) acted like the leader. At least, he had no problems telling the keyboard player to play in a lower register.

Matt ended his set with a cover of Led Zeppelin’s “Good Times, Bad Times,” taking his guitarist completely by surprise. The guy (whose name I didn’t catch, but Suna says he plays for Slaid Cleves) took it in stride. He seemed fairly nonplused and even managed a good solo. I was impressed with Matt’s ability to cover this song. He did better than Plant, but so would a cat undergoing castration without anesthetics.

The girl’s father showed up shortly before The Heathens took the stage, sometime during The Electrician’s set. And when they did, OMG…

We owned both of their previous studio CDs, so I was somewhat familiar with the music, but I wasn’t really prepared. The Heathens are definitely a live band. The albums, although very good and worth listening to on their own, don’t do them justice. I’m going to have to buy a couple of their live CDs and see if those catch the heart and spirit of the performance.

Here is a real professional, untouched by any melodrama unfolding on stage around him.

Let me tell you, brother. The Heathens rock. They rock. Even though they’re singer songwriters, The Heathens is an electric band, and they rock.

The Heathens includes three lead vocalists, each of whom can stand on his own. The apparent leader plays an adequate guitar. He learns his parts and place them well, but his real job is to be a singer. And he sings very well indeed. The other main guitarist seems like an old-timey blues stringer. He can play a mean guitar, a slide guitar, a mandolin like the one we bought for Tubaboy, and just about anything else he wants I bet. The last vocalist (of whom I was unable to get a good picture) sounds a lot like Kenny Loggins in the early Loggins and Messina days. He’s also the best guitarist of three. He smokes, and he’s a pretty damn good keyboard player, too.

The bassist¹ and the other (my favorite) singer

I didn’t get the bass player’s name, but I did get an acceptable picture of him. The sad thing was that they didn’t run him through the house mains. He was competing with the band was just his unmiked, mid-sized Ampeg rig. They didn’t even run him through the subs hidden under the stage. So sad. But then mostly what he played was quarter notes on the tonic. I think this was to satisfy some perverse tendency of the guitarists because when he went for it, he let loose with some interesting chops that I could barely hear. Strangely enough, he is very present on the studio CDs.

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1 Note the piece of foam near the tailpiece. It’s there to keep the strings from ringing. All Fender basses used to come with a chrome tailpiece cover that had a damper built in. Why “used to?” Well, you can still get it if you order it, but most bass players take it off, anyway. The tailpiece and pickup covers on my ’72 Jazz lasted about five minutes. That’s how long it took me to find a screwdriver once I got my favorite bass home.

Bombella BB00H6

The strings stay perfectly straight because the tuning pegs have been repositioned.

Photo by Suna

When I have taken Beccano to his guitar lesson the over the last month, I have studiously avoided eye contact with a new bass at the music store. All that ended today when Suna accompanied us to the store. “Look at this pretty bass, Lee. You should play it,” she encouraged.

So I did. That was it.

The bass is hand crafted in Mexico City by an acquaintance of the music store owner. Some of the other customers have also met the luthier, Bombella, is also reputed to be an excellent bass player and a very nice guy. He brought his first lot of basses to the US to sell, and Danny Rae got one because of their friendship.

The woodwooking originally attracted me to this beautiful instrument.

Photo by Suna

Bombella carved the instrument from a single piece of maple and inlaid two pieces of walnut on the body for dramatic effect. The fretboard is rosewood with what appear to be stainless steel frets. The instrument has incredible sustain in spite of a lightweight bridge—probably because the tuning pegs are offset so that the strings align perfectly from bridge to peg with no deflection.

The electronics are all active—the first time I have used this type. But after getting used to them, it will be hard to play my old ’72 Jazz bass again. And it did take a while to get used to them because there are no booklets to explain them. (This is, after all, a handmade bass, not a mass produced commodity.) Here is what I figured out:

• The tone controls are stacked on the left (looking down as you play). The bass control is at the bottom, and the treble is on top. Both lock into a flat position in the center and can either attenuate or boost the frequency range they control.
• The center knob controls the balance between the bridge and neck pickups. It also locks into the center or balanced position.
• The right stack controls the pickup volume. The lower knob controls the bridge neck and the upper one, the bridge.

Because of the active electronics, the string alignment, and the single-piece construction, the instrument has an extremely wide frequency response. Harmonics and slaps balance perfectly when playing through a Fender 250 2-10 combo using minimal compression. It delivers a wide range of sounds with the same attack, depending on where you attack the string. Varying the attack only increases the variety of sounds you can achieve.

World Premier

He looks crazy in the picture, but he seems like a very pleasant, funny man.

Photo Source: Center for the Promotion of Contemporary Composers

Instrumentals don’t have lyrics.

—Me, just now

Music today centered on church. The choir performed three songs that we hardly rehearsed for the prelude. It’s really difficult to read the music and the lyrics at the same time. I much prefer performing when I have at least one of those fiendish thingies memorized.

Worse, I was almost on my own as the tenor section. The Percussive Punctuater was away at a men’s retreat. Usually, all I have to do is hit the notes and make the appropriate vowel sounds. Booming Baritone was assigned to sing bass. (He switch hits between tenor, baritone, and bass. Amazing.)

Luckily, one of the altos volunteered to help out. Otherwise, things would have drawn serious vacuum. But between us, we got the tenor part to sound something remotely like what was written.

A local composer, P. Kellach Waddle, handled the offertory music. He performed one of his own compositions—The Morning Dispair: Prelude in F Major for Solo Bass, a modern double-bass solo. It was awesome. He played some wonderful harmonics and toyed with pitch. With modern classical music, you never know if the tuning issues are intentional or not. So I always assume they are for effect.

For the postlude, he conducted a trio:

• Our own lovely choir director on piano
• Michael Dzbenski, tenor
• Josh Borski, oboe

They performed a world premier of Hopes: Mini-cantata from the Requiem Mass, a work in four movements. It is based on text from Mozart’s Requiem Mass in D minor. The total postlude was slightly under 10 minutes. The longest of the four movements was just over four minutes. What I am trying to convey here is that it was very accessible. It focused on the optimistic parts of the Requiem, which may have also limited its duration. But that made it perfect for a postlude. Send the people away feeling good and wanting more.