If you like your music in safe, self-contained bubbles, untainted by
worldly turmoil, David Baerwald's sophomore solo disk, Triage,
is not
for you. Veering off from the California-smooth, almost Eagle-ish
techniques of his last album, Bedtime Stories, Baerwald's new
release,
takes an unblinking look, with biting humor and searing anger, at What
We Have Become. The stark, kinetic production, political focus and
no-punches-pulled attitude of Triage, especially of the earlier
songs,
following an effort still pulsing with its own elevated level of
social and political devotions, is a surprise but not a shock.
"There's so much dancing around issues," said Baerwald in Bearsville
last Sunday night, "that, ultimately, we become very good
dancers...and very good liars."
Looking as thin and intense as actor James Woods, Baerwald led off the
'In Their Own Words' singer-songwriter program at Bearsville Theater
with a mildly poisonous lullaby from the new record called "A Bitter
Tree." The format then shifted us to an introductory song from
Kansas-born Bar/None recording artist, Freedy Johnston, whose 1992
album Can You Fly was notably successful on several fronts and
on to
Lisa Germano. Best-known for her fiddle and mandolin work behind John
Mellencamp, Lisa's second solo effort Happiness is due in June.
Johnny Clegg, of Johannesburg, stateside promoting his fourth album
with Savuka, Heat, Dust & Dreams anchored the team.
The evening's host and moderator, Randy Milroy of WDST, then circled
back, re-engaging each artist to prompt conversation and trigger the
night's grabbag repertoire with his own notions of interest. The
blend of qualities each performer, all solid and versatile musicians
primed for the challenge, brought to the round table made the very
idea of the event delicious and exciting. With room for spontaneity,
lots of talk and humor, the progression evolved as vastly entertaining
in a form far from the usual fare of musical sets and recitals. Off
of the pop pedestal, it's a humanly rewarding experience to discover
our artists' other dimensions up close and loose- not as idols trapped
in caged arrangements and audience-identified "hits" but fully alive
as bright and interesting people.
The soft and mesmerizing voice of Lisa Germano, developed in a little
Indiana town near Notre Dame, delivers her unobtrusively intelligent
messages with coy dark humor and firm bite. She's an artist not
possessed of "great pipes" but her music doesn't require it. Germano
draws you into an intimate clutch which whispers sloping secrets to
your inner ear. At the end of the song, you step away utterly
charmed.
"I was putting a demo together for myself to see what I can do
that
isn't with someone else," Germano said of the tapes which became her
first release when she started writing her own songs and went solo
about 3 years ago with
On the Way Down From Moon Palace. "Because
after 2 tours with John (Mellencamp) and a tour with Simple Mind, I
still didn't have a job. So, you might as well find out what you can
do on your own. If it's bad then you find out and if it's not then
you move on.
"I've always written little ditties but I've never finished anything,
I think because when you're finished- you're making a statement- it's
done. That's why I write a lot about being a victim of yourself.
People keep themselves at a certain level because of their fears.
They get angry about it or they hold it in or they get very upset and
I think they get sick. I was kind of sick until I started to get it
out and just go 'Hey, you know, if people don't like you- that's
alright. If you're going to be a victim of yourself, you're the one
that suffers. I write about a lot of that stuff."
If there was a disappointment in the night, it was that Germano never
got around to her fiddle. Johnston, who spent 2 years producing his
third album, enlisted the embellishment of particular musicians for
selected spots, including Marshall Crenshaw- who left the audience on
request to supply lead guitar on one of Freedy's numbers.
Clegg, a White South African who grew up with a fondness for Zulu
tribal music (and even speaks a Zulu dialect), produces simple,
grasping melodies and lyrical tones which startlingly defy the
Apartheid cultural divisions of his homeland. Capitol Records,
Clegg's label, describes his output as a "Zulu-English-Celtic-Rock
mixture." Okay. But, it's rhythmically and joyfully enveloping
stuff, whatever you call it and Clegg's persona, upon scrutiny, is so
free of pervading American tensions that it forces you to recognize
their existence. It's not an accent but a vibe that announces the
artist's remove from that invisible national wiring- something you
only notice in it's absence.
Throwing such a diverse group of musical strangers together into a
team is a rotisserie
(spelling? Mic, how do rotisserie baseball buffs
spell their thing?)
sport that chances spectacular miscalculation.
According to Kathy Williams, a promoter for Capitol Records in Los
Angeles, a mixture of 2 "political-type" artists (Baerwald & Clegg)
with 2 not-so political figured in the formula.
The tour started Thursday in Virginia. By it's 4th date, in
Bearsville, a bond was already forming which spawned considerable
cross-humor and musical interplay as Baerwald picked up a bass for a
Johnston tune, Lisa joined the chorus on a Clegg song and so on. When
Baerwald rebelled a bit against the host's "boxing" of selections, the
others, in the spirit of keeping their options loose in an organic,
breathing showcase designed to change each night in response to
mediator and locale, gently in turn followed suit. Offstage, their
individual praise for the others was unforced. But, of course, the
tour is still in honeymoon stages.
After the show, Milroy felt warmed up. Rifling through his notes, he
said "Now I'm ready to do it again- because I know them better. But,
of course, it's a different host in each city."
- Gary Alexander -30-
[Gary, the following appeared after your name.
I don't know if these are notes to be discarded or are meant to be
part of the article.]
Baerwald's talents impressed most deeply in a genuinely impressive
group. The stained-with-world-involvement line-up of his
Triage album
[which sports the announcement: "This record is dedicated to dean
acheson, paul nitze, john j. mccloy, john foster dulles, allen dulles,
henry kissinger, james baker III, and george bush in the sincere hope
that there is a God and that He is vengeful beyond all comprehension"
features an ruder, rawer approach than we've heard from him before.
Also more musically indulgent. Baerwald sings less here, a
disappointment only because of his already noted capabilities. The
studied deliveries are replaced by a poetry of consciousness we have
seen from other non-rap artists recently (such as Jeff Wilkerson),
sounding sometimes like
beatniks hallucinated into the 90's and bending a bit perhaps to pop musical trend without cowtowing it. Baerwald's poetry, always crisp, b
On "They Got No Shotgun Hydrahead Octopus Blues- which would have been
Danny Casolaro's favorite tune- a jagged, harder-edged rock emerges.
"I Am Nobody" a talkin' blues-rock has Baerwald sounding sometimes
like John Hammond singing Tom Brokaw's script or vamps from the place
Mick Jagger should have gone to-
The second side eases into a gentler sound but the stark realities do
not fade until damnation is poisoned by rainbows, lightening toward
hope at the end, toward the redeeming values of love
Words Ring True: "In Their Own Words" Series Again Lights Up
Bearsville Theater