On Saturday night, the duplex club in LA (the Echo and the Echoplex) had organized the Roots Roadhouse festival, which was featuring a lot of country-folk performers. With my pair of free tickets, I managed to catch three of them, I See Hawks in LA, The Chapin Sisters, and Dave Alvin & The Guilty Men.
I See Hawks in LA, a five-piece band, plays some rootsy country music with pedal steel, 2 guitars, a bass and a drum set. It’s true music country, the one we used to hear, well executed with three-part vocal harmonies at times and rhythms that made people dance solitary or even in couples right away. Their music is never too hard but they can rock on some songs and can introduce some Tex-Mex nuances with the use of an accordion. They interpret country music in a traditional way but at the same time tell stories about the present time with some politically charged lyrics about the state of the country (there is even a song about U.S. Sen. Robert Byrd). They seem to want to replace country where it belongs, among outlaws and outsiders, a somewhat utopian idea, just like their band name.
The Chapin Sisters took the stage shortly after, three rather tall pretty women in colorful dresses and very few musical instruments: they actually did the first part of their show almost a cappella at times, before being joined on stage by the members of I see Hawks in LA for the last songs. However, without much more than 2 acoustic guitars and a tambourine, the sisters produce a large sound based on vocal harmonies. They are all about harmonies and the delicate blending of their three voices, mixing pop with country and folk, and reaching high notes with ease. The result is most of the time sad and dark, often distilling a mysterious atmosphere as if Lily, Abigail and Jessica were preparing behind the scene something you don’t really want to know the dangerous nature of, like for the song ‘Digging A Hole’, or ‘Kill me Now’. Don’t be fool by the sweet and pure harmonies, the lyrics can indeed be destructive like a beautiful but poisonous flower:
‘Kill me now, oh, kill me now /You’ ve ruined my life/Don’t defend it, no, no/Just go get a knife/And please end it, woah oh’
Their perfect vocal harmonies excel especially for the song ‘Let me Go’, a dark tale sung with a central voice, flirting at times with bluesy-jazzy harmonies, and two other voices spiraling, spinning around it.
They covered Crystal Gayle’s ‘Why Have You Left The One You Left Me For, but I was expected their brilliant cover of ‘Toxic’, which they didn’t do unfortunately.
Dave Alvin & The Guilty Men were the headliners of the festival and the crowd became instantaneously less dispersed as many people were moving up to the front. Dave and his brother, whom Dave mentioned a few times during the show, formed the rock band The Blasters which played alongside punk bands like X and Black Flag. Dave Alvin’s past is really interesting and anchored in punk, since he played shortly as the lead guitarist of X, performed with the punk band the Flesh Eaters, and the punk blues band The Gun Club.
He left the Blasters in 1986 to pursue a solo career with a more pure country sound, but I would say he played two types of music Saturday night, a really mean blues-country rock by which you could guess where he was coming from, and a more acoustic and quiet music. Dressed in black with a straw cow-boy hat, he was backed up by his guilty men band consisting of pedal steel, guitar, bass, drum set and harmonica.
At times, it’s country music with a hard and rough bluesy side, and then a more quiet and rockabilly side. But I must admit this tough bluesy country is the part that got to me the most: it’s aggressive but slick, it’s intense and powerful and with these electric guitars, I heard Jimmy Hendrix, Santana and probably others. ‘Out in California’ and ‘Out of control’ were some of these powerful songs.
Dave Alvin’s confidence on stage was translated by the stories he was comfortably telling between the songs and between the sips of his beer, stories about LA and memories, sometimes bitter sweet memories when evoking the recent death of his friend and member of the Guilty Men, Chris Gaffney.
And before singing ‘4th of July’, he added with the same low voice and confidence: ‘We are about 27 days late on that one’.