Sean Rowe at Caffe Lena, 2/23/13

We go up the creaky stairs, same as I remember from 30+ years ago, when Lena herself still ruled the roost, and I am glad at that point I got the tickets in advance, as there is an unhappy horde outside who are being told the show is sold out.  As it is, seating is extremely tight in there for the more popular performances…the second floor space sits about 80 (I’m guessing) at tables of 4, with not much wiggle room for the wait staff to get through.  But as a result, there are no bad seats, and on the slightly elevated stage, Sean Rowe did not have a problem making his presence felt.

I first saw him in the back near the kitchen and thought he was part of the Caffe’s regular attendees or staff himself, until I recognized him as the main attraction.  Very unassuming and dressed in lumberjack chic, there was no sense of ego or star power having changed his rootsy image.  Within the next hour or two, I would come to think of him as more a Force of Nature than a “mere” musician, but as such, he was still dishevelled in the perfect manner.  His loose shoulder-length hair a bit stringy and unkempt, full black beard, workingman arms and huge hands were what I noticed as a first-time audience.  My wife, and most other nearby women, was and were enchanted from the get-go, as was most of the devoted crowd.  And so it began…

What struck me immediately was how different his singing voice was from his speaking tone.  The latter, ordinary and matter-of-fact, kind of deadpan if anything–
gave no indication that he was a master performer.  He intro’d something to the effect that he had just come from a music festival in Toronto and was not sure he was going to get there on time, but was glad he’d made it, albeit admitting he was a bit road-weary.  “It feels like coming home, to be here,” he said. 

His guitar looked road weary too, and had the coolest collection of colored duct tape
strips adorning it in some kind of pattern that looked like semaphor signals somehow.  Playing just solo and acoustic it was soon apparent that he was not just a unique songwriter and vocalist, but a guitarist I would describe as “ferocious.”  He strummed the crap out of that thing for emphasis, he coddled and cajoled it for all it was worth, and at the end he delivered perhaps the most intense acoustic “sheets of sound” solo I have ever heard in my life… but we’ll get to that.

First off, he started slow, with the line “There was a time…when I could not cry…” which turned out to be a tune from his new album, called “Flying.”   The poetry of that tune immediately let me know this guy was a primordial poet, and later I would liken his imagery to Lightnin’ Hopkins or the old blues cats of the past, but it took a while to sink in.  HIs voice was nasally and strident, is how I would describe it, but could range from gruff and guttural to plaintive and pleading.  If you’ve heard it, you know it is like no one else’s you’ve ever heard, which is the ultimate compliment in my book.

The second tune was (I later found out) called “Joe’s Cult” which most of the crowd except Melinda and I seemed to know already.  The initial thick- plunked guitar lines were startling staccato like a flamenco master might play, and the words were a tale of conspiracy and political paranoia– “O friends, I’m gonna be honest with you now, I am weary of our noble mission/ There are a few of us who feel/ we’ve been led to an empty house/ There are some of us who know the roof is leaking…”  That was a staggering tune to listen to, even the first time.  It gave me chills, and I began to know how good this concert would be.

Next up was a touching testimonial to fatherhood– “My Little Man.”  He noted in his preamble that he felt badly about not being a full-time dad because of his chosen career and all the traveling it entailed.  Consequently, the poignant nature of his brief visits home to see his constantly changing 18-month old son, gave birth to a song almost painful in its beauty.  It spoke of distance and transience and longing for more time with his offspring, and contained the enigma of a line:  Someday you will know that you are a part of me… as if that was not the case in the present tense.  It made me glad I had seen my kids every day as they grew up.

Then came the first of several amazing covers he played– stuff for musical aficianados — a tune made recognizable by Eric Clapton when he was with CREAM–
but written and first growled by ancient blues master Howlin’ Wolf– “SPOONFUL”
The magic of Sean Rowe’s version of it was in the intensity of delivery– he snapped the strings so hard at every line break that I thought they would pop, and he spit the words so forcefully you understood that this incredible song was about Addiction in all its forms– equating intense Love with Heroin, Coffee, Tea, Sugar, Booze and every other substance that can drive a man (or woman) mad.  I loved that tune so much I had to restrain myself from giving a one-man standing ovation at the end.

He sang a tune called Chocolate Cake after that which seemed related in theme to the above.  Then came the start-up tune from the new album “The Salesman and the Shark” which is entitled “Bring Back the Night.”  I’ve got to say the live version enchanted me, with his harmonica playing adding bite to it, but the recorded song– which my wife loves– seems dreary and dismal to me.  That’s the only negative phrase I will utter in this piece.

After that, he sang a song he claimed to have “just written” in London, called “The Razor of Love”– from which I gleaned these lines:  “Your skin is a call/ to the Hall of the Divine/ your Lolita smile, and your chainsaw lips…”  Wow, loved that too.  He had given a prelude to that one I didn’t understand because I was too old to catch the television reference to The Greatest American Hero– a show about a superhero who inherited a costume that gave him incredible powers that he didn’t really know how to use, as it had come with NO INSTRUCTION MANUAL, like life.  Hmmm, yes.

Then it was another song that could be construed as either written to his son or to an abandoned lover, or to anyone craving  artistic legacy — “To Leave Something Behind.”   He mentioned it would be released as a 7″ vinyl– the equivalent of a singe “45” in the old days, I guess.  He sang:  “When my son is a man, he will know what I meant/ I’m just trying/to leave some-thing behind.”

One of the highlights for me came as a tribute to the guy whose label he had joined– Tom Waits– a recording artist I have both loved and occasionally loathed since the late 70’s.  I say that because there are phenomenal songs mixed in with grim and almost unlistenable songs on his many albums– the great ones are great and you have to skip a few others.  But the humor and keen study of human nature is consistent in Waits’ work– this one was a hoot called “Chocolate Jesus.”  The people we were sitting with were unfamiliar with Tom Waits’ style and songs so I gave them a list of what I thought were his finest pieces:  Step Right Up, Romeo is Bleeding,
Whistlin’ Past The Graveyard, Looking for the Heart of Saturday Night, Big Joe and the Phantom 309, Heart Attack & Vine, Swordfish Trombones, etc. etc.  (In return they gave me a list of Felice Brothers tunes which was a nice reciprocation of their passison for that semi-local group from downstate, thanks!)

I will not attempt to go sequentially through his second set, but just hit the highlights from my badly scribbled notes.   I absolutely LOVED the selection of covers he did, though of course he played them in his own inimitable fashion.  The most surprising of the bunch was a number by The Violent Femmes:  “Gone Daddy Gone” done in a much grufffer voice than the fey orignal, and without the toy xylophone of course, but just amazing.   He did an R.L. Burnside blues dubbed “Goin’ Down South” like he was Tommy in O Brother Where Art Thou?  He did an obligatory nod to Bob Dylan (also a Caffe Lena alumnus, as is commonly known around here):  “Girl From the North Country.”  And toward the end he commandeered a version of Leonard Cohen”s “Bird On A Wire” and made it his own– putting himself in some revered company with all of the above.  His most stunning original, to me, in the second set, was a tune I beleive to be from his first album, called “Black Diamond.”  It features the ominous line:  “She was a River, I was just a Man…” and had a foreboding subterranean tone to it that was uncanny in its spell.  There were lines I was jotting down like I was recroding a fever dream of my own:  “I gotta take darkness out for a ride…”   “You don’t need to cut your life on those razor blades…”  “…crucify your mind…”  Some of the lines and delivery was so dark and gruesome but there was a spirit and spark of life to it all that was somehow exhilarating after all.

The climax of the concert came, and he bluntly hinted beforehand that there would be no encore, “Because I can’t play anything better than this.”  Since he had already played a hell of a lot, I thought that was an astounding statement, but he meant it. He finished with an extended one-man jam on the Richard Thompson tune “1952 Vincent Black Lightning.”  It was dazzling, hypnotic, catastrophic, epic.  And I say that though I was sober as can be, under no influence other than Lena’s caffeine and Her awesome snacks.  Sean Rowe played that last song with concentrated ferocity, deftness and power that I wasn’t expecting in a coffeehouse setting.  He literally rocked in a rhythmic figure eight in one place through the entire song, and his manic head-bobbing reminded me of Frank Zappa at the War Memorial in Syracuse, in the mid-seventies, that kind of intense. 

At one point, Sean’s hands began disappearing in a blur of notes  that I thought was , analogous to Coltrane’s “sheets of sound” on tenor sax, circa 1964.  It seemed like 2 or 3 guitarists were present.  We were stunned and satiated, but still wanted more.  We stood up, applauding, and he bowed and stood down, and that was it.  Amazing.

Epilogue:

We bought his album and CD and a tee-shirt with a wolf’s head on top of a man, like newly converted fans are prone to do.  We shook his hand and congratulated him on his performance and he seemed mildly grateful but either standoffish or detached in a way, unimpressed by his own prowess.  Perhaps he was just recovering from the exertion of his performance, I figured.  But perhaps he was also just a bit dazed by success starting to stare him in the face, the bright lights soon to come.

He had announced during his concert that he would be appearing– only a few days later!– on the Jimmy Kimmel show as the featured performer, with his back-up band the Saratoga-based group Railbird.   I stayed up late that Monday night afterwards to watch a show I’d never cared to see before, and it was worth it to see him play his current trending song “Downwind”– which by the way he had not played at Lena’s.

His guitar with the colored strips of tape was the same, and so was his voice and beard, but his hair was brushed back and better groomed for TV, and his clothing more suited for L.A. prime time.  The heavy guitar work was handled, on that occasion, by Chris Carey from Railbird, and Saratoga native Sarah Pedinotti sang backup harmonies/played keyboards, and their local band looked to be having a great time on the national stage. 

My wife and I were so pumped up after the show it was hard to find anything else downtown that could compare in the aftermath.  We went home with a six-pack of Stella Artois and listened incessantly to the new album (vinyl version and CD both included) and had ourselves a ferociously good late night romantic time on Sean’s behalf.  It was the best belated Valentine’s Day make-up gift I’d given her in years– the concert, I mean.

  Since then I have concluded that he was much better in person than the album conveys, though the recorded version of “Downwind”  and a tune called “Horses” came closest to telling what he sounded like that night.  I’ve also re-discovered his duo work as part of “Mudfunk” and the version of “Poppa Was A Rolling Stone” with that percussionist percolating at warp speed behind his guitar was an indicator of how great he would become on his own.  Amazing stuff, and I encourage you all to see him locally as much as you can before he becomes bigger than Tom Waits ever was himself. 

Take care and be well,
Wayne Perras
WaynesWord2, for www.saratoga.com