There is irony in a band named Spooky Folk playing in broad daylight. They played their lunchtime show on the main-er main stage, a vastly different presentation from the only other time I heard them, which was in a friend’s cramped living room. Spooky Folk features the ubiquitous Petra Kelley on violin, one of the more modest virtuoso musicians in DFW, a warmhearted violinist who shares her talents with several groups. The other thing I surmised is that lead vocalist Kaleo has some pipes, his aerial vocals benefiting from the main stage’s boosted sound power.
The less main, main stage featured a string of performers whose work skirts the boundaries dividing music from performance art. North Texas’s Giggle Party, who took their talents to San Francisco, were among the more ridiculous things I have seen in my life. The comedy/music act, in their monochrome pastel t-shirts with matching war paint, looked like a demented platoon of Care Bears or the Wiggles on a five day bender of malt liquor and Skittles. Giggle Party didn’t seem to mind that it was midday, that the balloons attached to the cymbals might be musically inhibitive or that the crowd was small. They were charmingly oblivious to everything, throwing giant cardboard cupcakes, inflatable whales and one of the more poorly-constructed bed-sheet/balloon octopi I have encountered – and I have encountered several. You could call them gimmicky and the most enticing thing about Giggle Party is that they would have the detached veracity to agree.
Reggie Watts, with his Fletch-sized afro and beard, is the visual personification of comic excess. I am not sure anything he did could properly be called a song. Primarily what he accomplished was a flawless execution of leaving the crowd wanting more. Watts is obviously talented: a deft beat-boxer, vocalist and falsetto soul-singer. Watts coupled these abilities with absurdist, non-sequitur humor of the Letterman vein. He’s like Wesley Willis, but you don’t feel guilty laughing. Verbose, quick-witted, comically agile, Reggie Watts goes to great lengths so that his work can only be described as entertainment and he is certainly among the purest of entertainers.
Local Natives completed the day’s main-stage events, but the Mavs played the Lakers and there was zero chance I was going to miss it. I sat in Hooligan’s staring at the TV in horror, a basketball-loving island in a sea of hipsters. (In the unlikely case that you’re curious, the Mavs lost 91-96, mostly due to poor center play and Chandler’s inability to contain Bynum. Cue vomitus.) Regardless, I had to leave very early in the fourth quarter to catch the day’s best performance.
The Slow Burners were scheduled to play a later show, but unforeseen circumstances reshuffled the band personnel and pushed the show forward with Ryan Thomas Becker fronting a power quadrate: RTB4. The ensuing performance was confirmation only that every musical instinct Ryan Becker or Grady Sandlin has is flawless. Their performance of New Science Projects’ “The Train” was like a revelation. Accompanying guitarist and fellow collaborator Tony Ferraro added stunning flourishes of guitar. It was the fullest I have ever heard Ryan Thomas Becker sound and damn near perfect.
A local music organizer or show-planner or manager – I am not quite sure what to call him – recently admitted that he would never book Ryan Becker because Ryan plays too many shows. Apparently, there is some golden mean of performance frequency that best meets the fickle needs of the music industry. I received this bit of opinion as one receives any kind of madness: without grace and plenty of disgust.
In the past, I have gotten some good-natured teasing for seeing Ryan Becker perform as much as possible in any manifestation possible: solo or with the other handful of bands of which he is a member. The most transparent explanation I can offer is this: I honestly think Ryan Thomas Becker is the best songwriter and performer anywhere in at least North Texas and I would feel like an ignorant cretin if I did not make every effort to go to his shows. And if he is to be penalized for being such a liberal distributor of his preternatural ability to charm sound out of a guitar, well then that is gross, unimaginative foolishness.
If excellent music clashes with its own capital market, then so be it. But I know how the entire story ends and virtues like liberality and honesty win out over docile service to the status quo, as surely as a reeking Lazarus stands gasping at the mouth of death. In the most absolute sense, something as transcendently good as Ryan Thomas Becker’s work prevails. Anyone who was at Banter last night watching him perform, at heart-depth, knows this is true.
The last act I saw was Daniel Folmer, performing full-band as Danny Rush and the DD’s. He is the latest in my ongoing list of nominations to replace Johnny Cash, who meetly observed, “Up front there ought to be a man in black.” Folmer and his band were appropriately pushed up against the gutters and back wall of an adjacent building, like the brash vulgarity of an Edward Hopper painting. Folmer operates on a slipshod basis that, in the wrong eyes, could be taken for carelessness. I am convinced there is something much more soulful about the way he snakes words up out of his entrails. Folmer’s songs are too sardonic to be the tear-streaked cheeks of regretful country, but they are awfully close. They may be paranoid, pessimistic, apocalyptic. In the music’s oft unintelligibility, I could not decide, but they affected a pathos that is difficult to shake even in the daylight of next morning.
