Patterico's Pontifications

9/30/2014

Three Great Evenings of Music

Filed under: General — Patterico @ 7:28 am



Mrs. P. and I are coming off of three unforgettable evenings of music in a row. Over the weekend I told you about Saturday night’s star-studded Big Star tribute; if you missed that post, catch up here. But that was just the beginning.

Sunday night we were treated to a once-in-a-lifetime experience: a show given by the Posies’s Ken Stringfellow in a living room in West Los Angeles. The performance could not have been more intimate — unless, maybe, he had been sitting on our laps. Stringfellow, who has a powerful, distinctive voice, performed without a PA system for his vocals, which allowed him to stand directly in front of the couch that Mrs. P. and I were sitting on. Had he taken a very small step forward, he would have stepped on Christi’s feet. Early in the show, Stringfellow said he had forgotten something. He handed the guitar to Christi and asked her to hold it while he ran to the other room.

Stringfellow is an entertaining performer in every respect. His arrangements of his songs are fresh, many of them done on the piano. His between-song (and sometimes during-song) banter is spontaneous and amusing. He did Posies songs, solo songs, and covers from Big Star and The Beach Boys. This video is from a different performance, but replicates the experience pretty well:

One lovely bonus: Skylar Gudasz, a vocalist from the Big Star tribute, was in attendance, and came up and performed Big Star’s transcendant song “Thirteen.” That had been one of my favorite performances from the tribute, and the guy who videotaped most of the songs had notably missed that one. However, I found this video from a different tribute show, with the same vocalists, to give you a flavor of what it sounded like at the tribute show:

It sounded like that at the Stringfellow show too — just more intimate and with Stringfellow doing the harmonizing. Can’t argue with that.

The Big Star theme continued last night, when Mrs. P. and I went to Largo at the Coronet and saw the Watkins Family Hour with guests Susanna Hoffs and Dan Wilson, who had both performed at the Big Star tribute. We sat 15 feet away as Hoffs and Wilson performed two of the songs that I linked in my review of the Big Star show: “The Ballad of El Goodo” and the gorgeous “I’m in Love With a Girl.” Hoffs sang a few other numbers, including the Michael Nesmith song “Different Drum” (made famous by Linda Ronstadt and the Stone Poneys) and “Eternal Flame” by the Bangles. (That last number was included to fit the Watkins’s “wildfire” theme for the night.) Here’s a video of that last song, from a different performance, to give you an idea:

We are in Music Nerd Heaven.

One Response to “Three Great Evenings of Music”

  1. “Different Drum,” not “Different Drummer” is the name of the Michael Nesmith song Linda Ronstadt made famous.

    Dave (a53302)


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