“Why did he have to do that?” your friendly neighborhood Crawler remembers thinking.
We had been getting along so well, grabbing drinks after work. Then he had to come into my office, hear me listening to Living Colour and say, “Dude, you have to hear this guitarist. He is the best.”
For yours truly, such an utterance has historically proven as catastrophic as one party in a couple saying “I love you” after things had been going along just swimmingly as friends.
While I have by no means mastered it, the guitar is very important to me. I have been playing it since age eight—and practically cut my teeth, literally callused my fingertips, emulating the licks of everyone from Eddie to Yngwie. So whenever anyone from a generation that more closely identifies the movie Crossroads with saccharine pop tart Britney Spears than the six-string bonanza that pitted slide king Ry Cooder against shred-master Steve Vai wants to talk axe… it’s usually something to fret over.
Then he “Umphed” me.
Fueled by the dueling guitars of band founder Brendan Bayliss and the utterly explosive Jake Cinninger, Chicago’s Umphrey’s McGee first produced a blip on the national radar with the 2002 release of Local Band Does OK. That’s blip, not burst: with a multitude of 10 minute-plus tunes, often with little to no vocals, this is a band that’s not exactly made for radio. Predictably, without any aid from those airwaves, subsequent offers from television and print were equally scant.
So just how, then, did the 800-strong crowd at the Calvin on a recent Sunday night get hip to the Umphrey’s sound? Because of an innovative mix of dizzying skills, a multitude of bills and a boatload of e-savvy, it appears.
Borrowing the mold cast by the Dead and Phish, Umphrey’s McGee tours incessantly, changes up the set lists nightly and is prone to spiral off into improvisational flights of fancy at the drop of a knitted skullcap. The novel part is that the band has also fused this tried-and-true jam-band formula with today’s technology. For example, not only is every Umphrey’s show chronicled, but soundboard quality recordings of each song—or entire concerts—are immediately available for download at umlive.net for a nominal fee.
While the band takes its live cues for the aforementioned jam band icons, as evidenced by the recent Noho performance, musically, the McGees seem much more rooted in prog rock. “Hangover,” awash in fuzz and and wah-wah pedals, evokes images of a danceable “No Quarter” by Zep, while the piano-tinged popster “Made To Measure” harks back to the Beatles’ “Day in the Life.”
In between, the band shifts effortlessly between the funky freestyle of Freaky Styley-era Chilis (“Alex’s House”), a spot of Steely Dan (“Intentions Clear”), and, on this particular evening, a spot-on, straight-up cover of Toto’s “Africa” thrown in for good measure.
In other news… a notable nugget of info courtesy of one Jason Bourgeois.
“I’m hosting an event at the Rendezvous March 13 that I am calling ‘Nuggets Night,'” the Bourgeois Hero says of the origins of his homage to the mid-’60s psychedelic compilation records.
Already signed on to tackle the tunes of Amboy Dukes, the Knickerbockers, 13th Floor Elevators and more are local scene stalwarts Ray Mason, Claudia Malibu, trance-champs Alottle and Bank Row Recording co-owner Justin Pizzoferrato. For more info, kindly point your browser to rendezvoustfma.com.
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Last up, a golden opportunity for a family- friendly afternoon comes in the form of the Gustafer Yellowgold 2 p.m. Iron Horse (iheg.com) engagement March 14. Developed by illustrator/songwriter Morgan Taylor, the Gustafer Yellowgold show is a multimedia “musical moving storybook” concert experience that has been lauded in the pages of Newsweek, The Los Angeles Times and Parenting Magazine, to a name a choice few. Tix are $10 in advance, $13 at the door with $30 “advance family four-packs” available, too.
Send correspondence to Nightcrawler, P.O. Box 427, Somers, CT 06071; fax to (860) 698-9373 or e-mail Garycarra@aol.com.
