Cass McCombs Chop Suey Seattle, March 26, 2019

Break it down, get us fired up. Hell yeah we got fired up last night at Chop Suey in Capitol Hill in Seattle. Back in the US, back to a crowd more colorful, more varied, more down home American.

Karen and Garrett, my friends from San Francisco who recently relocated to Seattle, accompanied me last night and they brought the enthusiasm, first falling in love with Sam Evian’s tunes and then later, facilitating the CM love when we unwittingly got caught in the very back of the room (hey, the view was good). The place was packed. The venue itself has a low ceiling and a feeling of intimacy with performer and audience, a good bar with Seattle Dry Cider on tap, and a kitchen that serves sandwiches and burgers (in this case by a speed goth).

In our case, the back was a place from which to better survey the crowd, their pluck, a better place from which to project cheers and whoops and to reflect energy back to the front. The other guys in the back loved it too. People kept yelling “THANK YOU” and “I LOVE YOU” at Cass and it was pretty much true for all of us. Cass was smiling, his body language was authoritative and playful and he would lean sideways this way or that, delivering his unwavering falsettos with squinted conviction.

Last night Sam Evian again joined Cass and the band for a run of several songs, starting with What Isn’t Nature (some of the pics are of that number), but the long faced drummer from Sam’s band did not drum for CM last night. Cass himself looked good, good haircut holding up, and his white shirt was emblazoned with a Pilot logo, giving credence to his own truck stop persona—life on the road as a musician sometimes equals wearing Pilot t-shirts out of necessity like any normal long-haul trucker.

I took away many truths last night, the two primary truths being 1) there is no wrong way if you are harnessing your own talented energy, luxuriating in it, and giving it back to the world in sheer joy—and that’s what I’m trying to do with my life, mostly through rare books and archives; and 2) Cass uses his voice as an instrument just as much as he uses the guitar. On this tour, in particular, his vocals are no longer simply a component that rounds out the melody, they are no longer solely the deliverer of a message (even though yes, he’s a poet and an auteur): his vocals have transformed to being the only ticket out of the chaos—the only ticket to ride out the meandering euphony and find the mainline back to the selfhood and the exclamation of the human spirit.

Set list

  • Sleeping Volacanoes

  • Bum Bum Bum

  • The Great Pixley Train Robbery

  • Estrella

  • What Isn’t Nature (this is off A and I don’t think I’ve ever heard him play it live, so amazing. He sounds exactly the same as he does on the recording which was put out in 2003. I love the early stuff so much. I’ll definitely be listening to A on my drive to Portland today)

  • Laughter is the Best Medicine (epic jam session)

  • Sidewalk Bop After Suicide

  • Absentee (again, a trio with Sam Evian and Frank LoCrasto)

  • American Canyon Sutra (the turning point according to Garrett, who is not that into jam music. It was at this point Cass took off his satin white smoking jacket and according to Garrett the music changed)

  • I Followed the River South to What

  • Morning Star

  • Big Wheel (my favorite jam session of the night)

  • Brighter

  • Rounder (but really this jam session was my favorite because I just wanted it to keep going on forever. By this point I had weaseled my way back up to the front of the dance floor and was grooving)

    Encore

  • Rancid Girl

Cass McCombs St. James Hall Vancouver Mar 25, 2019

This morning there is a pep in my step. A feeling of lingering contentedness and tenderness pervades my world view. It’s almost like the feeling, “Yes, I can go on,” that comes after spending a day with a really good friend or a night receiving unexpected yet welcome affection.

The venue of the Cass McCombs concert last night here in Vancouver, British Columbia was St James Hall, a churchy-community meeting center on a quiet, green residential street one block off a main shopping thoroughfare. The humble sanctuary-like gathering space had pews in the back and a balcony filled with pews as well. The neighborhood’s called Kitsilano and the stage has a large A-frame architectural accent that adds to the visual composition of the performance by drawing one’s eye upward—toward heaven, toward the Sacred Heart? As such, it was a dry show, and Sam Evian in his sleepy, theology school dropout affect respectfully pointed that out. Later, about half way into Cass’s set, Dan Horne produce a bottle of bourbon, and after he and Cass took a pull, he set it down on the stage within reach of the crowd, and some front-rowers helped themselves to it.

Cass seemed like he was in good spirits, playful and smiley with the crowd, wearing his signature white satin lounge coat over a shirt screen-printed with the visage of Humphrey Bogart. Dan Horne looked kinda fucked up but he was jamming hard. The keyboardist, Frank LoCrasto, looked spaced out from the night before but did not miss a beat. The long-faced drummer from Sam Evian’s group joined Cass and the gang.

During Cass’s set, Sam Evian played the sax on about three or four songs, including “Medicine,” “Absentee,” and “American Canyon Sutra.” Sam’s entire band joined Cass onstage for his encore performance of Rancid Girl. Cass didn’t play much of the old stuff at all (interesting when compared to the set lists from the previous shows of the tour), but a lot of the songs stretched out twice or three times their recorded length so he went deep rather than wide. 

Jam-o-licious is the best way to describe last night’s performance, a motif most likely established earlier in the tour and one whose evolution I look forward to witnessing throughout the next 5 shows. They jammed out hard on almost every song.

I mean, have you ever heard music so expressive, instruments so perfectly harmonized, bass plucking so deep, and guitar shredding so articulate that it feels like an orgasm? Orgasm meaning the pinnacle of bliss? Orgasm meaning the raw, bloody life you often feel but struggle to put into words or coherent emotions until something not based on language does it for you? I was living in the pinnacle of bliss during the jam session on “Laughter is the Best Medicine” and again on “Big Wheel.” “Medicine” was so deep and so moving that my ecstasy may have culminated in a blown fuse had it kept going.

It can’t get much better than this: the joy of seeing one’s favorite musician happy, healthy, and playing like a boss… Enjoying being in Vancouver for the first time in several years and bringing all the musicians into the fold. Even though I felt incredibly conspicuous being the only person not wearing black and denim, which held me back from taking pictures and writing down the setlist, I had an amazing experience last night, and I kept having to remind myself that the novelty I felt could partly be attributed to being in a foreign country.

Set list (this is what I have so far, and I will fill in the rest from setlist.fm when it gets posted—this may be out of order):

  • Sleeping Volcanoes

  • Bum Bum Bum

  • The Great Pixley Train Robbery

  • Estrella

  • I Followed The River South To What

  • Sidewalk Bop After Suicide

  • Laughter is the Best Medicine

  • Absentee

  • American Canyon Sutra

  • I’m a Shoe

  • Big Wheel

  • Brighter

  • Rounder

    Encore

  • Rancid Girl

Itinerary Spring Break / Cass McCombs 2019 Tour

Tomorrow I fly out of San Jose International Airport to Portland to start my spring break vacation. Monday I’m driving to Vancouver, BC to catch the first of six Cass McCombs tour dates for his Tip of the Sphere 2019 tour. Seattle follows Vancouver on March 26, and Portland on March 27. On Friday I fly to L.A. and I’m catching the Hollywood show with my dad (not the first time my dad has accompanied me to see CM… he was also there that fateful night at the Eagle Rock Community Center in 2011).

The following week, the first of April, I’m back to work but driving down to Santa Cruz Thursday night to see the show at Moe’s Alley. The whole affair ends Friday, April 5 at the Fillmore in San Francisco. The last tour date.

Minus Sacramento and Santa Barbara, I’m planning on catching all the west coast tour dates.

There is a term for Grateful Dead fans that follow the band on tour, and a similar term for Phish fans. What do you call me? CM himself pointed out the Grateful Dead are a band for dancing… people follow them on tour, do psychedelics, and dance (…rather strangely imho). Considering CM’s history of jamming with Phil Lesh and co. at Terrapin Crossroads, and his side project the Skiffle Players, I feel totally legitimate in the artifice of my trip’s purpose… I’m just a person on a mission to find a release of luxurious imagination through ritual and repetition.

For now however… it’s time for my nightly haunt around the wide, quiet streets of Santa Clara.

2019 and I'm Feeling Fine

One year ago today I started my job at Santa Clara University and in less than two weeks I’ll be off to my first vacation (other than the holidays) since starting. Spring Break Pacific Northwest Tour 2019! Keep your eyes on this space to follow my groupie embodiment, à la deadheads and phishheads, as I catch as many west coast tour dates of the Cass McCombs Tip of the Sphere tour 2019 as possible: Vancouver, British Columbia; Seattle, Washington; Portland, Oregon; Los Angeles, California; Santa Cruz, California; and San Francisco, California.

In this moment it seems comparable to the joy I felt tromping around the quiet streets of Santa Clara blasting the new album in my wireless headphones earlier this evening, but it will surely surpass even tonight’s euphoria.

Could 2019 be… the best year yet?