Giant Sand and the Handsome Family, Berbati's Pan, Portland, Oregon, U.S.A., November 2, 2004
Giant Sand, in its current touring configuration, is a rocking band. The twisted Tucson balladeer Howe Gelb fronted a quartet of highly in-sync and sympatico musicians on Election Night 2004. They applied a good dose of what Neil Young calls "the healing power of noise" to a small, but appreciative, crowd of about 100 in the dance-hall section of Berbati's, a Greek restaurant, bar and venue in Portland's Old Town.
Gelb has become increasingly eclectic and international on record in recent years -- with Giant Sand as well as solo or fronting The Band of Blacky Ranchette. And, in addition to putting out Ogle Some Piano, a record of mostly instrumental piano pieces earlier this year, he's been using a lot of keyboards on all his recent records. But the touring Giant Sand of Gelb, Anders Pederson (guitars), Thoger T. Lund (bass) and Peter Dombernowsky (drums) is a tight, rocking unit behind Gelb's laconic vocals.
The band played a goodly chunk of the songs from its latest album, Giant Sand is All Over the Map, with a liberal sample of songs from Gelb's three decades as a performer. The show started with Gelb alone on stage with his Telecaster, saying "Hey," followed by "Jude," and he launched into his own interpretation of the Beatles classic (filled with some mean guitar blasts), during which he was joined by the rest of the band. As is his wont, he segued without pause into Giant Sand is All Over the Map's "NYC of Time," which paraphrases a line from "Jude" as "take a bad thing and make it better."
Gelb sang into one of three microphones during his generous, two-hour-plus performance; the two mikes on stands had varying degrees of reverb, one a little, the other a lot, and he switched from one to the other to great effect. He also on occasion strapped on a remote headset whose mike processed his voice into a tinny, speaker-phone-like sound, with its own degree of reverb as well. At one point he left the stage and walked around in the audience, picking and singing in what appeared to be total improvisation as he went, while the band kept up with him seamlessly from the stage. He even left the performance space, went in to another room of the bar where election results were being broadcast on a big-screen TV, and worked the ongoing results into his bluesy improv.
The headset came out first for a rather jazzy rendition of "Wayfaring Stranger," which he followed by a psychedelic blues that started soft and slow, built to a shattering climax, and then segued back into "Hey Jude."
Among the older material was "Grandpa's House," "Love Knows No Borders," "Bored Little Devil," and "Loving Cup," which he tried to place in his extensive discography but couldn't: "Too many albums," he said. They wrapped up the main set with three from Map: "Cracklin' Water," featuring Pedersen on a wailing slide mandolin, "Muss," and the album's centerpiece, "Classico." For an encore, they played "Remote" and "Fool," both also from the new album, at which point Gelb let the band go and tried to please the crowd with at least one more request. After readjusting his two microphones so that one was acting as a guitar-mike, he played a solo acoustic "Wander" before adjourning to the bar, where he appeared ready to talk politics, weather and music until closing time.
The Handsome Family, otherwise known as Brett and Rennie Sparks, put in a low-key opening set that was pretty much overpowered by Giant Sand's electrifying performance. With no new album to promote, they touched on songs from throughout the past decade. Brett's powerful baritone grabbed the crowd's attention on Handsome standards like "Weightless Again" and "Cathedrals," from their 1998 breakthrough album, Through the Trees, and "Amelia Earhart vs. the Dancing Bear" from 1996's Milk and Scissors, and he cut loose with a fuzzed-out guitar solo on a couple of numbers, particularly "Singing Bones," the title track from their most recent release. Rennie switched-off between a four-string banjo, fretless bass guitar and melodica, sang harmonies, and kept up a running surreal monologue between songs. The sound was nicely filled-out by Chicagoan Steve Dorocke on pedal steel and dobro, as well as the Mac PowerBook that ran the drum machine. Their most notable performance, though, came in answer to a request for "Arlene," the rivetting murder ballad from their debut album, Odessa.
It was a cold, rainy night in the bluest of cities in one of the bluest of states on an election night that was all red. Alternative music fans, though, had found a momentary balm for their souls in a night of truly alternative music.
