While nearly 18 million viewers watched Amy Winehouse and Kanye West wave their hardware on the Grammys, more than 400 braved a sub-zero Minnesota night to see three wizened pickers playfully billed as The Monsters of Folk.
“They said it couldn’t be done: The reuniting of the Spice Girls,” deadpanned Monsters of Folk ringleader and ex-Blasters guitarist Dave Alvin, as he, singer-songwriter Chris Smither and bluegrass-roots virtuoso Tim O’Brien took the stage and started tuning up. Then: “I’ve never played a gig before in long johns.”
They opened with Mississippi John Hurt’s “Make Me A Pallet On Your Floor” and closed twenty tunes later with the Prohibition-era ditty “Walk Right In”, offering up in between a musical dissertation on the subtle, vital difference between something that’s shiny and something that shines.
Most of the trio’s songs featured whoever was singing lead calling the tune while his two cohorts accompanied him on the fly. One especially gorgeous exception was “Blackjack David”, described by Alvin as “the ‘Louie Louie’ of folk music.’” The musicians braided lead and rhythm duties together with continually evolving variations of tempo and volume, creating surges and eddies like water moving over rocks and branches on a shallow riverbank. The climax of this sensation occurred when O’Brien’s hard mandolin strumming circled like a whirlpool, while the busy yet still casual interplay of Alvin and Smither’s guitars hovered like a swarm of tiny insects just above the surface.
As the night wore on, it became increasingly apparent that O’Brien was the most indispensable musician onstage. The songs he led comprised a enormously broad stylistic range that never felt strained or illogical, thanks to his masterful playing and his emotional fidelity to the material. The evening’s highlight came when he broke out the fiddle and announced he was going to do a song on the southern Pentecostal side of the vocal quartet tradition of bluegrass that he’d learned from Bill Monroe. The resulting “Workin’ On A Building” tightroped that thin line between kitsch and glowing tribute, with a plaintive fervency as raw and rural as O’Brien’s West Virginia roots.
O’Brien also dedicated a Montana cowboy song, “Old Paint”, to his in-laws in the audience, singing in a flat, unaffected drawl that provided extra heft and fiber. He threw out a couple of whimsical yet testimonial originals from his then-unreleased new disc Chameleon, one exhorting people to get up and dance, the other wondering, “Where does love comes from, and where does it go?” And his accompaniment was consistently more sophisticated and transformative to the songs than that of his cohorts.
By contrast, Alvin belabored the introductions to his songs enough to rob them of mystery, and their epic nature — “King Of California”, Tom Russell’s “Blue Wing”, and a convoluted song-poem tracing the history of the fabled Los Angeles club the Ash Grove — didn’t jibe with the sage, stoicism and sly wit exhibited by the other two musicians. Alvin was more monster than folk, but proved an enjoyable master of ceremonies along the way.
Smither, probably the purest “folk” musician on the bill (though the blues influence on much of his work is clear), delivered the goods without breaking his stride. Few songwriters are more adept at the dying art of the punchline couplet, which he sings with an amiable burr akin to phlegm-coated sandpaper, a solicitous voice that charms you into his narratives.
He had the crowd wiping away tears of laughter on the anti-creationist “Origin Of The Species”, and tears of poignance on his ode to enduring love, “Leave The Light On”. He also had a habit supplying vocal harmony when the mood struck him, enriching spare choruses of “Old Paint”, “Stealin’”, and “What Did The Deep Sea Say” with that burr and resonant guitar chords, until they shone.
