(This has the odd expletive in it here and there. You will survive reading it)
THE END OF THE LINES
After a few more songs – including an odd innocent one, of the kind he
sometimes does talking about cows and bugs that sound like they come from a
children’s show – the backing band came onstage and grabbed their instruments
and starting throwing down, as Welles grabbed an electric guitar. Some of it
was very country-influenced, and I liked the idea of a musical style invented
by the Scots and Irish in America making its way back across the Atlantic sonic
boomerang-style.
Other tunes were far more traditional AOR-style rock fare, and I confess I found some of
it quite bland and uninteresting. Not my thing. Shrug. This direction certainly was a change from
the naked acoustic segment of the gig, and Welles seemed more at ease with
fellow musicians (Adam Meisterhans - guitar; Joel Parks, bass; Connor Streeter, drums; Bobby Steinfeld, keyboards) to bounce off of. He and Meisterhans (real name? Dunno) did a duelling
banjos type of thing, facing each other, rocking and reeling and jigging,
having great fun. After the serious acoustic soul-dredgings, this was oddly
jarring, if obviously easier on the singer than just playing solo in front of a
crowd with an acoustic guitar. I felt like shouting “JUDAS!” when Welles shifted from acoustic to electric, mirroring the infamous 1966 Dylan heckling
incident in Manchester. I figured that Welles might get it, might not, but
the audience definitely wouldn’t, so just shutting up was the best idea.
Some halfwit behind me started blabbering through a couple of the songs.
Partway during the second one, I turned angrily to confront the gobgrinder. A
wee ned teen in a Celtic top, probably drunk, spilling wisdom and pintslop. “Excuse
me! Can you stop talking please!” I said, trying to be civil, but also trying
to contain my anger. The wee prick started havering drunkenly back at me. I
just sighed and shouted “FOR FUCKSAKE!” and turned back round. If he had done
it during the acoustic set I don’t know what I would have done. I momentarily
waited for a knife in the kidneys, hearing the wee wankstain bumping his gums
again, and just moved out of hearing range. I really was angry.
Why pay good money to go along and waffle drivel, and annoy people around you? That was the bad thing about everybody finding an artist online: as well as genuinely interested people, it also brought obnoxious wee Hoops fan tollie torpedoers like this who couldn’t care less who was onstage, and who liked the sound of their own drunken numbrain burblings more.
A few more electric numbers were done. Then Welles did a short acoustic set again, and then got back into what I assumed was the final part of the night, with some more electric croons. Unfortunately, I had to leave early to get the last train, so I couldn’t stay to the end. I left to the band performing a cover of Creep by Radiohead, a song I personally can’t be bothered with. The last words I heard as I left the music hall were “I don’t belong here,” which was as fair enough a place to bail as any, if not particularly appropriate.
I stopped on the threshold of the outside door, zipping up my jacket and putting on my woollen hat (which I would end up accidentally leaving on the train) to shield myself against the driving insistent rain. There was a middle class mid-70s well-dressed couple who looked like they had just stepped out of a night at the opera waiting on a taxi there.
“Ah, the benefits of having to leave early to get the last train home,” I smiled to them as I zipped up, “Did you enjoy that?”
“Oh yes, he was very good,” they enthused.
“You know, they say he’s the new Bob Dylan, but I can see more Woody Guthrie in him,” the old guy said to me. I said I didn’t know much about Guthrie, but I could hear the Dylan in Welles. The old guy looked the type to have been of age back in Dylan’s prime, cultured with it, well-spoken, and I just thought well, he knows more than me, fair enough.
“They’re really concerned for his welfare,” the old woman said urgently.
“Aye?” I said noncommittally.
“Yes. We were speaking to the people at the merch table. I asked them, ‘aren’t you concerned for his welfare’? They said yes, they were, all the time.”
“Aye?” I said noncommittally, again. I wasn’t really buying it, to be honest. It sounded a bit dramatic to me, but arguing in the Glasgow rain with an anguished septuagenarian female wasn’t on the cards.
“Oh yes. That’s why he records where he does, you know,” she confided, nodding.
“You mean in the forests, the open air settings?”
“Yes.”
“So that nobody will know where he’s recording?” I asked blandly, bemused. I really wasn’t buying this, although maybe the silencing death of Charlie Kirk should have made me a bit more circumspect. Welles was coming from a long, long-established line of American protest singers. On one level, a great many people do not take that seriously, unfortunately. Anytime I ever looked at his songs posted on Instagram, yes, there was definitely abuse there below every post. But it was nothing much more than “Ya goddam commiesymp pinko limpwrist liberal bastid!” You know, the type of troll patrol abusive hogwash that every single video gets anyway.
(I always love it when American right wing nutters spew 20th century Cold War “Reds under the bed!” insults like they’re still valid. Comforting that some things never change, in a sea of existential uncertainty. No lone voice truly scares or challenges corporate authority now. If it did, Welles (and a million punk bands) would not be allowed to exist. No matter how correct what he is saying is, he will just come across now as an entertainment option, pushing the leftist side to people who like that angle. It's easy to disregard the hard harsh truth in a sea of shit as just another dancing monkeyboy voice looking for a dollar and likes and shares, tragically and unfortunately.)
“Yes, that’s right!” said the imaginative old lady in tortured pensioner anguish.
“I like his lyrics,” I said, quoting the lyric from Friends that I quoted earlier. “Beautiful poetry, he’s got a real talent for it, knitting together old and new imagery.”
“He’s lived a rough life, you know,” said the old guy conspiratorially, “Rock and roll. It does things to you. Drugs.” He nodded gravely.
“Is that right, aye?” I almost felt like laughing. I had no idea about the truth or otherwise of his statement, it was just the stern, disapproving public service announcement way he said it that I found funny. Reefer Madness ya bas! But they were harmless, and I bid them goodbye as their taxi arrived and I headed off into the wet night. Got on the last train home, packed, had to sit next to some female Muppet eating a fish supper. Never understand people who take hot food on public transport and sit and munch it, freely sharing the stink in an inescapable environment. Maybe they think they’re doing us all a favour. They’re not.
Got back to Killie, missed the last bus, had to get a taxi home. Woke up the next day and, knowing I was going to write this review, I did an idle search for some article that might fill in a few Welles blanks. I knew that Rolling Stone, a rubbish rag these days, normally does a fairly comprehensive background exposition on any new artist they cover. Sure enough, they had one on Welles. It explains the origins of the forest recordings which, as I suspected, had nothing to do with keeping the artist away from everywhere-lurking culture war snipers:
https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/jesse-welles-protest-songs-tiktok-politics-1235410873/
I laughed when I saw that Welles had just replicated another artist who had recorded in a bucolic setting. I did wonder briefly about whether making up strange conspiracy theories made your life more interesting as somebody in your seventies. I hope to find out. Apart from that, well, that’s pretty much that.
I must admit, Welles would be somebody it would be interesting to talk to about his poetic and literary influences. He’s clearly very erudite, and his quoting of people like Mark Twain and Bertolt Brecht sits interestingly uneasily with singing about not killing bugs, acid flashbacks, cow stomachs, presidential evil and poetry and philosophy and nonsense and so on and so forth. He’s certainly eclectic enough, from electric to acoustic to cynical to pure and bemused, and it will be interesting to see how he handles the ride into the entertainment industry fender-bender Stratocaster stratosphere. We’ll see. Let’s hope the river’s not too deep and wide for him to swim across. We certainly need more artists of his calibre and thus-far-untested-integrity in this day and time of corporate crime, that’s for sure.
Onwards…
THE END
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