Folk Ups Performance Review

Blue Bear School of American Music

April 3rd, 2003

Spring is in the air and it is a time when rock fans turn their attention to shiny strings and fancy guitars. The long cold rockless winter produced a dreary landscape. It was so dreary even the punk rockers didn't venture out of their caves. This spring brought the Faculty Recital series at Blue Bear music in San Francisco.

Bill Spooner, who has been known to be strung out on strings, and Alex Guinness, also a known purveyor of a power chord or two, tickled hibernating rock fans as the Folk-Ups at the first recital April 3rd.

Seeing the Folk-Ups on Thursday night was like seeing bears in the melting snow of spring. They were rested, looking for action and sporting guitars. Bill and Alex quickly warmed up the showcase stage and the intimate gathering in the tiny theatre seats with warm chatter and quick songs. Spooner rocked back and forth on his feet as if working off the winterÕs cabin fever. Alex prowled between his amp, his microphone, and the music stand stuffed with songs, scouting out any signs of the sick or weak as the Folk-Ups served up their set. Bill in his palm tree and guitar shirt, Alex in his tag and release tee-shirt looked like the forest-wary, street-savvy performers they are. They beamed and looked like they were glad to be rolling out the songs in the spring air.

As I watched the Boys play, it was clear that the Folk-Ups are like the bears in Yellowstone. They suit up for the tourists but they are really there for their own view of Old Faithful. Like the best street performers who casually work for a coin or two, the Folks-Ups obviously still enjoy entertaining in that same polished yet off the cuff manner. They pick the next song from the song list and launch into it with solid enthusiasm and humor.

Bill and Alex tossed out songs from their repertoire like Yogi going through your picnic basket. One after another, the boys revealed surprise after surprise. From the dry Mexican Holiday to the Street Corner standard, Please Please Me, the Folk-Ups never stopped being exhilarating.

The momentum of the show continued and Bill and Alex lured us deeper into their den as Spooner sang out the I Love Lucy theme song and a faithful Proud to be an American. During Talk to You Later, Alex ladled on the mandolin solo while Bill served up the spine tingling power chords of the bridge. The rush that I felt can only be compared to what a salmon feels swimming up stream, arching his body into the next set of rapids, his sinewy body slapping against the cold water as he just manages to escape the hungry bearÕs steel like claws.

As if the set wasn't sweet enough, Too Much was the honey. The song is very touching on Demolicious but when Alex and Bill play it live, it is hypnotic. Something that has to be seen. I floated out of my seat as I listened to the two guitars weave the song together. BillÕs voice held me aloft. AlexÕs concentration could be felt across the room. As summer approaches, I hope there will be more sightings of the Folk-Ups frolicking in their environment, playing among the six strings.

Camden

CBRadio2000@earthlink.net

Folking Up in Fairfax

by John Schoneboom

There are basically two ways for you as an ordinary civilian type to get to know your favorite major rock stars a little bit better, to transport them from the distant, shiny, and untouchable Pop Universe into your own world, the one populated by actual human beings who eat, talk, shit, and do dishes. One is to wait for MTV to put out a reality show about them. The other is to ride the waves of inexorable change until the very fabric of space-time melds with human will and a vortex of opportunity appears. In other words, you wait until he gets email and starts playing small clubs.

This, incidentally, is the story of Bill Spooner and the Folk-Ups at Cafe Amsterdam in Fairfax, just outside of San Francisco, on June 7, 2002, but keep your shirt on. I'll come back to it shortly. First I'll drop a few seemingly irrelevant details that will turn out to be important later in the film.

The first time I saw Bill Spooner play live was with the Tubes, on Long Island in April of 1976. Dave and Phil, my two best friends, were being cheap and lazy that night so I went alone. I was too young to drive and Long Island has fuck-all for public transportation so my mom had to drop me off and pick me up. That may sound like a recipe for a fairly dismal night out, but as it turned out I spent that fateful evening in a kind of elated shock. I remember describing it to my friends afterwards as being like some sort of variety show gone berserk, with sexy dancers, hilarious antics, and surreal, mind-bending rock music. I was hooked, and next time they came around Dave and Phil went to see them with me. We saw them about a million times after that. The Tubes were our favorite band.

Bill Spooner was our favorite Tube. Not to take anything away from the other essential ingredients in that incredible stew, but Bill was the heart and soul of the band as far as we were concerned, musically as well as what you might call aesthetically. There he was, like irony personified, laid back in a just-crawled-out-of-bed and where-the-hell-am-I-aww-who-cares sort of way, his face contorted into a kind of half-amused agony while his Flying V shredded eardrums and his richly raspy singing made you laugh or moved you to tears, sometimes within the space of a single song. The idea of this demented rock genius being transmogrified into an acoustic outfit called the Folk-Ups was irresistibly attractive to us, both stunning and strangely right-feeling at the same time.

I need to add here that the folk direction was not entirely unanticipated. Dave and I first met Spooner in 1988, after a Tubes show in Hadley, Massachusetts, when we happened upon Rick Anderson carrying an armload of pizza across a motel parking lot and, in a probably misguided fit of public-spiritedness, he invited us into Bill's room. Dave took it upon himself that evening, for reasons that remain unfathomable, to burst out with the peculiar assertion that Bill ought to do a folk album. Although I can say with complete confidence that nobody in the room was even listening to him, the fact remains that when the Folk-Ups eventually appeared on the musical scene many years later, Dave felt a surge of something akin to fatherly pride. It may be that he feels he controls the universe with his mind. We've been keeping a very close eye on him for some time now.

In any case, the fact remains that for these various idiosyncratic personal reasons, Dave, Phil, and myself all feel a profoundly fond attachment to Monsieur Spooner in whatever incarnations he chooses to appear. And now for the next ten pages I will give you a detailed account of how the lives of me and my little friends have grown and diverged and twisted and bonded, what we mean to each other, how we get along, and...oh, hey wait, come back! All right, all right, I'll skip all that and cut to the part about how we decided to converge on San Francisco from our disparate locations around the vast expanse of proud-to-be-America in order to see the Folk-Ups play.

I mean: Have you heard these guys? They're great!

Only problem was, there hadn't been a Folk-Ups gig scheduled in a while and there wasn't anything on the calendar. This is where the email-accessibility I mentioned earlier comes back into the film and becomes important. A few messages back and forth with Bill's way-cool wife Anna and presto, a gig appears for June 7 at good old Cafe Amsterdam. Hurrah! A made-to-order Folk-Ups show -- life is good! The trip was officially on.

And so we all made it, some of us barely, to Cafe Amsterdam at the appointed hour. Cafe Amsterdam is a very cozy place to see a band. It is in fact ideal for that up-close-and-personal effect, which is exactly what we desired. For that reason, however, it is also initially a shocking place to see Bill Spooner, because if Bill Spooner wasn't there, you'd, well, you'd just be in a nice homey little restaurant eating a (rather good) Caesar salad, and Bill Spooner would be about the last person in the world you'd expect to see. I mean hell, Mick Jagger might as well walk in for fucksake. Therefore when you look up and there he is, he's really there, and he's just a few feet away, it is what you might call a surreal thrill. And then you begin to realize that this is something very special, something that could quite easily not have happened, and past and present combine somehow in your mind to create a dream-like quality that pervades the three smoking sets of acoustic brilliance that follow.

Seeing the Folk-Ups play is a truly exuberant and joyous thing. Spooner and his co-conspirator Alex Guinness (on guitar and mandolin) have created something vibrant and special here, with the able assistance of a sort of revolving coterie of other contributors that sometimes includes Bill's son Boone on drums. It is a pleasure to be treated to a whole other side of Bill's musical personality, a demonstration not only of his talent but his versatility. It is of course a special treat to hear innovative, twisted acoustic versions of some favorite Tubes songs. But this is no nostalgia trip, it's all about the here and now.

Spooner remains a consummate songwriter, and in case you haven't heard yet, the best of his recent offerings are every bit as strong as anything from the amazing back catalogue. Because he is so often very funny, one can sometimes forget that Spooner can be an intensely soulful singer and songwriter as well, and many of his best songs are the ones that come straight from the heart. The gorgeous "Too Much" and the darkly hilarious "Mexican Holiday" are the shining stars of the recent Demolicious CD, and were also highlights of the Cafe Amsterdam show. Besides being perfectly catchy little numbers that will grab onto the insides of your head and sink their hooks into your cranial walls, the new songs are perfect showcases for a lot of quick-pickin', fun-strummin' guitar work -- and these guys sing up a storm as well. On this particular evening they were joined by [ARRGH, WHAT'S HIS NAME] standing in on bass.

In addition to freshly squeezed original songs and a few freshly twisted Tubes numbers, the show also included a smattering of classic but interestingly reinvented cover tunes (including a quirkily countrified reworking of "Foxy Lady") and, not least of all, requests. "Just write 'em down on a five, ten, or twenty dollar bill and we will maybe, possibly, or absolutely play them." Well, we were quite happy to hear whatever they wanted to play, but coming up with requests was not a problem either on the other hand. In fact Dave (perhaps in a continuing quest to control the universe) had emailed a few relatively obscure requests to the man in advance. And let me tell you something about Bill Spooner right now -- he got Dave's message and proceeded to dust off such treasures as his beautiful rendition of Captain Beefheart's "My Head Is My Only House" and had 'em ready to go. Heart of gold, I tell you, the man has a heart of gold!

Now you may begin to appreciate the intimate nature of this musical mystery tour. Our universe for a few hours collided with the Spooniverse, histories intersected, for a fun-filled quasi-astronomical pulsar fest, or other galactic metaphors to that effect. It was after their version of Space Baby that Alex pointed to us and said "That was for you guys" (right after which Bill broke us up with "Yeah, so where's our twenty?"). And speaking of Space Baby, with all due appreciation for the great songs that did come later on, I've always had a special place in my heart for those early Tubes albums, when it seems to me they were most completely themselves, without any conscious effort at making something "commercial sounding," and their music seemed to find its truest, most natural expression. It is refreshing, in an era where pop stars seem more than ever like interchangeable plastic toys off a corporate assembly line, to see a man like Bill Spooner keeping it real and making music that he loves for the sheer pleasure of it. May it bring him joy and success for many years to come.

[John Schoneboom is an omnivorous biped and freelance writer based in New York City. His play "Dreams of Jimmy Bannon" recently won a Fellowship Award from the Massachusetts Cultural Council.]