Nicholas Black-Darquea – Spinning Platters

Spinning Platters Interview: Martha Wainwright

Martha Wainwright is the kid-sister scion of a Canadian-American folk music dynasty, a fact not so notable for what is to American Popular music, a particular provincial renown, but for multi-generational musical avouchment; the inescapable gravity of a family that sings its sins to the public. She grew up at the knees of Leonard Cohen, Emmilou Harris, Richard and Linda Thompson, etc. It is an inescapable and fascinating bramble of musical history.

I want you to watch the YouTube video of ‘Proserpina‘ from Not So Silent Night, McGarrigle & Wainwright Christmas Celebration at the Royal Albert Hall, December 9th, 2009. This is the last song written by her mother, Kate McGarrigle, and performed here by her, a month before she died of cancer far too young at 63. The recommendation menu will likely offer Martha’s haunting rendition in a sparse head-on video of the track that anchored her 2012 Album, Come Home to Mama. The song stands on its own, but the context dares you to tears. A mother twice over, Martha Wainwright is well grown up now.

Of her father, louche folk singer, Loudon Wainwright III, she has said, “For most of my childhood Loudon talked to me in song, which is a bit of a shitty thing to do, especially as he always makes himself come across as funny and charming while the rest of us seem like whining victims, and we can’t tell our side of the story. As a result he has a daughter who smokes and drinks too much and writes songs with titles like ‘Bloody Mother Fucking Asshole’.” That song was the hand grenade she smuggled into her eponymous first album twenty years ago. The current tour is built on this anniversary. But it is also a tour of her recent memoir, ‘Stories I Might Regret Telling You,‘ from which she reads some of that bramble at each show.

Martha was kind enough to grant me some of her time between the tour’s first and second leg.

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Show Review: Martha Wainwright at Great American Music Hall, 4/2/25

Comes out and plays through the album that made her, that created a being separate from lineage, too mature for this crude southern land, the pedigree and the world wise chanteuse disorienting pop music. Self aware, the first line is an irrepressible fein to the Carpenter’s ‘Superstar’. The very first line claims a place: Long ago, and so very… Continue reading “Show Review: Martha Wainwright at Great American Music Hall, 4/2/25”

SF Sketchfest Review: Red Room Orchestra plays The Lost Boys at Great American Music Hall, 1/19/24

It is apparent as we arrive that The Lost Boys is a seminal coming-of-age film to more goths and their familiars than those —ahem — of a certain age. Though not sold out, The Great American is full of stylish vampires of all ages, my partner and myself included. The 1987 Schumacher Peter Pan/Anne Rice mashup maintains a certain cultural currency as evinced by a thirty year reunion back in 2019 featuring the full living cast.
Tonight features a more modest guest list — a fit Alex Winter and a near manic Timmy Capello, second-string vampire and scene-stealing shirtless saxman — the Red Room Orchestra lineup is fire. This is a blessing because when we dust off the Lost Boys Soundtrack CD, we find an abbreviated list of ten tracks representing not a post-punk goth masterpiece but a schizophrenic mash-up of late eighties pop distractions, from INXS regrettably twice-dipping into Aussie pub-rock, to late-career solo forays by Foreigner’s Lou Grahm and the Who’s Roger Daltrey, to the residual 50’s rock n’ roll hangover that plagued that decade. The unauthorized list containing all the film’s tracks is just as bewildering, including the Run DMC/Aerosmith hip-hop crossover, “Walk This Way.” We rightly remember the high points: Echo and the Bunnymen covering “People Are Strange,” Gerard McMann’s standout “Cry Little Sister,” and, of course, Tim Capello’s sweaty and inexplicable cover of Christian rock band The Fall’s “I Still Believe.” Continue reading “SF Sketchfest Review: Red Room Orchestra plays The Lost Boys at Great American Music Hall, 1/19/24”

SF Sketchfest Review: Kids In The Hall “Unplugged” at Palace Of Fine Arts, 1/23/24

Photos by Jakub Mosur

I’m not sure what the “unplugged” in Kids In The Hall Unplugged is referring to. Non-electric comedians? Acoustic comedians? The first thing that happened was a sound issue with one of the mics running foul and each member of the cast hopping up and down and tapping and teasing each other to figure out whose it was. They were wireless mics, so there’s that. As will likely become apparent, I am not a comedy reviewer. I’m not even much of a live comedy consumer. Perhaps “unplugged” is vernacularly smuggled in from live music that has assumed its own valence. At any rate, the mic problem, rather than hindering the performance, seemed to loosen everybody up and give them a chance to stretch their ad-lib muscles in these predefined but still vigorous skits.

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Show Review: Spiritualized at The Fillmore, 4.12.22

Spiritualized, enters its third decade doing the one thing it has done and doing it well: building manifold soundscapes over rock and pop fundamentals, repetition unto transcendence.

Each track is reducible to some early Rock Rhythm and Blues motif. Continue reading “Show Review: Spiritualized at The Fillmore, 4.12.22”

Show Review: Perfume Genius with Hand Habits at The Fillmore, 3.21.22

Photos by Tiffany Black-Darquea

For one night, as Perfume Genius (Michael Alden Hadreas) brought the second show of their tour to the bay, The Fillmore had a spectacular mirror ball swinging across its stage, all graceful arcs and delicate reflections.
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The Waterboys at The Fillmore, 10/11/19

I’ve always wondered why the Waterboys are not regularly mentioned in the same breath as U2, their more successful cohorts in Big Music. Mystic Celtic themes, wide genre experimentation, reckless ambition, and earnestness occasionally lapsing into bathos — it’s all there. Perhaps it’s because founder Mike Scott has been a bit too wide and reckless in ambition and scope. Perhaps it’s because the Waterboys as a cohesive band, has pretty much been just Mike Scott.

I suspect that a less raggle taggle band might have made Scott’s musical forays more cohesive over time. If so, the current lineup, no larger than needs be, tight and effortless enough to riff and be fun, would be a solid contender for posterity. Veteran fiddleman in a low top hat, Steve Wickham, took the stage as Scott’s equal, the latter in Canadian tuxedo and cowboy hat. The complimentary front men were supported by steadfast Zach Ernst on rhythm guitar, and Ralph Salmins on drums, who showed his chops during the second set in a solo tribute to the recently late drum god Ginger Baker. The big sound was rounded out by blistering keysman ‘Brother’ Paul Brown.

We can be grateful the Waterboys are not a bigger act and are still free to fill relatively intimate venues like the Fillmore with waves of sound up close and personal, starting appropriately with the rolling title track from the current release, Where the Action Is. The album is less a return to form, as a welcome integration of the new wave proto-pagan soul of the first three albums, with the rampant experimentation of the previous album Out of All This Blue, and their more unfortunate recent forays into rock, rhythm & blues by way of Austin. They then settled into some familiar territory with a couple solid Celtic folk tracks off 1988’s Fisherman’s Blues, and the Rolling Stones’ “Dead Flowers.” The next two tracks were homage to primary influences. Scott was clearly excited about new single ‘London Mick’, a Replacements style tribute to Clash’s Mick Jones. It was a nicely complimented by ‘A Girl Called Johnny’ the very first song recorded by the Waterboys, and a tribute to Patti Smith that brilliantly held promise of what was to come.

They followed this unblemished block with ‘Still a Freak’ from Modern Blues, which is a song that fully qualifies as Dad rock, with watery blues riffs and embarrassing lyrics assuring us that, though 60 years old, yes Mike is still cool. ‘Nashville Tennessee’ is better but more of the same.

And that pretty much sets the pattern for the night: Solid new material, vibrant first iteration tracks, then unfortunate dad rock, with ‘Rosalind (You Married the Wrong Guy)’ as the standout offender. Miraculously, each and every clunker ascended to a brilliant room-filling jam thanks to that virtuoso fiddle player, and a madman on keys who at varied points stripped off his shirt, and came to center stage looking like RiffRaff wailing on a keytar!

Standouts of the evening were ‘We Will Not Be Lovers’, ‘Morning Came Too Soon’, and ‘Ladbroke Grove Symphony’, a jazzy piece closing the first set with the running rhythm of Nina Simone’s ‘Sinnerman’. The band survived a significant soundboard disruption with grace and humor, and closed the show with cheesy but endearing ‘In My Time On Earth’

The single encore was the Waterboys’ only stateside hit, ‘The Whole of the Moon’ which epitomizes their early sound. Derailed a bit perhaps by the sound malfunction, it wasn’t the strongest rendition. Yet, singing along loud and off-key as can only be done to those recognizable singles, a clump of burly middle-aged Irishmen swayed and danced and bumped into each other and hugged and took embarrassed offense and patted each others backs with forgiveness in big over earnest rapture.