Beard Rock Magazine

It promised to be an intimate evening. Entrance required an invitation. Conversely, one could become a supporter of the radio station host, to the tune of US $1,500, for passes. The latter was not an option; the former was extended to me, plus one. Online photos of the venue revealed a space roughly the size of my tiny condo’s footprint. We would be up close and personal with Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds.

What my appreciation for these gentlemen lacks in length, it makes up for in depth.  A run-in with the album Tender Prey (on cassette) at age 13 left me confused and slightly scared. It was clearly Important Music, but I lacked the essential enzyme, or whatever it was. From time to time I’d give it another go, but it never worked. I shrugged and gave it away to an older, cooler, extremely enthusiastic kid.

Then around 2004, a friend of mine devoted some serious time and effort to getting me to give the Bad Seeds another try. He kept insisting I’d love them. After some initial resistance, and partly to get the guy off my back, I picked a few songs at random from the by-now-extensive catalog. I gave them a whirl. And -- surprise, surprise -- they blew my mind. The lyrics. The lyrics! The arrangement of the music. The exquisite musicianship. The we-do-as-we-please-thank-you variance in styles.

And, well: the baritone.

I was done for. This band was everything I loved about my favorite writers, stories, singers, songwriters, musicians, and stage productions, all rolled into one.

So when a client called one day to ask whether I was doing anything on April 18, because Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds were playing at a recording studio in Santa Monica, I assured her I was available. My plus-one and I arrived early -- way too early. A woman about my mother’s age pulled up in her Subaru and yelled, “Is this where all the Nick Cave fans go who are too old for Coachella?” I smiled and said yes. “Well, it’s too early. I’m going to go get some dinner,” she boomed, cheerily, and drove off. My friend and I shrugged at each other, cheeks crosshatched. The crew emerged periodically from the studio for smoke breaks and eyed us warily. My friend and I made up a running commentary based on what we’d have thought of us: God, those idiots have been standing there since last week. Can someone turn the sprinklers on them? But we reckoned we’d get a good spot inside. And we did.

(Still, I was pleasantly surprised when, at the start of the show, Warren Ellis asked me to hand him one of his violin bows. Standing, as I was, with knees against the open violin case, I was closer to the bows than he was.)

They opened with ‘Higgs Boson Blues’, after which Nick asked the audience what they wanted to hear. A chorus of requests rang out. One audience member ardently asked for ‘Breathless’, and a grinning Warren played a recorded snippet of the intro for her. Then Nick announced that they could play the requested songs, but they weren’t going to. A brief silence fell upon the (tiny) crowd, and I asked, in a voice only slightly louder than normal, “Will you be closing with Stagger Lee?”

“Ah...” Nick said, turning to look at me. “Well...I could...read it to you.”

“Yes,” I said, nodding.

He did that mock-stern thing he does, and let his voice drop lower.

“Later,” he said. “Just you and me. One on one.” And he motioned offstage.

I shot him the thumbs-up sign while the audience laughed and hooted.

He gave me a long look, then looked at my friend.

“Is he...your...?” He pointed from me to my friend, and back again.

“No!” I said.

The audience laughed again.

“Okay,” he said, and launched into 'Far From Me'.

It was a short and fairly loose set, with a lot of jokes and a lot of starting and stopping. That casual vibe allowed for a closer look at the relationships between band members, as my friend pointed out. More than once, Nick turned to Warren or to bassist Martyn Casey for the right opening chord: “Is it D minor? C minor??” Sometimes a song just gets away from you, he explained. And when it doesn’t?

“That was better than the Red Hot Chili Peppers,” he said, after one such song. The audience laughed and clapped.

But Warren shook his head.

“That’s how rumors get started, mate,” he said. “I think you meant [Coachella headliners] the Stone Roses.” He burst out laughing. Nick concurred and repeated the comment to the audience, saying that of course he was joking about the Chili Peppers, as “they’re friends of ours.”

Given that the stage at Apogee is narrow and long, I saw quite a bit of Nick and Warren and decidedly less of the rest of the band. Martyn was a pillar of calm, playing steadily and unassumingly. (I ran into him afterward, outside, and he was mellow and down-to-earth.) Jim Sclavunos was back in a corner, on the drums with his usual graceful focus. He sang backup on a couple of the tunes, along with Warren, quite beautifully. For some reason I only laid eyes on Barry Adamson, erstwhile Bad Seed who’s joined this tour, during the final song, which, er, answered my questions about where the keyboard music was coming from.

Anyway, the thing about all of it was how normal it felt.

In 2009 I saw Leonard Cohen play in downtown Los Angeles. The seats were provided by a friend’s employer, so they were great seats, and it was a phenomenal show. At several points throughout the evening I caught myself thinking, That’s Leonard Cohen! That is totally Leonard Cohen!

Years earlier, at a different concert, I was seated next to Gloria Steinem. Throughout the show, I’d catch sight of her from the corner of my eye every few minutes and think, Whoa! Gloria Steinem. There she is. Right next to me.

This experience elicited none of that. There was nothing surreal about it. It was simply a lovely, deeply intimate, candid evening, spent in close quarters with talented, seasoned musicians who love what they do, and a group of people who love it, too. Blush-inducing banter thrown in at no extra cost. A treat, from start to finish.

As for me, I maintain a remarkable flexibility in my schedule where any Stagger Lee-themed spoken word engagements might be concerned.

You can listen to the Apogee Studios set here: 

http://www.kcrw.com/music/programs/mb/mb130520nick_cave_and_the_ba/#