ADANOWSKY, JADE, GRACE WOODROOFE, DJ DEVENDRA BANHART @ HARVARD AND STONE
November 8th, 2011 · No Comments
Harvard and Stone used to be just “the Stone,” a triumphantly shabby drag queen hangout that could service Jean Spinosa’s Wig Out as easily as an impromptu rock show. Now that gentrification bucks have graduated it into “Harvard and Stone,” an upscale-looking hetero joint they’ve decorated ironically by peeling off the plaster, exposing the wood and drywall, installing vintage-looking low wattage bulbs, and basically going “slum chic” with the whole thing, it seemed a little out of place as a venue for Jade Castrinos, the jubilant female co-singer of Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros, she with the purity of Joan Baez but the aw-shucks glee of June Carter.
And yep, sure enough, her simple setup of an acoustic geetar and microphone was too much for the dedicated but ill-equipped Harvard and Stone sound crew, and a peal of feedback toyed with her like a catty ghost intermittently throughout the set. No matter—she was mesmerizing, and not just because she’s the most adorable thing ever, yet more obscure than she deserves, praised by websites as diverse as Curve Magazine andfuckyeahjadecastrinos.com yet oddly difficult to pin down via a formal press release. Since I know little more about her than that Alex Ebert apparently “discovered” her sitting at a coffee shop because he liked the cut of her jib and that magically, poof, she was as talented as all hell and helped make his band famous, it’s hard to say how she got so good. But I really am torn between who’s better, Jade or June Carter, and not just because Jade is alive and can still perform. Both have a penchant for solid, dirt-honest female vocals and for bringing mirth and merriment everywhere they go, with Carter perhaps slightly wittier and Jade with perhaps slightly better pipes.
In case you’re wondering, Jade solo is the same Jade you think you know, just as smiley and happy from two feet away as in every photo of her in Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros on a festival stage you’ve ever seen. As she tuned and tried to adjust to the crappy sound system by leaving her elevated stool and sitting cross-legged on the low stage, even her eyes smiled, and her eyebrows too. And if I’d had a magnifying glass, I would suspect that her dimples are smile-shaped.
But her songs were not so shiny and happy. Tragic songs poured out of her about loneliness and unimportance: “There is no sailor, there is no sea. There is no you nor even me.” The painful delicacy of the whole thing threatened to be shattered by the Hollywood douche bags in the back of the crowd, who were talking to each other so loudly, my friends and I just barely resisted shooshing them (we should have!). But Jade took it all in stride, dropping songs like little packages of special pain into the laps of the front-row favorites, my favorite being a ditty about angel choirs that could have scored a David Lynch film ten years ago.
It was beautiful, and so of course it was a letdown to see Jade make way for Grace Woodroofe and her more rockin’ band. Nothing wrong with Grace Woodroofe per se—in fact, she too has a beautiful voice, a strong, somber thing that’s put her in the public eye since about age 16. And she’s a major looker, and could be/probably is a model. Maybe there I’m showing my prejudice, but aren’t rock and roll stars supposed to be a little ugly? Rock is supposed to transform plain-janes like Joan Jett and Roger Daltrey into steaming piles of sex, and if you start off already looking like a smoking-hot damsel with alabaster skin, well, where’s the charm?
But my puttering inability to engage with the band wasn’t all Olivia Munn-ery and the backwards prejudice in beauty—there was something lacking in this band. Not so much a salad of sounds as a sludge in between, Woodroofe’s act couldn’t quite seem to make up its mind about whether it was hard rock or poignant songcraft, and if it was supposed to be the latter, well, songs rhyming “lover,” “father,” and “mother” might as well just go into “I’m a servant/I’m a saint” and become Alanis Morissette. Actually, the template for Woodroofe’s act seems to be that more respectable 90’s icon, PJ Harvey (and I don’t just say that because they’re both Aussies). But Harvey in her youth always had a hard, dark, crazy, jealous edge, and I can’t say that I felt a whole lot of danger in Woodroofe’s performance—certainly not enough danger to scare away the aforementioned douches.
Though that too is prejudice: maybe the douche bags just show up every night, like roaches, for the architecture. I also saw a ton of chill, happy-as-hell fans in the front cheering Woodroofe on, clearly loving it, Mia Doi Todd herself among them, and me! So maybe what I was seeing was a lackluster performance by an otherwise respectable artist. But really, Woodroofe’s was not an inspiring show. Even closing with a cover of the Stooges’ “Now I Wanna Be Your Dog” couldn’t redeem things, as Woodroofe bounced around in her designer-looking white dress that has never seen a stain in its life, much less a jar of peanut butter.
But then the stage filled up with the main course in our aural dinner: Adanowsky, with a new band that looked like it was made up of the Bizarro world Village People: a mixed martial arts villain on guitar, a white nerdy thing on keyboards who could have been in the Zombies, and a bassist with hair like a Brazilian Chris Ziegler!
Adanowsky himself, AKA Adan Jodorowsky, might at first seem to have a pretty boy pedigree. An actor cum musician who likes to unbutton his shirt a little during the show, and the child of director Alejandro Jodorowsky, clearly many ladies find him gorgeous as well—and even if the gals don’t respond immediately, he’ll strike first by staging videos with Devendra Banhart and a bunch of naked ladies covered in makeup having an orgy around him. But as an actor, his films have been insane and bloody, and as a musician, he’s punk enough to actually engage with the crowd. When the set started, a drunken couple was actively making out right on the stage, and as the band began to play, Adanowsky pried them off the stage with a mic stand poke, then gracefully avoided a full-on brawl when the man of the pair tried to pick a fight: “Don’t worry, I won’t sleep with your wife!”
When I saw Adanowsky at SXSW earlier this year, it was in a lineup that included some great bands such as Shannon and the Clams and the Growlers. But Adanowsky in particular impressed me, skirting the line somehow between smooth country rock and Murph and the Magic Tones but, you know, with a more international intrigue flair, singing in Spanish and French as often as English.
This new line-up had even more zing, and more swing, and more sex appeal, possibly because he was less jet-lagged and better dressed than he’d been in Austin in the spring. His press people have been pushing the legend of little Adan Jodorowsky learning to dance from James Brown—it sounds more to me like he just got to meet James Brown as a kid, like once, but hey, he certainly busted a move Wednesday night, twirling and dipping and bringing a kind of coy macho sexiness that we haven’t really seen since 80’s Prince. At one point, he stopped singing and literally said “I want to give you a little bit of kisses,” then leaned into the audience as a smorgasbord of women jumped out of their boyfriends’ arms and up to the front of the stage to get a big wet peck on the cheek or three. The songs were a mix of Spanish, French, and English, some of which he dedicated to Devendra, who was holding court behind the turntables in his shocking short black locks.
Not being a polyglot, or even bilingual like seemingly most of the audience, I missed out on some of the lyrics that weren’t en Inglés. But on the rare acoustic numbers, I could make out the sentiments just fine, and on the rock numbers—well, what more do you need to understand when a beautiful young man coos “Jam du Jour” while wiggling his hips, and when the need to dance propels my feet anywhere but out to my car?
Intending only to stay until a safe bedtime, I stuck around for the entire thing, wondering when late November would approach so I could get the new Adanowsky disk coming out with some of these tunes on it. It’s both shallowand deep, the way post-war guitar-based music sounds best. With his hairstyle and approach to music, clearly he’s got one foot in the Serge Gainsbourg legacy and another in the world of smooth soul, and from that, he’s able to strut like a shaman.
-Dan Collins
