Photo of Bill Mallonee at Mad Donkey courtesy of Rob Blake. Used by permission.

Whether there’s five people there or 50, you try to play like there’s 5,000. Maybe there’s some nobility in that on some level, but there could be some stupidity too in sort of trying to keep a dream alive.
- Bill Mallonee

Road warrior singer-songwriter Bill Mallonee showed once again that he can “bleed on 10” even without his legendary (but underappreciated) band, Vigilantes of Love. About 100 people at the Mad Donkey Coffee House this evening were treated to two hours of Bill wearing his heart on his sleeve.

Before the concert, Karyn and I enjoyed the free Starbucks with several friends of this blog, including Dr. Joel, Mike and Rachel, Christiana, and Jason and Amanda…along with Josh, Adam, Sam, Scott, and many others from the Westminster community.

Bill began with an apology for the misinformation that he would be appearing with a reunited Vigilantes of Love, saying that we would just have to settle for him and his guitar. I don’t think anyone felt they were missing much once the songs got started. For one thing, with just guitar, harmonica, and his voice, Mallonee can more than adequately recrate the ethos of his most recent recordings. One thing for sure, Bill is an artist born for the live performance stage. He somehow projects intimacy so that you really do feel he is singing just for you. Singing and playing with “swagger and flair,” Mallonee took the audience on a two hour journey through scars salved with grace, drawing mostly from recent solo releases (particularly Dear Life, Friendly Fire, and Hit and Run) with just enough VoL classics thrown in (Solar System, Resplendent, Nothing Like a Train). He seemed a little tired, but in a good mood, enjoying the mostly attentive crowd. At one point he apologized for problems with his falsetto (which seemed fine to me), explaining that he had “olfactory issues” due to sleeping the night before in a house full of plug-in air freshners. Then, in typical Mallonee self-deprecation, adding, “This complaint from a man who spends 180 days a year sleeping in a van full of other guys’ laundry.”

Though the Mad Donkey venue is more like a “coffee warehouse” than a “coffee house,” there was a crescent of couches and folding chairs gathered tightly around the little stage. De rigueur postmodern decor was accomplished through candles, a film projected on a side wall at a bizarre angle, and a stage backdrop made up of dozens of stacked-up, old TV sets displaying static. Bill eschewed the raised stage, preferring to get as close to the audience as possible. For the gentler tunes, he seated himself on one of the folding chairs, connecting himself to his listeners all the more. His guitar playing was crisp and rhythmic, punctuated by the trademark forehead tapping and chest thumping. Like a violin made by a master, Bill’s voice shows the patina of age that has only increased its richness. One thing that struck me this evening is that Bill’s harmonica playing, always one of his strengths, is better than ever. He knows well how to use the mouth organ to add just the right accents to his solo performance.

As part of a two-song encore, we were treated to a cover of Neil Young’s “Out on the Weekend.” Mallonee has always listed Neil as one of his primary influences, so it was nice to hear this tribute. A personal highlight for me was hearing a live acoustic version of one of my favorite Bill Mallonee songs, Overflow (from Locket Full of Moonlight). It was like he did a request tune for me….three years late. Three years ago Karyn and I saw Bill at Jammin’ Java in Vienna, VA. Locket Full of Moonlight was out, but Bill told us he wasn’t going to do any songs from it because it was a “band album.” I shouted out “Overflow!” and Bill cocked his head for a moment, then said, “Yeah, that might work solo”…but didn’t do it. Well, tonight he made up for it. He confessed that he hadn’t played it for some time and “might have to bail on it,” but despite a couple of small stumbles, he made it through.

A big treat of any Bill Mallonee performance is his little “tuning talks” before songs. You never know what he’s going to say, but every time there’s at least one gem, usually more. My favorite this evening was an anecdote about recording Audible Sigh in Buddy and Julie Miller’s Nashville studio. Seems the Miller’s are huge cat fanciers. The cats have pretty much free reign of the house and studio. Julie had started feeding an opposum in the back yard, and eventually the critter learned to use the cat door to get into the house. Country songwriter Jim Lauderdale, who was renting a room at the time from the Millers, came down one morning to complain that the ‘possum had been sleeping under his bed. Buddy thought for a moment, then responded, “Guess I’m not charging you enough rent.”

Maybe even better was Bill’s tale about renting a car in Athens to drive to a set of gigs in Texas. The young rental agent mentioned he really missed Stevie Ray Vaughn. Bill agreed about the tragic loss to the musci world, and asked the agent if he knew the circumstances of Vaughn’s untimely death. When the agent responded that he didn’t, Bill told him that the great Eric Clapton had given up a seat on a helicopter so Vaughn could get to a gig. That helicopter went down, killing all on board. The young man looked at his shoes for “a pregnant pause that soon became post-partum,” then very seriously said, “Why couldn’t it have been Michael Jackson.”

I picked up a copy of Bill’s home produced CD “Hit and Run” after the concert. I’ll try to post a review of it in the next few days. Also, if any of the folks who took pictures of the Mad Donkey gig run across this review and would like to send me some of your photos, I’d be glad to swap them in to this post for the “stock” pics I used, with full attribution to you, of course.

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 17th, 2005 at 2:06 am and is filed under Music, Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.