Most people don't understand why I would drive four hours to see an eight dollar show. Most people don't know who Jolie Holland. As most people tell me, I'm not like most people. Regardless, I found myself standing with my wife outside of the Beachland Tavern, across from the R&B Sausage Co., well over an hour before show time eagerly anticipating an hour or so of music from an artist I hadn't heard of just a few weeks before. Eavesdropping on the sound check, I had a pretty good feeling that the show was going to be well worth the trip.
The Beachland Tavern isn't to be confused with the adjacent and presumably somewhat larger Beachland Ballroom. As the crowd slowly trickled in, it was obvious that this was a show meant for the tavern end of things. It's a shady little venue. A room sectioned off of a building that's history is stated in the marble at the entry way: "Croatian Home." The makeshift stage, well worn stage monitors, and veneer paneled bar reminded me of any number of other little bars...little places that have hosted some of my favorite performances.
After I found myself most of the way through one of those small time bar cheeseburgers and the better part of a basket of fries, Expecting Rain took the stage. They were a rather unassuming looking bunch, and from their appearance I was expecting anything from heart-wrenching emo ballads to Pink Floyd covers. What we got was a blend of folk music somewhere between Simon and Garfunkle and Rilo Kiley, confidently strummed and sung by frontman Nick Tolar, who has a voice reminiscent of John Wozniak (Marcy Playground). The songs were poems put to music about failed love and how much Cleveland sucks, as one would expect from a band who's name pays homage to Bob Dylan. And they (the songs and the band) impressed me a great deal...of course, it is well known fact that I'm a sucker for sad songs and acoustic guitar. Ballad of Labron James was magic. Check these guys out if you're the folksy type from around Cleveland.
Most of the local crowd was still distracted with Expecting Rain and/or their own conversations when Holland took the stage. Her touring band is pretty minimal consisting of the brilliant Dave Milhaly on drums and the soulful Brian Miller on electric guitar (hollow body Les Paul style of course). Jolie plays acoustic guitar and fiddle as well. She started her set off with "Goodbye California", a matter of fact country tune about...well, leaving California. As if there were any doubt at all, her voice is as good or better live as it is on the album. Of course, live is almost always better in my opinion, but this type of music is meant to be heard live, and she had me transfixed in about 5 milliseconds. I'm not even going to attempt to describe her voice. Just go to her website and stream Catalpa if you haven't heard her. Anyway, back to the show. "Poor Girl's Blues" is an instant classic and was great to hear live. For some unknown reason, it seemed to take the majority of the crowd awhile to figure out that this wasn't just some stray cat from the bayou. I think she woke them up with the memorable and profane closing of "Do You?". Certainly if "Do You?" didn't get the room's attention an awesome performance of the haunting, native american tinged "Alley Flowers", made the crowd helplessly hers. She offered a free cd to anyone who could guess the two time signatures used in Alley Flowers, and even though there were more than a few musicians in the crowd, no one could. 12/8 would have been half of the correct answer. At one point, Jolie gave a rather interesting and entertaining 'ghost' story about her friend Sascha and the ghost of Jim Morrison before leading into the song named for "Sascha". They played a song from Catalpa called "Wandering Angus" which is a W. B. Yeats poem that guitarist Brian Miller put to music. Jolie's voice mixed with the vibrations of that hollow body Epiphone sounded incredibly sweet. The undisputable highlight of the show came in the form of the closest thing she has as a single, "Old Fashioned Morphine."' It's a jazzy song that requires some horn to get the full effect. So the venue cook Rafik was recruited to play trumpet and a very talented jazz musician, Josh, happened to be on hand to play sax. It was an inspired and amusing improv performance by all involved. She closed her set with upbeat and vocally impressive "Mad Tom of Bedlam" after which she proclaimed "I think that is the last song that I want to do." Fortunately, drummer Dave Milhaly, along with Josh and Rafik, was talked into doing a rap song as an encore. It was a great little rhyme he had written about the corruption of American youth, George Bush (sr.), and war. The chorus went "Stelazine, stelazine...stelazine, stelazine..." It was one of the many highlights of the evening and served as a good crowd pleasing closer.
In the future I'm going to make an effort to make sure that this is not the last Jolie Holland performance I see.
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