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A man walks into a bar. Not a joke, this one’s a story. This man, Ken Stringfellow, walks into a bar in his former country and plays music for three hours, leaves behind a big piece of himself, admits an equivalent degree of hospitality from the people who accept his gift, and departs again. He wears shiny leather shoes and skinny pink jeans, looks eternally youthful, and has perfected a mode of existence, traveling as a pretext for making music and making music as a pretext for traveling. He’s lived in France since the early part of this century, and mocks the misinformation of an expatriate: “What’s more popular here these days, ice sculpture or butter sculpture?” … “Is it true that in ten years all Americans will be required to drive a smart car with a gun rack on the back?”
But the relocation has also resulted in an amazing artistic transformation, from co-leader of The Posies to worldly pop troubadour. I can’t think of any musician who started off better in the 21st century, and at the beginning of its second decade, he still has access to the same voice (pure Nina Simone, if it wasn’t forced to always fight against a native resistance, that lower persistent croak), narrative empathy, and aura of unacknowledged genius. You won’t hear many albums better than 2001’s Touched and 2004’s Soft Commands, and he largely focused on those records in the clubhouse at Brit’s Pub, bouncing between guitar and keyboard, sometimes unintuitively, as when piano ballad “Known Diamond” was rendered with strummed chords, losing the Elton John intricacy of its piano arrangement but gaining commensurately in vocal nuance. The similar solo treatment of songs from Soft Commands, so varied in production on record, suggested that what they must have in common is a genesis in a series of very nice rooms (the clubhouse at Brit’s being only the latest and perhaps most modest station). These songs have known luxury.
Touched standout “Uniforms,” the tale of doomed gay lovers in 1930s Berlin, required a history lesson for the younger members of the crowd (given with great, almost absurd, tact). The lesson was perhaps useful all around, as the song’s bright chords belie its themes; it reaches a dark, breathless drama at the climax, but then returns to its previous buoyant refrain. “A shot splits the air,” but the sweet release could easily be mistaken for a happy ending. Later, the words of suicide tale “Down Like Me” gained the hushed utterance that was their due, but the musical irony persisted, as did fictional and poetic integrity.
A nearly three-hour set can’t be quickly summarized, but it did divide neatly into the “main set” that comprised this solo material, and what might be called the “encore,” marked not by a re-emergence but by a trip into The Posies songbook, and, further, into a sort of exhausted lunacy. “Grant Hart” was essential given we were in Minneapolis (it struck me anew how perfectly the song follows Hart’s own melodic and rhythmic tendencies) and The Replacements‘ “Kids Don’t Follow” was a complementary choice of cover.
During a particular fit of sleepless hilarity, “One Morning” morphed into a dozen different unlikely and quickly abandoned covers (Carole King, The Pretenders, The Beach Boys, Ramones, other reliables) before reaching its conclusion. And then, to finally signal that he didn’t intend to play until morning, he ended with Big Star’s “Take Care,” just as Yo La Tengo did very recently at the 400 Bar. Perhaps you can’t understand Alex Chilton until you’ve heard his words on the cusp of sleep.
