Live: Jesse Malin

I was really tired last Wednesday night. I’d been to shows Sunday, Monday and Tuesday night and my day job requires me to get up at 6:30 am every morning so to say the least, I was dragging…oh and I had a bad cold. So when it came time to go to the Troubadour to see Jesse Malin on Wednesday night, I was seriously debating over whether to go or not. Well, I’m glad I went, because the Brooklyn based singer-songwriter gave me my favorite show of the year so far (that is saying A LOT) and jerked me out of my lethargic daze quicker than all the coffee and red bull had been trying to do that day.

Opening for Malin for the entire Death and Taxes magazine sponsored tour is LA’s Acute who I’d met a couple months ago at different shows where they shared the bill with two of my favorite local acts,
The Parson Red Heads and The Ghost Kings. It was then that I picked up their great debut album Arms Around A Stranger, but unfortunately there were only a small collection of fans that made it down early enough for their 8:30 set. Next was former Hot Water Music singer Chuck Ragan, whose solo stuff is more in the acoustic-country vein and comes across as an ill-fated Social Distortion meets Johnny Cash hybrid aka Hank Williams III without the genes. We’ll use the kinder word of “mis-matched” as to why this guy was on the bill.

Then after an annoyingly long 45-60 minute wait, Jesse Malin took the stage with his band of four and opened with an amped up version of “Riding on the Subway” from 2003’s Ryan Adams produced
The Fine Art of Self-Destruction. I had seen Malin twice before this but only as a solo acoustic support act, so it was a nice change that allowed him to play many songs I hadn’t seen live before like “Cigarettes and Violets”, “Hotel Columbia” and “Wendy”. The set of songs that also included ones from 2004’s The Heat and this year’s Glitter in the Gutter were interjected with Malin’s always funny, between song (sometimes between extended verse and chorus) dialogue, that in the past has included stories about moving a bed for Barbara Streisand. This time he mostly focused on the sad digital state of music, “If I bought all my music online, I’d just buy London Calling over and over. I like going in to a record store and seeing what cool looking people are buying.” This was all prompted by his attempt to go to the now closed Tower Records on Sunset that happened to be rented out that day by The White Stripes and therefore dubbed Icky Thump Records. Another gripe he voiced was how a friend had once told him that she wouldn’t make it out to his show because she had a friend recording it and she’d just watch it on You Tube later, “I’m not a religious person and to me this is my religion, this is what I believe in”. What would normally be some pretty heavy handed talk was balanced by Malin’s irresistible charm and humour, including him rejecting all tags of “emo-core”, “alt-country” and routing all sub-genres back to the core of Jazz, “I’m Jesse Malin and I’m a jazz artist”.

The set was mostly focused on his new album, so many songs from that like “Broken Radio”, “Happy Ever After” and current single “Don’t Let Them Take You Down (Beautiful Day!)” were played. One of the best parts of the night was when he played “Solitaire” off of The Fine Art and had the entire audience sit on the floor as he walked around the crowd and sat with many people and made fun of those who wouldn’t sit down. After the initial set was over, Malin returned for an encore with an acoustic rendition of The Hold Steady’s “You Can Make Him Like You” and then the band returned for “Lucinda”, a song he admits is about singer-songwriter Lucinda Williams. The hi-light of the night however, was when Malin invited all the guys from Acute onstage for a cover of The Flaming Lips “Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots” that had just about everyone singing and smiling along. About an hour and half after he had taken the stage, Malin left and I simply had forgotten that I had ever been tired.

-Dane Sundseth