Richard Buckner is conducting a tour of what he is calling his "Living Room Shows." Last night was his first, and I was there, seated on a sofa with a couple other graybeards; an attractive, mature couple sipping red wine at my feet; facing us ten-feet away, Richard Buckner, a big guy with long hair in a brown sports coat, looking not unlike a more attractive, virile Tiny Tim. He sat in a wooden chair at the front of the staircase and played acoustic guitar and sang and spoke for 90 minutes. He ended the performance with the a capella "Fater," from his seminal Devotion + Doubt (1997) major-label debut, delivered from the bathroom, which provided just enough distance and echo. Wonderful!
Before proceeding any further, I want to say that there a lot of ways I can approach this. I am dealing with a more liberal time constraint since I used a vacation day today knowing that I would get home late and not want to go into work with four-hours sleep. I could do a straight review of Buckner's performance and what it felt like to see an artist in a private residence among other fans who learned about the show via the Internet; I could describe the heft of Buckner's catalog; I could discourse on what I mean by "Life at the Millennium." But mostly I just want to make a purely adulatory statement: I think Richard Buckner is one of our most important contemporary artists. His recordings are close to my heart. As I mentioned in a previous Hippies vs. Punks post, his Impasse (2002) helped get me through a difficult stretch. In this age of digitally distracted time constriction, Richard Buckner's music taps into a fundamental honeyed current that must exist in order for life to flow forward.
The "Living Room Shows" support Surrounded, Buckner's latest record which was released at the end of last summer. It is an excellent album, consistent with the high quality we have come to expect from our bard of the millennium, and well worth picking up:
Buckner appeared yesterday morning on KEXP during Cheryl Waters' "The Midday Show" and performed some songs off Surrounded. It was on KEXP over 15 years ago, when it was KCMU, that I first heard Richard Buckner. Then he was promoting Devotion + Doubt on Amanda Wilde's show. What I remember is how hilarious the two were together, so much so that I got out a cassette tape and started recording their repartee. (Somewhere in a storage facility in Southern Oregon I still have that cassette.) Last night Buckner performed quite a few songs, in addition to the above-mentioned "Fater," from Devotion + Doubt:
One of the things that I remember about Amanda Wilde's electrifying interview of Richard Buckner from those days preceding the millennium is that it was a beautiful sunny afternoon. You see, we still had the sun -- sunniness -- back in the 1990s. Now, the sun still shines, but, paraphrasing Dylan from "Highlands," it is not the same sun. The sun that shines now heralds not a Golden Age, but a period of cataclysm and destruction and evil spirits. We cleared the Y2K hurdle, but we haven't made it to "the millennium" yet.
Time after time during the winter of 2002-2003 I would listen to Impasse. I was breaking up with my girlfriend of 11 years. I was fracturing, splitting in two. But I still had to go to work and earn a living, etc. The nation, post 9/11, was on its way to war with Iraq. At the office we were allowed to listen to music while we sat and toiled at our desks. I had a Sony Walkman. Once I made it through the first 11 songs of Impasse, I would cross a dividing line when I got to track 12, "Were You Tried & Not as Tough."
"Impasse:," "I Know What I Knew," and "Stutterstep" would follow, concluding the album and locating me in a blank, airy heaven realm.
Each time I completed listening to Impasse I participated in some sort of magical, healing dramaturgy, and I was stronger for it. What else can art aspire to? Once "Stutterstep" finished I would hit play and start the process over again.
So I'm going to cut it short with that. No disquisition of how alt-country grows out of cowpunk; no thumbnail sketch of American political history since Clintontime. Just pick up any Richard Buckner record and have a listen. Better yet, go hear him sing in someone's living room.
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