Like many of my favorite artists, I first heard of A.A. Bondy through Daytrotter. I was a huge fan of his set after the first listen, and I always associated Bondy with the lonesome harmonica + gentle vocals + soft acoustic guitar sound that permeates the session. Before his show with Fences and Willy Mason at the Tractor Tavern on Saturday, I also checked out a couple of other songs off of his first and second albums, and I heard another live session he had taped, but none of it did anything to change my conception of the man or his music. Seeing him live, however, proved all of my preconceptions about his music wrong.
It was a really good show, front to back. Both of the openers were relatively new to me – I had heard the 1.5 Fences songs on the GIVE Seattle compilation before, but I had never heard of Willy Mason. Fortunately, I’m happy to report that he sounds exactly like you might think that a guy with the name Willy Mason might sound. Most of his songs fell squarely on the country side of folk, and his set was quiet, slow, and acoustic – just like I expected out of Bondy. Fences drew the biggest audience of the evening, and they played a solid set. Given that they are much more high energy than both Mason and Bondy, they seemed to me to be an interesting choice for an opener, but Chris Mansfield, lead singer of Fences, remarked that he was a big Bondy fan, so maybe that’s how it happened. The most notable part of their performance, for me, was when both the drummer and the lead singer absolutely laid into the chatty audience – at one point calling them ignorant rednecks who learned only to talk and not make music, among other things. I thought that it was pretty hilarious, particularly given that most of the chatty people seemed to be there for Fences (thankfully a lot of them cleared out by the end of Bondy’s set), but whatever – it’s true that a lot of the audience was obnoxiously loud all night, Fences will get no disagreement from me there.
Well, anyway, as it turned out, Fences wasn’t as inappropriate of an opener for Bondy as I first thought they might be. Instead of being hushed and haunting, Bondy surprised me by absolutely rocking his set. Accompanied by a drummer (who was tastefully muted and didn’t overpower the rest of the music) and a bassist, Bondy sounded nothing like the quiet and folksy musician I expected to take the stage. Though I like quiet folksy Bondy just fine, this change was actually a good thing. In the past, I have almost always been disappointed when artists that I like for their softer solo material perform with a band. For example, I fell in love with Cat Power after hearing a recording of her solo Live at La Cigale Paris set (and her solo live at WWU bootleg, and her solo Nacht-Mix Lounge session, and her. . . ok, so I really loved Cat Power for a while), but I walked out of her show at Showbox SoDo because hearing the quiet songs that I loved so much being blasted by a full band absolutely ruined the experience for me – I felt like everything intimate that I loved about the songs was crudely violated by pepping them up and playing them with a band (on a related note, I have never seen a show that I like at Showbox SoDo – I’m not really sure why, just sayin’).
Surprisingly, I had absolutely the opposite experience with A.A. Bondy. The harder that the band rocked, the more I liked them. Not only was I surprised by how much I liked the more rocking versions of his songs, but I was really taken aback by just how profoundly Bondy transformed himself as a vocalist when performing live. Whereas I had always thought of his voice as sleepy and somewhat distant, live it was raw and plaintive – emoting to a level I did not expect and fitting the bigger sound perfectly. Instead of standing and gently strumming and plucking on an acoustic all night long, at times he banged his hollowbody electric guitar on the ground near his amps for a pretty cool feedback effect, and with the band, created dark and lush guitar-driven soundscapes that reminded me somewhat of something you might hear from Castanets. He was electric for most of the show, though he did play some solo acoustic towards the middle and end of his set. Yes, there was harmonica, and yes, it was awesome. You could really tell that these songs meant something to Bondy, and he held nothing back when delivering them. So, yeah, it was an awesome show, and I expect that I will continue listening to Bondy for long into the future. If you like the music I linked to above, you should check out his CD, it’s pretty great.
AA Bondy photo by Jason Tang.
