Jason Webley, Home Show & Bottle Village
September of '04 a friend, Jason Webley, came to town and played at the Knitting Factory. Missed that show. He'd apparently run long (for the KF) and took his crowd to the street and when he was done he'd asked the crowd if anyone knew of a place to play in town on such-and-such a night. A venue of any sort, since he's still trying to build an audience in the region, a house even. A young woman spoke up when no one else did and offered her Woodland Hills home. Arrangements were made and the event was cast.
A digression for context, Jason is local phenomenon in Seattle and fills mid-size halls. He's toured around the world -- big in Russia -- and maintains internet contact with his scattered fans who learn webly of Webley's shows. Fans come to him widely. Tom Misuraca was sent a promo CD and he liked the Tom Waitsishness of a tune and paired it with a Waits song in the rotation on his internet radio station, an otherwise "Goth, 80s, Punk" venue. A 30-something couple attending the Woodland Hills show discovered him at some fairgrounds performance a couple years previous during a time when they had sold everything they'd owned, bought an RV and toured N.California and Oregon for a few years. The 20-something woman who spoke up and offered her home found Webley when a roommate at her Midwestern university used some music in a documentary they had made. She'd come to the Valley in the previous couple months ("Is it always this hot?") meeting up with and bringing a passel of her college friends, many who were at her home to see Webley.
Trouble was, home was an apartment in an immense and mazely Gordian knot of an apartment complex with bad signage and keyed entry and distant parking. A handful of folks found their way, us included. And Jason, who drove up from some OC college and an after-party of adoring coeds, to discover his email and website posting of little more than an address was woefully inadequate for an unadventurous fan circling the Owensmouth/Burbank vicinity.
He seemed a sport about it enough to make a bit of a show that ended with the 15 or so people there spinning like dervishes and singing:
"When the glass is full,
Drink up! Drink up!
This maybe the last time
We see this cup.
If God wanted us sober,
He'd knock the glass over,
So while it is full we drink up!"
The performance began with him telling a story of how Chris & I had met him the previous year. A good friend, Monte Merrick -- a poet and publisher doing schtick here, was staying with us while he worked in wildlife rehab and Jason was a good friend of his (enough to sing in the chorus on an album cut). Monte and Chris had seen him play a show (I missed that show owing to my workshift and geographical ineptitude, a tangent that ends with me buying a cell phone soon after) at what surprisingly (to Jason) turned out to be an apparently kind of sophisticated day-care center/kids school where as a portion of their artsy outreach host performances of contemporary types. Someone, upon hearing "ecclectic folk singer/accordian player with a lot of vegetable imagery in his songs and on his records and he's touring with a puppeteer" thought it'd be good for the kids to see. Nevermind that one of the puppet pieces was rabbits acting out the story of a Johnny Cash song where one of the rabbits is hanged at the end. Parents were aghast. The kids loved it, Jason said, telling the handful of us in that apartment that it was that show which was maybe the weirdest venue he'd played, until this one.
"This one" was a smidge of a collegiate hollow with improvised art on the walls, including an LP cover of an Allen Sherman masterpiece. The differences between that evening and this one, though many, ended similarly in that Jason afterwards stayed overnight on an extra bed at our house. Last time, the next day, Jason and the puppeteer and Monte and us wound our way to the Watts Towers (a touchstone for Jason, returning when he's in the region) and along the way -- to be reductive -- we stopped at a yard sale and a taco stand and witnessed a spontaneous folk song in Spanish by the puppeteer on ukelele that was unprompted by and discomforting for the Latino retail store owners for whom he performed and for a yardsale-goer he performed a rather odd bilingual folktale technique of relaying the words of some vulgar tune where images illustrating phrases are painted primitively on sheets bound on one side and flipped in sequence, or so I recall.
We arrived at Watts Towers on the day of a drum festival featuring Leon Ndugu Chancler, art & craft show, food fair -- cool sounds, some fine fine art and great smells. I raved about Bottle Village (similarly envisioned as to be constructed from consumer cast-offs, similarly movitated by an anti-alcohol streak, but constructed vastly differently since Simon Rodia was very much a preternatural engineer and Grandma Prisby was very much not) and how next time Jason should see that.
So this time we went.
A digression for context, Jason is local phenomenon in Seattle and fills mid-size halls. He's toured around the world -- big in Russia -- and maintains internet contact with his scattered fans who learn webly of Webley's shows. Fans come to him widely. Tom Misuraca was sent a promo CD and he liked the Tom Waitsishness of a tune and paired it with a Waits song in the rotation on his internet radio station, an otherwise "Goth, 80s, Punk" venue. A 30-something couple attending the Woodland Hills show discovered him at some fairgrounds performance a couple years previous during a time when they had sold everything they'd owned, bought an RV and toured N.California and Oregon for a few years. The 20-something woman who spoke up and offered her home found Webley when a roommate at her Midwestern university used some music in a documentary they had made. She'd come to the Valley in the previous couple months ("Is it always this hot?") meeting up with and bringing a passel of her college friends, many who were at her home to see Webley.
Trouble was, home was an apartment in an immense and mazely Gordian knot of an apartment complex with bad signage and keyed entry and distant parking. A handful of folks found their way, us included. And Jason, who drove up from some OC college and an after-party of adoring coeds, to discover his email and website posting of little more than an address was woefully inadequate for an unadventurous fan circling the Owensmouth/Burbank vicinity.
He seemed a sport about it enough to make a bit of a show that ended with the 15 or so people there spinning like dervishes and singing:
"When the glass is full,
Drink up! Drink up!
This maybe the last time
We see this cup.
If God wanted us sober,
He'd knock the glass over,
So while it is full we drink up!"
The performance began with him telling a story of how Chris & I had met him the previous year. A good friend, Monte Merrick -- a poet and publisher doing schtick here, was staying with us while he worked in wildlife rehab and Jason was a good friend of his (enough to sing in the chorus on an album cut). Monte and Chris had seen him play a show (I missed that show owing to my workshift and geographical ineptitude, a tangent that ends with me buying a cell phone soon after) at what surprisingly (to Jason) turned out to be an apparently kind of sophisticated day-care center/kids school where as a portion of their artsy outreach host performances of contemporary types. Someone, upon hearing "ecclectic folk singer/accordian player with a lot of vegetable imagery in his songs and on his records and he's touring with a puppeteer" thought it'd be good for the kids to see. Nevermind that one of the puppet pieces was rabbits acting out the story of a Johnny Cash song where one of the rabbits is hanged at the end. Parents were aghast. The kids loved it, Jason said, telling the handful of us in that apartment that it was that show which was maybe the weirdest venue he'd played, until this one.
"This one" was a smidge of a collegiate hollow with improvised art on the walls, including an LP cover of an Allen Sherman masterpiece. The differences between that evening and this one, though many, ended similarly in that Jason afterwards stayed overnight on an extra bed at our house. Last time, the next day, Jason and the puppeteer and Monte and us wound our way to the Watts Towers (a touchstone for Jason, returning when he's in the region) and along the way -- to be reductive -- we stopped at a yard sale and a taco stand and witnessed a spontaneous folk song in Spanish by the puppeteer on ukelele that was unprompted by and discomforting for the Latino retail store owners for whom he performed and for a yardsale-goer he performed a rather odd bilingual folktale technique of relaying the words of some vulgar tune where images illustrating phrases are painted primitively on sheets bound on one side and flipped in sequence, or so I recall.
We arrived at Watts Towers on the day of a drum festival featuring Leon Ndugu Chancler, art & craft show, food fair -- cool sounds, some fine fine art and great smells. I raved about Bottle Village (similarly envisioned as to be constructed from consumer cast-offs, similarly movitated by an anti-alcohol streak, but constructed vastly differently since Simon Rodia was very much a preternatural engineer and Grandma Prisby was very much not) and how next time Jason should see that.
So this time we went.
