A Bright Eyes show. I think anyhow....

Was this a Bright Eyes show? I have no idea. I suppose doing a show like this is pretty cool, keeps people on their toes and makes the live experience something much much different from just pressing 'play' on your stereo. But this might have been bordering on disconcerting. Interesting, yes. The unnerving bit came in from all the blurred lines between who's set we were actually watching, and what songs we were actually hearing, and how coherent everyone on stage was.

It began innocently enough... M. Ward kicked off the show with his soft songs and out-of-this-world guitar action, much like he did the last time I saw Bright Eyes. Ward was soon joined by... well, who knows? Second act? Accompaniment to the first act? Whatever the case, Jim James, otherwise known as part of My Morning Jacket, was now on stage taking the helm of some of the songs while Ward still played on beside. It was very odd to see James like this - barefoot, hair back, very calm. A little different from how we're used to seeing him. Through all of this (and I'm not familiar with either's music enough to know who was playing whose songs at what time...), Bright Eyes personified, the unpredictable Conor Oberst, was seen sitting cross-legged just off stage, a beer on the floor beside him, hands tented and propping up his chin as he closed his eyes and nodded thoughtfully along to the music.

Eventually, he too picked up a guitar and joined the others on stage. Now's where things really got haywire. Not out-of-control by any means, just confusing. Interestingly, Oberst's own songs were altered so much in this outing that many of them were difficult to pick up on at the outset, and became almost impossible to sing along to. This may well have been the intent of Oberst, who seemed to drive a wedge firmly between himself and his audience. There's something untouchable about Oberst, even though he seems at the same time extremely fragile and as though if you get in his circle of trust, you're there for the long haul.

This was the 'Masters Of Folk" show, a point that the people on stage didn't let the audience forget for more than the duration of any one song. Repeatedly, Oberst would shout with varying force "We are the Masters... [dramatic pause]... of FOLK!" [dramatic echo]. Wilty girls collapsed themselves in a twitterpated state all over the edge of the stage, maybe waiting for Oberst to notice that each one looked a little more woeful and despondent than the next. He didn't. In fact, he appeared to make not the slightest note of the audience until some time later in the set when he acted out towards some guy in the room who'd been shouting out requests or telling him to stop his jittery banter and play more songs or something. He actually stopped a couple bars into a song and said, "Hmm well, hey hey, I have an idea. Why don't you come on up here and sing this next song? Oh, that's right, because you can't." And then he whipped himself away from the microphone and started the tune over again. Ouch.

The bossy, nonchalant attitude is somehow part of his draw. Maybe it's his "playing hard to get" factor, maybe it's the hardened-exterior-from-a-troubled-mind thing that makes people want to understand and get through to him. But he is a strange and fascinating creature to watch. He either got drunker or just more stage-high as the show progressed, longer and longer into this whirling mass of jams and mixed songs and timelines. Ward and James would often take over with one of their songs, while Oberst hung back, lying on the ground and smiling to himself as he tried to see the strings he was pressing, taking up a chair, or just wandering around thrusting various body parts into the air. He played songs spanning his impressive career, including a bunch of new ones from the double album that hadn't even been released yet.

A really interesting showing from Oberst again. Not quite as enrapturing as the first time I saw him, but having a dozen people packed on a stage with all sorts of exotic instruments is obviously more dazzling than watching some guy kind of fall over himself in fits for two hours. It was a look at another side of Oberst, the creepier side that probably spawns all these melancholy tunes of his. I'm happy to have seen such a range out of him. I still love what he does.

Elsewhere

By Andy Scheffler
Photos : Andy Scheffler
Published : July, 2005.