Originally, Jay Farrar and Ben Gibbard were only supposed to record a couple of songs for what was to be a star-studded soundtrack to the new Jack Kerouac documentary, One Fast Move Or I’m Gone, but the two hit it off so well, they decided to do the whole thing themselves. The film, which chronicles the period of Kerouac’s life while he was writing Big Sur, was issued on DVD on October 20. To coincide with the release, Gibbard and Farrar have embarked on a short tour. On Thursday night, the band played its first ever show, at one of the most intimate and magical venues in the country, Los Angeles’ Largo.
Opener John Roderick (Long Winters) warmed up the crowd nicely, telling jokes and taking requests. He also took the opportunity to debut a new song called “Not Moving To Portland,” which he stressed was “not an anti-Portland song,” and try out a cover. Roderick said, “When you play Valhalla, you have to play the songs of the gods,” and then proceeded to almost butcher Aimee Mann’s “Wise Up,” having trouble hitting some of the notes and eliciting laughter from the audience. It seemed to be in good fun, but I wondered if Roderick was aware that Mann was there, watching from the back of the theater.
After a 10-minute intermission, Farrar and Gibbard took the stage with bassist Nick Harmer (Death Cab For Cutie), multi-instrumentalist Mark Spencer (Son Volt) and drummer Jon Wurster (Superchunk, Mountain Goats, Robert Pollard). The band played the entire soundtrack, most of it in order, in addition to a few other songs: Son Volt’s “Voodoo Candle,” “Couches In Alleys” (which Gibbard wrote during a collaboration with Styrofoam) and two covers (Bob Dylan’s “Absolutely Sweet Marie” and Tom Waits’ “Old Shoes”).
The songs from the soundtrack seemed to vacillate between quoting Kerouac directly and empathizing with the writer, trying to see things from his point of view. Several of the tunes felt a bit unfinished, but that could have been a result of the lack of practice with the band or the loose structure that develops out of adapting someone else’s prose to an Americana/folk template. The endings to a few songs especially felt awkward, where the music would just trail off and end when you expected the band to go back into another short verse or chorus. That said, almost every song they played had great, beautiful moments. It’s possible I just didn’t want them to end at all.
The non-soundtrack numbers were noticeably stronger and more confident, with the highlights of the evening being the cover songs. Dylan and Waits have come about as close to living lives akin to Kerouac’s as any famous musicians possibly could, so the choices were certainly fitting, with their words seeming to resonate a bit more with the spirit than anyone else’s that night, but that could probably be blamed on the nerves of the performers.
This is a good band, and it’s a shame they’re only together for this little project. Farrar and Gibbard play off each other well, and their voices sound very smooth together. It would be nice to get an original and proper full-band album from this group or even hear these songs when the band is confident enough to jam with them. This was a warm-up show, and that’s just what they were doing, getting warmed up. They sounded terrific—we just wanted more.
They finish up the tour this week with dates in Chicago, D.C. and New York. The Largo setlist is after the jump.
—Edward Fairchild
1. “California Zephyr”
2. “Low Life Kingdom”
3. “Willamine”
4. “All in One”
5. “These Roads Don’t Move”
6. “Big Sur”
7. “One Fast Move Or I’m Gone”
8. “Final Horrors”
9. “Couches In Alleys”
10. “Sea Engines”
11. “Void”
12. “Breathe Our Iodine”
13. “Voodoo Candle”
14. “San Francisco”
15. “Absolutely Sweet Marie”
16. “Old Shoes”
