The View From Nowhere
Good-bye Cava Java and hello The Gypsy Cafe. Starting this month, Joe Tiboni (fill in the blanks with historic facts about his days as a music life force involved with important rock and roll - flavored stuff like the Ann Arbor Free Concerts and Mr. Floods Party in the '70s, Joe's Star Lounge in the '80s and the laid back (sonically but not artistically) basement performance venue Cava Java in the '90s) has taken over the booking duties at The Gypsy.
Unfortunately, music has been axed from Cava Java. While CJ hasn't been around quite long enough to wax nostalgic over, the cozy space with just the right everything (size, lighting, sound system and cosmic aura) was the first new spot in recent times to take seriously the new wave of singer/songwriters who've emerged as part of the Ann Arbor New Folk Underground. According to Mr. T, it's the same old story. The Cava Java owners weren't happy with the financial numbers, didn't have a clue about music and knew more about roasting coffee beans than art (l'm paraphrasing here ... ). While Joe Tiboni continuing as a booker at The Gypsy Cafe without missing a beat is good news, the senseless and shortsighted end of Cava Java isn't.
By luck of the draw, Lisa Hunter and her band got the honor of headlining the last night at Cava Java to a packed, standing-room-only crowd. You should run out right this minute and pick up her new CD, Solid Ground (on the local Thursday Records label).
The contrast between her recorded work and her live show was interesting. Hunter is a strong candidate for having the best local release of the year with her collection of catchy, pop-influenced snapshots of personal highs and lows. With the record you get a spotlight blasting into a diary full of tell-no-one secrets with a meditative kind of quality that contrasts with boppy, hook-filled song structures. On stage however, Lisa Hunter can sing about these little scenes and tragedies totally relaxed and cheerful as a Moonie selling roses on a street corner. Telling jokes, and acting goofy oddly enough works in a live setting and the audience composed of obvious Lisa Hunter groupies (in the artistic sense) loved it. Is this face/stage act a triumph over the pain of the songs or a nervous veil that Hunter wears as she bares her soul in song? Probably a little of both. Either way Ms. Hunter is one of the more important singer/songwriters in Ann Arbor as we close out 1996.
With the death of music at Cava Java, there is new hope at the Main Street Espresso Royale Caffe. The coffee place has decided to seriously refocus on presenting live music. The plan now is for a six-month trial with the usual acoustic-influenced suspects. I caught another Thursday Records artist, Brian Lillie, for a Saturday night set and had mixed feelings about the venue. For Lillie, there was a pretty good crowd for a Saturday and the area near the stage seemed like the perfect spot to check out his music. But if you don't show up early and get stuck over by the coffee bar, good luck. Those damn espresso machines make way too much noise and mess with the musical ambiance. That didn't seem to bother Lillie though. While singing mostly tunes from his debut recording of last year, a pair of new songs, one called "Bad Advice," a low key, introspective number about failing to listen to your soul, and another about his grandfather (a pilot during WW II), which became a folk crowd-participation-sing-along, shows that his CD was no fluke. And his carefully picked covers and references to Dylan, Springsteen and Lyle Lovett are evidence of the kind of performer Brian Lillie wants to be - an artist seeped in the American rock-influenced tradition with one eye on telling small truths and the other on having an audience join in.
Unfortunately, good news travels fast. I attempted to pop into The Gypsy Cafe for the Jen Cass and Friends tape release party last month but ... by ten o'clock, the small club was jammed to the roof and even standing room was not an option. While l'm not one to whine for the days about how nice it was when the GC audience was half-a-dozen people and you could grab a table five feet from the stage and how amazingly hip you were to have found such a place ahead of the pack ... it appears that bigger venues are the next logical step in response to the growth in the local acoustic scene.
The idea of Michigan garage bands doing surf music in the 1990s is like watching a rerun of Happy Days - good, clean, dumb fun. There is nothing wrong with fun, of course, and over the past few years, this part of Michigan has been fertile ground for reverbing guitars and ethereal time-warped amphetamine-injected rock that flows from the roots of Dick Dale, The Ventures and hundreds of 60s groups who are probably all working in car washes now but at the time were creating slices, however obscure, of American rock and roll history. Surfin' The Spillway (Happy Hour Records) is a 17-tune collection of SURF'S UP kickin', campy, local delights. The Prodigals are maybe the best known group here with four instrumentals, but from The Silencers to the Lustre Kings, this CD is a dance party classic for anyone who thinks rock and roll has to have words or an inner meaning or a "purpose." The BEAT is the purpose, silly ... And you're not going to find any better surf music anywhere, unless you can come up with a time machine with its destination set for 1963.
On a final note, as a newspaper junkie it's been heartbreaking to watch the corporate fascists of Gannett and Knight-Ridder in their attempt to bust the unions involved in the strike against The Detroit News and Detroit Free Press that has gone on for well over a year. And, on a personal note, I ALWAYS toss in the trash anything any of you out-of-touch punks who are dumb enough to actually send me something to review with a QUOTE from one of the above scab papers - l'm funny that way. (Pre-strike quotes are OK ... just so you know). Having said that, be ready to mark Thursday, December 5th on your calendar and catch the All Star Benefit Concert for the 2,000 striking newspaper employees still out there struggling for justice, at The Ark, where for $15 you can catch the very best of the local singer/songwriter scene. Dick Siegel, Frank Allison, Jay Stielstra, Audrey Becker, Lisa Hunter, Jo Serrapere, David Mosher, Jere Stormer, K.C. Groves, Chris Buhalis, drivetrain, and others will be using their songs to light a few candles in the darkness.
The View From Nowhere, 220 S. Main St, Ann Arbor, Ml 48104; or e-mail to: Alannarbor@aol.com.