Richard Buckner never really stopped playing at his Friday-night set at the Walnut Room. The artist also never acknowledged the crowd. Photos by .
beautiful, mesmerizing Friday-night solo set at did not feature discrete songs interrupted by banter and guitar re-tuning, but rather a single 75-minute stream of soundsmithing with unbroken song-to-song segues. The lead actors included five vintage guitars, various technological tools, and a trail of broken hearts.
On the stage, Buckner set up a confined space for himself, with monitors, mics, guitars, cases, and other gear in a tight radius around his chair—creating a small room of sorts on stage. He hardly left his chair, and he did not directly address the audience. A shambling man, Buckner’s eyes appeared to be closed for most of the set, though even from the second row I couldn’t confirm they weren’t merely overhung with flaps of skin.
Buckner’s music is a contemplative hybrid of folk and country, with Son Volt-style vocals and lazily smoldering songs that suggest walks around a lake or drives through a forest. His song “Ariel Ramirez” was plucked from obscurity last year for use in a Volkswagen ad, but otherwise Buckner has plugged along at 200-seat-houses for more a decade. This is good for audiences, because to appreciate his performance truly, you must watch him up close, seeing what his hands and feet are doing—or not doing.
Buckner frequently would finish a song on a guitar riff repeated to the point of hypnosis… then thanks to his bank of pedals, Buckner would put his guitar down as that riff continued to ring, and he would switch to another guitar. His new-song segue would use the prior riff as a bed for a new progression. Along with these pedal effects, he frequently played guitar not with his fingers but with an e-bow, generating a mini-electromagnetic field around the strings that produced a bow-like sound.
I’m ambivalent about guitarists as DJs—using technology to create new and evocative sounds, but turning the live experience into a house of mirrors. When I saw Keller Williams employ this effect, his “look ma, no hands!” high-techery struck me as a cheap ploy that undermined Williams’ claim to brilliance on the instrument.
But Buckner doesn’t care about tricking an audience. That would entail recognizing the audience. His button-pushing was aimed toward emotional meaning—and toward putting up a wall of sound between him and the audience, thereby eliminating the stop/start and chit-chat that can shatter the tone of intense art.
If anyone needed that “Hi, I’m Richard… boy, the Walnut Room has great pizza, but the air sure is thin up here!” banter, they left disappointed. The set ended without a cue to the audience. After a series of intense riffs that resonated throughout the room, Buckner put his guitar down, put on his sweatshirt, and walked wordlessly into the bar. It was like the plot of a Richard Buckner song. Before we knew it was over, he was gone.
Jeremy Simon is a Lafayette freelance writer and regular contributor to Reverb.
is a Denver-based photographer and a regular contributor to Reverb.
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