Bill Callahan — former Smog leader, prolific songwriter and all-around weird dude. Photo courtesy of .
Once in a while, a song’s performance makes you feel more like you’re remembering it than discovering it. You know you’ve never heard it before, yet you feel yourself hooked by something that resonates within you, so familiar that you can’t believe you haven’t spent most of your life humming it. It doesn’t happen often, in my experience, but when it does, the intimacy increases exponentially, regardless of — or sometimes despite — the size of the venue. I experienced this Monday night at the Oriental Theater, at a performance by (previously known as Smog).
Callahan has an eerie talent for discovering a perfect riff or chord progression that, at one end of the musical spectrum, emulates the smoothness of Lou Reed, while flirting with the austere chaos of Jandek at the other. Musically, his peers include Angels of Light, Lisa Hannigan, Low and Crooked Fingers, though his signature delivery consistently sets him apart. His deadpan baritone (one that often makes comedian Steven Wrightap delivery look positively manic) is folded with lyrics steeped for days in an easy, black humor into repetitive sequences that avoid the trappings of any accepted “verse, chorus, verse” structure. Yet he always seems to end up with a perfect song.
Once one of them has grabbed you, it drags you and your soul into an entrancing, euphoric spiral, where it has its way with the both of you, and never lets go. Respite comes, with bittersweet mercy, only with the beginning of the next song.
Monday nightap show saw a barefoot Callahan and his guitar joined on stage by a violinist, drummer, cellist and a second guitarist, all of whom formed a perfect quintet to capture the intense scarcity in his 20-year ouevre.
During the long, trickling and loopy guitar introduction to set opener “Our Anniversary” (stretched out as the Oriental’s sound crew adjusted the violinistap monitor), the audience was ushered into its first enchantment. Filling half the venue’s capacity, they responded at the song’s end with the only truly boisterous applause of the night. Thereafter, each song was followed with short, almost drowsy bursts of applause, after which you could feel a pin drop as they awaited the next one (not that their appreciation wasn’t obvious and heartfelt, it just seemed to take a Herculean effort to emerge from the transport of the previous one).
The group continued through a set list that lasted about 90 minutes, including “Sycamore,” “Diamond Dancer,” “Rococo Zephyr,” “Cold Blooded Old Times” and “Rock Bottom Riser,” among others, each of which were followed by similarly long stretches of almost absolute silence. These breaks often stretched to a point where Callahan started to appear awkward, aloof. The few times Callahan did interact between songs, he actually came across as shy, even a bit perturbed by the audience’s persistent presence.
No matter — as soon as they started again, the cavernous main room was easily overtaken by a potent, almost fervent intimacy, to all of their constantly spellbound delight.
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Billy Thieme is a Denver-based writer, an old-school punk and a huge follower of Denver’s vibrant local music scene. Follow Billy’s giglist at
