Calexico
Club Congress, Tucson, AZ
October 18, 2002

review by: Matthew Scrivner
Date: 10/22/02

I have been musically bored by live music for a long time now. Until Friday night, it had been a while since I had seen a live concert worth my time. I think the last show I paid money for was a year ago. I went to see the aging members of Midnight Oil on their tour to promote what will probably be one final album before they retire. I remember feeling empty and sad (and deaf) as I walked to my car, and sort of frustrated and disappointed. Don't get me wrong, it was MIDNIGHT OIL, dude, and they rocked. But they didn't rock as much as they should have. I think Peter Garret looked tired, and his weird epileptic flailing was almost embarrassingly out of place.

Also, I don't know where it happened but along the way, but I started noticing that every live show I was attending had the same formula. It was the same clichéd mix of new songs and standards, spiced by between-song band intros into the microphone ("this is Jim on bass, everyone say hello to Jim"). Then inevitably, at the end of every show, the audience coaxes the band back on stage with chanting and adoration, like some teenager convincing his coy, virginal girlfriend to satisfy his "needs." The band returns, all coy smiles and winks, and finishes the show by emotionally jacking the audience off with the best of their best. The auto-erotic metaphor I am using here is intentional, I started leaving concerts feeling no less fulfilled and sort used and dirty for all of that. And really, my question is how can something like a live concert become predictable? Isn't the point of live music the energy it draws from the unpredictability? Was it just that I had been to too many shows?

I realized Friday night that it's not my problem, it's the fact that I had been going to concerts where the musicians had stopped enjoying what they are doing. Calexico, without a doubt, clearly enjoys what they're doing. And they are so good at it, that not even the most jaded, music elitist left that show without a big warm grin on their face.

The band started Friday night with some unpredictability right off: by dragging some local artist and street musician on stage with them, this aging Mexican national named Salvador Duran, and proceeded to back him (on drums and standup bass) while he played five or six of his own classical mariachi ballads. Picture this: an audience full of tatooed and pierced twenty-somethings with their jaws to the floor as this old guy stomped and strummed his nylon-stringed classical guitar and belted out in this lovely tenor a music so out-of-place that you could feel everyone shiver with icy, pleasurable shock. The guy was amazing, and, as band leader Joey Burns explained as the rest of the band finished setting up and joining him on stage, he thought so too, and just wanted the opportunity to share that with us, knowing that we might not have otherwise had the chance.

As if that act of creative kindness was not enough, the band proceeded into their own repertoire, accompanied by the three trumpets, three violins, two acoustic guitars, and two acoustic bases, the equipment of their sometimes collaborator, Mariachi Del Luna. And while the core band members looked relatively flannel and unshaven and grunge (they're all former members of Giant Sand after all), Mariachi Del Luna was fully decked out in traditional black and silver and sequins and fluted bell-bottoms. I counted fifteen people up there on a stage the size of my cubicle at work. It was comical as they all crammed together. But the music that fifteen people can create together is outstanding.

Calexico defies genre description. They are combining country-western, grunge, jazz, and mariachi to create something you just aren't going to hear anywhere else. All the songs are warm like the desert, and rich, and despite the number of instruments and musicians, not in the least overdone. It was clear that here's a group of musicians who have stumbled into a sound, a style of song witnessed nowhere else, and they love sharing it, and they do it in a way that is totally unaffected, almost intentionally underdone.

This show single-handedly renewed my desire to watch bands play their trade live again. Not only was the sound unique and the atmosphere lacking the self-aware nervousness present in other shows, it was clear that everyone who played is up there doing it because they want to. Yes, they are homegrown, maybe the only band out of Tucson that will ever amount to anything of interest. But if you ever get a chance to see this band play where you live, do not pass up the opportunity.