Hospitality

Hospitality played a rockin set. The indie rock trio play what I’d call pop if it were more repetitive and the instrumental sections less ambitious. Watching Hospitality start the evening before 8:00 PM, taking up only one corner of the stage while ushers silently guided latecomers to their seats, the Berklee Performance Center struck me as a potentially scary place to play.

The BPC (if anyone calls it that) is a long and narrow room with excellent acoustics, high ceilings, two balconies, and seats that call to mind a high school auditorium. It feels like a stiff place to hear a rock band. Songs came off more as “pieces” and the performance felt more like a recital than a rock show. Hence: “potentially scary.” The minutiae of a performance matters less in a loud club with an imperfect mix and a spirit of rowdiness. But on that stage, every instrument was equally audible, every note spotlighted, and everything presented at a palatable volume that invited a detached, critical ear. And there were likely plenty of detached, critical ears in the audience, including Berklee students with the fresh focus of a new semester.

The Hospitality machine held up fine in a setting that welcomed scrutiny. The voice of singing songwriter/guitarist Amber Papini had nothing to hide; it’s rich, smoky, but sometimes cutesy, and maybe a little world-weary. She cradles her syllables the way Paul Simon does, just emphasis enough to bring out their rhythm. You hear some Regina Spektor in the annunciation, but without Spektor’s loopy cheerfulness. Papini came across as somewhat withdrawn. When she talked between songs she sounded as though she were falling asleep, which charmed the shit out of me, partly because it contrasted so starkly with the formal feel of the room.

Their instrumental sections set Hospitality apart from what would be similar coffee-shop-ish outfits. When guitar and bass departed into their jazzy chords and varied counter-melodies, Nathan Michel’s drumming kept things feeling easy. It was such precise drumming that I’m not sure any fill was improvised. It’s also possible that they all were. And although things never got LOUD, the room honored the nuances of Hospitality’s dynamics.

Tweedy

Tweedy seemed natural on the stage, partly because they filled it up with their gear (they’re touring with five musicians to Hospitality’s three). It helped too that the stage was lit beautifully for them. The curtains, which were a dead black behind Hospitality, cycled through a range of colors. They had a Wilco-ish instrumentation with two guitarists, three when Liam Cunningham wasn’t playing keys. I find Tweedy to be more spacious and drawn out than typical Wilco, and it’s much less electric. Call it avant-country if you don’t want to call it indie-rock.

The Tweedy songs were recorded mostly with just Jeff and his 18-year-old son/drummer, Spencer. It was nice to hear them played with the help of some talented non-Tweedies. They sounded great, but at times I found their performance a little hard to follow. I think it’s that we didn’t have enough time to digest the album. Jeff Tweedy has crossed to the other side of songwriting; most everything Wilco’s put out post-Summerteeth takes a little effort to appreciate.

Not long into his set, Jeff Tweedy made a joke that voiced the anxiety I had projected onto Hospitality. He told the audience that the Berklee crowd could be spotted as “the ones sitting there like this [hand on chin] thinking ‘Yeah I could do that.’” I had wondered when I got there how it would feel to be Spencer and if there would be any uncertainty to the performance. The kid’s a good drummer, but he’s also (presumably) fresh out of high school and playing for huge audiences in a touring art-rock band with gentle, carefully arranged songs. Does it ever cross his mind that Wilco fired their original drummer to trade up to the virtuosic Glenn Kotche? Maybe he’s not that insecure. He really shouldn’t be.

Spencer held up, thanks, perhaps, in part to the laudable feel of old-pro bassist Darin Gray. Wilco fans in the audience yelled “SPENSURRR!” between songs. They were that tickled to see the son of Jeff back there, bopping through the songs’ unpredictable drum parts with an air of pent-up energy. He’d gravitate back to a teenager-ish slouch between songs, while his dad joked with the crowd. At one point, Jeff remarked that his extensive guitar collection had been bought with Spencer’s college fund, that now Spencer has to work his way to school. Jeff held up a gorgeous acoustic, looked at Spencer and said, “A couple semesters right here, buddy.”

Boy-Wonder: Spencer Tweedy

Comparing Tweedy to Wilco (and how can’t you?), it’s not Kotche’s absence that struck me the most, but Nels Cline’s. When the performance really needed a boost of Cline’s caliber, two or three guitars speed-picked up to a Klinean frenzy.

They played an unfinished song, a good tune, an easy swinger like “Whole Love.” It sounded more like a “rock song” than anything else in their set. I imagine this was because the band was playing what came naturally to them. It highlighted the difference between Jeff Tweedy jamming a song out with a capable band versus Jeff Tweedy composing/arranging a song at home. It made obvious how much the other material falls on the “piece” side of the song vs. piece distinction, whether they’re playing in the Berklee Performance Center or not.

The band left Jeff to sing Wilco songs that were requested online in advance of the show. He started with “Via Chicago.” Alone on stage to sing that first, disaffected line (“I dreamed about killing you again last night and it felt alright to me”), Jeff Tweedy reminded me how sad he used to be. I’ve heard his name presented as an argument in favor of the positive role of suffering in art (or something like that). But he conducted the night with the cheerful grace and ease of an expert dinner-party host, cracking up the audience with a story of ten-year-old Spencer, dressed up like a hippie in San Francisco. He remarked that “Spencer’s mother” wouldn’t be pleased to hear an audience member had enthusiastically identified herself as a “Tweedy nurse.” The audience were in good hands with this (safe/responsible) cool dad. Fifteen years after releasing the domestic hell of “She’s a Jar,” Jeff Tweedy is on tour as an easy-going father, a happy person, and kind of a ham.

Jeff played an impressive one-man approximation of “I Am Trying to Break Your Heart.” He followed it with a Wilco song that did fit the mood of the evening, “My Darling,” a cosmically-appropriate lullaby of parental love. It seemed like a sentimental nod to Spencer’s role in the band, which itself is something of a hilarious move considering Wilco’s been derisively (stupidly! superficially!) labeled dad-rock. But after playing it, Jeff revealed that the song had been requested 421 times on the site, compared to the runner-up, “Jesus Etc.” with a whopping four requests. He joked that the requester wasn’t even at the show, was in fact sitting at home and convinced Jeff wouldn’t play it. He said playing the song was a “fuck you” (that’s a quote) to the requester.

No one “heckled” but there were a lot of… spirited audience contributions. Jeff handled all of them expertly with a warm, light-hearted sarcasm that neither shut down the fan nor encouraged the behavior. During “You and I,” an audience member took it upon herself to sing Feist’s half of the duet. Tweedy kept the audience laughing by reveling in the lyrics’ changed meaning: “You and I, we might be strangers, however close we get sometimes, it’s like we never met” (sang: “we’ll never meet”). She didn’t always sing the right words at the right time so Jeff would correct her with a “Not Yet” and later prompt her (“Ready?”). At the end of the song he directed the applause to the audience-member by lifting his arm and saying, “Leslie Feist, ladies and gentlemen…. That bitch knows how to enjoy herself.” Once again, he invoked Spencer’s mother, assuring us she’d approve of the term. (“That is bitch behavior. I mean that in the most positive way.”)

Now that he’s happy, maybe we’re not getting anything as broken-hearted and touching as “Ashes of American Flags,” but we are getting an old pro in a good mood. An old pro in a good mood makes for a good show, makes a living room of a 1,215 seat theater. And indie rock, whomever that term includes for you, has a relative dearth of happy old pros.