Jules Shear at Club Helsinki (5/27/00)
(GREAT BARRINGTON, Mass., May 28, 2000)
Shear conceived of and hosted the original program as a music-television
version of a late-night talk show, with Shear playing Johnny Carson to
songwriters like Elvis Costello and Richard Thompson. The idea was to bring
on these guests and not have them perform so much as have them reveal bits
of the creative process through discussion and informal jamming with Shear.
As we know, this format didn’t last long, and “MTV Unplugged” was soon
transformed, minus Shear, into a vehicle for aging stars like Rod Stewart,
Eric Clapton and Bob Dylan to wage MTV-engineered comebacks.
By design or by habit, a bit of the original format lives on in Shear’s own
stage show, with Shear playing both the roles of host and guest on his own
show.
That Shear was also able to bring alive the musical personalities of a
diverse range of performers and songwriters including Jimmy Webb, Cyndi
Lauper, Johnny Rivers, Carole King and The Band through story and song was
all the more remarkable in what was a unique evening spent with an utterly
unique, downright idiosyncratic musician.
As a singer-songwriter, Shear is pretty much an unknown to all but the most
fervent cultists. Whatever small successes he has enjoyed on his own, from
his role as leader of new-wave band Jules and the Polar Bears to his
collaborations with various other performers to his ill-fated stint with
MTV, owes its enduring longevity mostly to his authorship of a few mega-hit
singles he wrote for Cyndi Lauper and the Bangles.
Shear treated the assembled fans at Helsinki to a journey through his
creative life and collaborations, a kind of opening of his aural notebook
through story and song, in what was an utterly unselfconscious and endearing
performance that could easily be turned into a theatrical one-man show.
The stories Shear told were revealing about the roots of his craftsmanlike
obsession with pop music. Perhaps none rang truer than the one that had a
young Jules Shear growing up in Pittsburgh with his ear glued to the weekly
countdown of the Top 40 and his eye plastered to the window of the local
radio station, behind which he could see the DJ spinning the latest hits. He
was inexplicably drawn to the magic coming off those platters, and he knew
that his destiny was inextricably linked to those records.
Shear’s is the kind of omnivorous appetite that is drawn equally to the
commercial pop songwriting of Jimmy Webb, whose “Wichita Lineman” he
performed, the soul balladry of Johnny Rivers – he did Rivers’s “Poor Side
of Town” -- and the roots-rock mysticism of The Band.
The bearlike Shear performed a quirky version of “All Through the Night,”
his song that struck paydirt with Cyndi Lauper’s version. In fact, all his
songs were quirky in that, as if it weren’t enough that he plays an
upside-down, left-handed guitar, he plays in a unique style all his own
whereby the strings are tuned to an open-chord which he bars with a thumb.
To make major- and minor-key variations on the tuning, he simply plucks one,
two or three notes, to make for a starkly minimalist style that evoked the
rootsy power of the Delta blues even as it was applied to melancholy pop
tunes.
A font of stories about the heroes with whom he has collaborated, including
Carole King, Rick Danko and Webb, with whom he collaborated on songs for a
movie musical that never got made, Shear sang in a slightly pinched, nasal
voice that evoked Jackson Browne’s yearning tenor.
He ended his set with a tune he collaborated on with The Band, one that has
come to serve as the epitaph for that group’s tragic death roll. “Too Soon
Gone” was the name of the tune, and it also marked the sentiment in the room
when Shear’s set had come to a close.
[This review originally appeared in the Berkshire Eagle on May 31, 2000.
Copyright Seth Rogovoy 2000. All rights reserved.]
Seth Rogovoy rogovoy@berkshire.net music news, interviews, reviews, et al.
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