CONCERT REVIEW
John Gorka displays his folk-art at the Clark
by Seth Rogovoy(WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass., March 1, 1997) -- Singer-songwriter John Gorka played two sets of his quirky, intimate contemporary-folk songs before a standing-room-only crowd in the auditorium of the Clark Art Institute on Friday night, in the first concert of the Clark's "Four Fridays of Folk" series.
Gorka is one of the acknowledged masters of his genre, which often relies as much on the power of personality as it does on the performer's talent or strength of the material. In Gorka's case, talent, personality and material are all well-balanced, making for a neat package that is alternately entertaining and suggestive while always remaining audience-friendly.
Gorka's between-song patter is as much a part of his show as are his songs, and he has taken his already unassuming, unprepossessing persona and developed it into a full-blown, faux-naif character, part Charlie Chaplin, part Andy Kaufman. He announced at the outset that he was leaving behind his "slick, Las Vegas" stage act -- he never had one -- in favor of his current approach, which was to "apply chaos theory to folk music." It was a clever motif which he was able to play off of throughout the evening, and the substantial interaction between performer and audience -- which tossed him several requests and questions -- helped lend the proceedings an aura of singularity and spontaneity often missing in such shows.
Gorka's songs ranged from social-realist portraits of declining factory towns ("Where the Bottles Break," "Down in the Mill Town") to lighthearted chronicles of suburban life ("I'm From New Jersey," "Italian Girls") to surrealistic evocations of fractured states of mind ("My Invisible Gun," "Can't Make Up My Mind," I Saw a Stranger With Your Hair") to comic novelties ("The Body Parts Medley," "Springtime in Pennsylvania").
"Good" was an upbeat catalog of all the things the singer -- whose songs and personality tend toward the downbeat side of life -- is good at. "Blue Chalk," from his most recent album, "Between Five and Seven" (High Street), was more typical in its focus on the dark spiral of addiction. It also contained a couplet that is classically Gorka in its multiple layers of meaning: "I am far from the mint condition/Circulation's hard on you."
Several of Gorka's songs straddled the line between serious and comic. "Italian Girls" is a lovely ballad that captures the allure of the exotic in a white-bread world. "The longer names, the darker hair/They made me weak, they made me stare," sang Gorka, only slightly undermining the tone when he continued, "I couldn't say a word to them, their figures so full of vitamins."
Gorka's delivery rarely varies: he boasts a resonant baritone, and although he writes catchy melodies, they are typically set in minor- key, modal scales that lend them a patina bordering on new-age. He is a subtle if functional guitarist, sticking mostly to strumming chords, only occasionally picking or inserting an instrumental line or fill.
On Friday night, he played a few songs on piano -- a welcome diversion. His ornate style recalled Bruce Hornsby without the flash. One of the piano tunes was a perhaps ironically chosen cover of the pop standard, "You Don't Know Me," which fit well with Gorka's own oeuvre, despite the impression one got that indeed, after listening to Gorka of an evening, you DO know him.
In the end, Gorka's strengths are also his weaknesses. He is an artist of limited breadth. There is a sameness to much of his material so that over the course of a long, solo show much of it seems indistinguishable. He makes little use of peaks and valleys in his music; the dynamics are mostly found in those lyric lines that resonate meaning beyond the moment. Gorka has successfully carved out his niche, however, and in fussing it with the precision of an age- old craftsman, he has elevated it to the status of folk-art, which was quite appropriate, given that the Clark series is being presented in connection with the exhibition "A Passion for the Past: The Collection of Bertram K. and Nina Fletcher Little at Cogswell's Grant."
[This review originally appeared in the Berkshire Eagle on March 3, 1997. Copyright Seth Rogovoy 1997. All rights reserved.]
Seth Rogovoy
rogovoy@berkshire.net
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