Stuart Davis Sings The B Side's Swan Song
Written by Michael Garfield Wednesday, 16 December 2009 23:57
"This is so awesome, you guys. We should just lock the door and have a sleepover in here for the next three weeks!" ...So implored Boulder singer-songwriter Stuart Davis at his final show at The B Side Lounge on 12/4.
The B Side, and its previous incarnation The Trilogy Lounge, have been Stuart's home-away-from-home since long before his music was featured on Hollywood soundtracks; before he was a celebrity interviewer for geniuses like Leonard Shlain and zen masters like Genpo Roshi; before he was flirting with cable TV for rights to his hilarious talk show, Sex, God, Rock 'N Roll. I might have even heard a quiver in his normally jubilant voice when he offered thanks to Andy The Bartender between songs and suggested that "We should find a room exactly like this one, not too far away, where we can keep doing this. Oh wait, this room will do! Let's just do it here!"
But the emotion didn't keep Stuart from delivering an excellent performance that night – riding rollercoaster-style through an extensive catalog that celebrates in utter weirdness, flexes gem-quality pop punch, and shifts repeatedly from bug-eyed irreverence to monastic gravity and back. One moment he's looking forward to an evening of loverly dyadic mayhem while tapping out sweet licks in "F*ck Or Fight" (my favorite) – or singing remorsefully about it the next morning in "Doppelganger Body Donor." The next, he's neck-deep in a heartbreaking ballad about dying on a hospital bed in "Swim," a hair-raising and tear-jerking ode to our ultimate reunion with the Mystery from whence we came.
Stuart does things no sane songwriter would ever do, like drop the guitar, pick up a pair of reading glasses, and treat us all to a ten-minute detour through his account of coming to Earth in a human body as a telepathic "Intergalactic Gypsy" who "parties and fornicates" from world to world. The joke is on us – Earth is a real trip, his buddy tries to convince him, because while we're here we have to use sounds to communicate and we forget we're God. ("Oh man, what's that like?") He even popped open a projection screen and treated everyone to a half-hour "best of" presentation of segments from his TV show before turning the night over to a dance party by co-conspirator DJ Rekluse (whose classy radio mash-ups made me glad I'd worn my slippery shoes).
In some ways, Stuart Davis is precisely not a rock star. He reaches down to turn on his distortion pedal by hand. He spends most of the show beaming a goofy look of intoxicated rapture to nobody in particular. He makes earnest jokes about dog rape. But there's no question that Stu, the "Twisted Mystic" or "Punk Monk" as his adoring public knows him, is one of the most engaging entertainers I've ever seen. His albums do him zero justice; the guy knows how to turn on a room, period. He knows how to engage everyone exactly where they are, which is no doubt why he has cultivated such a family of fans who are so willing to follow him through his right angle turns and perverse diversions. He's a funny, funny person, and he is able to find and share the joke in the direst of subjects. I had to sigh, because he says this at every show, but when he invited us all for a lock-in and sleepover my heart jumped a little at the thought...I can't imagine a better way to bid farewell to one of Boulder's best small venues.
