Sounds like the start of any number of rather predictable jokes, doesn't it? A guy walks into a bar...
I had one of those "guy walks into a bar" experiences the other night, but it did not lead into a punch line of any kind. Instead, I walked right into an unexpected transformational experience where I now think entirely different about something. You know the experience. You encounter something, usually the mundane, in a way that you never have before and you have one of those "Aha!" moments. Remember that feeling you get when this happens and you murmur "I'll never again think the same way about this, that or the other thing?" Somehow, your world had been changed. While these changes may seem like a trifle, they may often be unusually meaningful trifles, for you now approach some aspect of life, no matter how small, in a fundamentally different way.
The bar I walked into was Trovato's and I was there to see a band called Vago do an acoustic set. If there is any set-up to the joke you might have expected when you first glanced at the title of this story, it is that I have never been fond of acoustic sets and find them perhaps a bit contrived. What do bands do when they want to extend their reach without having to develop new material? They do an acoustic set. And we can probably trace this whole phenomenon back to that widely-seen set on MTV a decade ago where the ill-fated man from Seattle unplugged our world while being supported only by a three-legged barstool instead of that wall of sound we had grown to expect.
I really don't know much about music and have great difficulty writing about it. As a matter of fact, this is my first (and perhaps last) "music review" for the Pulp. This just goes to say that the fact that I had never liked acoustic sets most likely speaks only to my own naïve, stunted and ill-informed view of the world of music and how to appreciate it.
I had seen Vago a few times before. I even own one of their CD's, so I am certainly not unfamiliar with their sound. But what I learned about music while watching their acoustic set that night is nothing short of that transformational experience I mentioned early on in this piece, for I now somehow get it. The result of all this is that I will never again think about acoustic sets in the same way.
I had heard most of the songs in the set before, yet it was somehow fundamentally different that night, as if I was hearing a totally new repertoire. Hearing November and December in Vago's acoustic arrangement revealed to me a song that simply does not exist when played in their electrified sets. It's not just that the arrangement is so radically different, even though it most surely is. What I heard for the very first time that night was that November and December is a sweet love song composed by Vago's front-man for his wife. There is an almost lilting romance that envelops the acoustic version of this song that I had never before heard in other sets. And it's not just that I heard the same song in a different way. What I experienced was nothing short of having the true nature (in my mind) of that song revealed to me for the very first time, as though it was previously wrapped in a mysterious shroud of some sort when played all those times during their normal, electric sets, making it almost like an "inside joke" of some kind where its true meaning is carefully guarded and known only to the musician and his lovely muse.
The choo-choo train staccato of the guitar play in Lorraine ("written for a woman whose name is not Lorraine, but is too hard to rhyme", we're told) comes across in machine gun fashion in the electric set but, when played acoustically, it somehow takes on that lonesome "Johnny Cash" air of a solitary soul rocking on a front porch of an old farm house on some dark and otherwise lifeless night where the eerie wonder of the entire universe unfolds above in a canopy of nothingness in the endless night sky as a ghostly train passes in the distance.
There I go again. Now I've done it. I've been asked to do a music review for the first time and I can't seem to get around to actually writing what I know such a review is supposed to look like. I know I'm supposed to identify the Vago band members and describe them as three guys originally from Fremont and that two of them are brothers. I know that I'm supposed to tell clever stories of the postage stamp sized stages they've played on in postcard sized bars in towns that don't even warrant being put on postcards in the first place. I should probably tell you the funny monikers that the boys go by, but it's a good thing that I don't because one is a bit unflattering and the other two are off-color and borderline obscene, respectively. The meaning of the name "Vago", ubiquitous in the Spanish-speaking countries of the Americas (but with curiously different subtleties in meaning, depending on which country) would certainly make for a paragraph of good ink. Instead, I have once again taken an easy assignment and wasted my word count exploring nothing more than my own peculiar and perhaps eccentric experiences as I partake of the local art scene.
Since this will most likely be my last music review for the Pulp, should they even print this at all, let me just leave you with this one piece of advice. Go see Vago. They are a fun band, and yet they can be oddly dark and brooding at the same time while they put on one heck of a show. Wow! That last sentence almost sounds like a "music review", doesn't it? There may be hope for my writing career yet.
I don't know if you'll get much of anything from my ramblings here, but I am certainly glad that I was the "guy that walked into a bar" the other night for I have now learned to listen to music in new ways. And isn't that what all art is really ever meant to do…to provoke some kind of emotional response from us? The fact that I can't seem to get it down on paper in no way changes the fact that I know what happened to me the other night and the boys from Vago can take the credit for that.