Concert Review: Mark Kozelek Live at the Chico Women's Club (12/16/18)

Taken from markkozelek.com

2018 has been a really memorable year for concert experiences for me. It's hard to even get into highlights without devoting a ton of text here (and, since I'm planning a post for next week reflecting on some of my favorite shows of the year, I won't bother), but the year was bookend-ed by two performances featuring one of my all-time favorite songwriters, Mark Kozelek. The first show, at Gundlach Bundschu Winery in Sonoma this past January, was a benefit for the Sonoma and Santa Rosa fires of October 2017. This was my first time seeing Mark in the full Sun Kil Moon band setting, and I'll spend some time talking about that in the upcoming post I mentioned earlier. Last night's show in Chico was also a fire benefit, this time for the historically destructive Camp Fire that destroyed homes, took lives, and darkened and choked our air last month. The year beginning and ending with benefit shows were a stark reminder of how dire the climate situation has become with no solution in sight. In both cases, though, Mark was eager to play benefits with all proceeds going toward fire relief. I already have a huge amount of admiration for Mark as an artist, and this sort of thing just increases my admiration for Mark as a person.

Last night's show took place in the 200-capacity auditorium at the Chico Women's Club in Chico, CA. I was up front, so I'm not sure how packed the venue ended up being, but there was already a substantial crowd when I arrived around 7:15 for the 8pm show. For the concert, Mark was accompanied on grand piano by Oakland-based musician Patrick Main, who Mark had met at this year's San Francisco Leonard Cohen Festival. This was their first time playing together, though (with the exception of a little bit of difficulty starting My Love For You Is Undying), you couldn't tell. Patrick's playing throughout the evening was very much the perfect accompaniment for Mark's singing, with appropriately alternating (& sometimes simultaneous) intensity and tenderness.

The show opened with a peaceful, melodic performance of Night Talks from last year's EP of the same name. Mark may be the master of saying something universal while detailing something incredibly personal (something which has become all the more clear with his increasingly diaristic songwriting over last half-decade), and I definitely experienced a feeling of warmth thinking through all the conversations I've had while falling asleep next to my love over the past few years. This was followed by one of the highlights of the night, Somehow the Wonder of Life Prevails, off of 2013's collaborative album with Jimmy LaValle, Perils from the Sea. I've seen Mark perform this song a number of times before, though this was certainly the most passionate reading I've heard. The song mixes melancholic memories from Mark's Midwest upbringing and other years gone by with thankful meditations on his life in California and Northern California's picturesque landscapes. I found myself a bit choked up by this song (not a huge surprise). As a fellow Midwesterner, I often get nostalgic pangs when I hear Mark sing about Ohio -- It's not hard to find parallels between Mark's Massillon and the Peoria, IL area that I grew up in, and a lot of what he says, both about places and people, ring true for me (again, universal in the specific). Last night, though, I was thinking about how, when California is someday a place I used to live, as it almost certainly will be, Mark's lyrics about the beauty of California will elicit the same feelings.

Next up was one of the standout tracks from this year's self-titled Mark Kozelek, 666 Post. This one is a lot of fun live, building in sometimes hilarious intensity through the dream sequence where Mark first talks about terrifying an SPCA employee with a video showing how his "kitty cat barks," his "duck goes quack," and his "puppy dog goes meow." This is followed by another dream where he lives at 666 Post and his neighbor, who may just be Satan himself, is coming over to babysit. Following this, Mark took one last dip into his "deeper" back catalog with Dogs from 2014's Benji (a later attempt at playing I Can't Live Without My Mother's Love was abandoned before it started when Mark couldn't find a woman in the audience willing to sing it as a duet). When I first listened to Benji, Dogs was easily my least favorite track (although I still liked it quite a lot). After seeing the two quite different live versions this year, it's certainly climbed in standing for me. This one built throughout, landing in about as cacophonous of a climax as you could get from a singer and a piano.

The next four songs were drawn from this year's two releases (Mark Kozelek's Mark Kozelek and Sun Kil Moon's This Is My Dinner) and from next year's I Also Want to Die in New Orleans (a new Sun Kil Moon album featuring, among other's, Blackstar's Donny McCaslin and the great Jim White). First up was This Is My Dinner, the title track from the Sun Kil Moon album released at the beginning of last month. Ahead of the song, Mark explained how each of the songs were written fairly quickly on planes and trains on the way to shows during last year's European tour. Each song was written specifically to be sung in a given city. This track, for example, was written for the city of Oslo. Mark noted that they were trying the songs out in different cities to see if they still landed without the audience knowing the local references. (He also promised to work Chico into the lyrics, which he did deliver on.) I'm not sure how much the rest of the audience enjoyed the song, as this was around the time parts of the audience started to depart, but I thought it was a lot of fun, and Mark was definitely not phoning-it-in with his performance. (This is a good time to make the comment that I've never seen Mark give as great of a vocal performance as he did last night. Wow, wow, wow.)

This Is My Dinner was followed by my favorite song Mark put out in 2018, My Love for You Is Undying. The song is series of pretty banal vignettes about day-to-day life in San Francisco (dropping his wallet and knocking over a glass in a restaurant, getting into an argument with a vaguely gas-lighting bookstore employee) linked by the repeated titular refrain. Patrick couldn't quite seem to figure out how exactly to play the riff the runs through the entire song, but his alternative rendition of it seemed perfectly acceptable to Mark and made for a fun alternate version of the song. The version of this song played in Sonoma was marred by a drunken fan who Mark couldn't resist responding to lyrically ("My love for you is undying" became "Would you please shut the f*** up?" and the fan was removed from the venue). Last night's rendition was a lot looser, with both Mark and Patrick regularly cracking grins and even laughing as Mark told the stories that make up the song.

Next up was I'm Not Laughing At You, a song off of the upcoming Sun Kil Moon album about other nations' impressions of Americans. My favorite part of this song came with Mark's defense of America (I can kind of boil it down to "Yeah, we suck sometimes, but we did produce Bob Dylan and Jonathan Richman") and the sections that included particularly inspiring lines from Bob Dylan ("Bob Dylan said that") and from Mark's older work ("I said that").

The Mark Kozelek Museum was initially going to be the last song of the main set, but, as the audience continued to dwindle, Mark decided that he'd forego an encore and instead follow this one with a brief Christmas set. The Mark Kozelek Museum was my least favorite track off of Mark Kozelek, but it landed a lot better live, particularly in the impassioned ending sections. Mark insisted the audience singing along to the "diarrhea" section could've been beautiful had the Liverpudlian in the front row who chose to shout loudly between each song not been overwhelming everyone else's voices. Here's a nice moment to address how non-curmudgeonly Mark was last night. Even when the guy ignored Mark's repeated pleas to shut up, he was really cordial. I've seen him have rowdy crowd members thrown out before (something that sits poorly with other music fans I know, though I'm wholeheartedly in favor of it and wish more artists would refuse to tolerate asshole-ry in the audience), but he was able to gently defuse this guy and give him just enough attention to keep everything lighthearted. Though Mark famously sometimes has an aggressive stage presence, I've always thought this was way over-exaggerated by (and, okay, maybe sometimes for) online media. He reminds me a lot of one of my uncles from back home, which might explain why (1) that sort of behavior really doesn't bother me and (2) it might seem unfamiliar to audiences who aren't from the kinda down-and-out Midwest.

The show was just about wrapped up with (no pun intended) a trio of Christmas covers (The Pretenders' 2000 Miles, the Charlie Brown classic Christmas Time Is Here, and The Christmas Song (Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire)). Christmas songs have long been a part of Mark's repertoire (his first two solo live albums are called Little Drummer Boy Live and White Christmas Live and the follow-up to 2014's Benji was Mark Kozelek Sings Christmas Carols), so, given the time of year, it wasn't surprising that these appeared in the set. I really love Mark's Christmas songs (particularly the more religious ones, like What Child Is This, as they really convey the solemn, quiet peacefulness of Christmas Eve services I remember from growing up), and it was great to hear him play a few. It was especially exciting to have Mark point at me ahead of Christmas Time Is Here and tell me he'd need me to come up in the middle of the song ("But don't worry, it'll be really easy"). About halfway through, he beckoned at me and held up the lyric sheet and microphone for me to read the "of all the Mark Kozeleks in the world, you're the Mark Kozelek-iest" bit of dialogue, one of my favorite moments of humor in his catalog. It's the least I possibly could've done and still be able to say "Yeah, I got to perform with Mark Kozelek once," but it's already a special memory and I'm really thankful I happened to be in the right place.  

To finish, Mark chose A Dream of Winter off of the second Jesu/Sun Kil Moon album, 30 Seconds to the Decline of Planet Earth. This one took my breath away the first time I heard it, because it spoke so much to how I've always felt around the holidays. "Wintertime is melancholic and sometimes gets me overthinking." "And the downtown Christmas decorations make me want to cry. When you're young, it takes forever for Christmas to come around, and, when you're older, it comes around the corner faster than a greyhound." I feel a lot of emotion just retyping the lyrics here. In the chorus, Mark sings about how he hopes December passes slowly, as he gets to rest from the fast-paced grind of the rest of the year and spend time with the people he loves. Man, I feel that. This is my last Christmas without a child, and, while I absolutely can't wait to meet him in February, I do hope this December, the last one with just the two of us, passes slowly. I so wish I could see the people I love at home in Illinois this year, but my heart still echoes Mark's last line: "I'm more grateful for this Christmas that's approaching than any Christmas ever before." (One fun aside about this song: Mark mentions that he's been "everywhere from China to Iowa City" -- My first time seeing him was at that Iowa City show in 2014. It feels like a lifetime since, and it makes me smile to hear a little callback to that show at the end of a hot, rainy Iowa summer, the first summer living away from home, the first summer married to my beautiful wife).

I think this review, which may have more words than any of Mark's recent songs (quite a feat!), goes to show how much this show meant to me. It was a wonderful way to wrap up concert-going for 2018 and to celebrate Christmas, which is somehow now only just over a week away. I hope these days pass slowly. Merry Christmas to all of you. If you're interested, I'll have some year-end recap posts about favorite albums, concerts, etc. up in the next week or so. Thanks for reading!

Setlist

Night Talks

Somehow the Wonder of Life Prevails

666 Post

Dogs

This Is My Dinner

My Love for You is Undying

I'm Not Laughing At You

The Mark Kozelek Museum

2000 Miles

Christmas Time Is Here

The Christmas Song

A Dream of Winter