A weekend of worthy music - Marah at the TLA and Graham Parker at the Tin Angel Saturday, then We Are Scientists at the First Unitarian Church Sunday - but I'm going long with one man - Alejandro Escovedo returns to the World Cafe Live Saturday. With his string quintet.
"Only Al rocks with strings," wrote the Austin Chronicle last November, when Escovedo released the live "Room of Songs." How does one rock with strings? Visit his MySpace page, which streams video selections from an Austin City Limits appearance. The violin and double cello intro to "Put You Down" is electric.
Nerd Litter nailed it when the San Francisco music blogger wrote of the former member of Rank and File and the True Believers:
Alejandro Escovedo has the kind of trajectory meant for a Behind The Music episode. He produced great albums in relative obscurity, earning industry respect but little fanfare. For his ‘90s genre-defying output, No Depression named him the Artist of The Decade. Then after the commercial break—bam! life sneaks in with its pivotal ... twist of the knife—he collapsed onstage in Phoenix in 2003. He had Hepatitis C and his body had given up. Dosed with a drug regimen, an uninsured Escovedo got weaker and more broken down. He had gotten to a lower point than most people ever reach.
Escovedo talked to me for a piece that ran in March 2005 (this version, from the Anniston Star, was published nearly a year later):
"I was completely unmoored," he says. "I had no anchor whatsoever. The thing that I had done every day of my life — play music — I did not enjoy. Playing wasn’t something I had done for a living. It was my life."
For months after he was stricken, Escovedo would toss in bed, battling both sickness and the treatment, a battering combination of interferon and ribavirin that turned his muscles into putty. He couldn’t sleep. He lost his hair. His skin felt as if it were on fire. He wasn’t sure if the drugs had made him dark and depressed, or if he was meeting some new part of himself. Without health insurance, he was beat financially. He wondered if he’d ever want to pick up his guitar again.
He got better, on the strength of new meds, support from a very good benefit album, stronger and stronger live performances. By this summer, he was smoking.
His show at XPN's All About the Music Festival on the Camden waterfront is posted on the XPN site - here. And NPR has this concert from the World Cafe Live, recorded in June - eight songs upon the release of his most recent CD, The Boxing Mirror. It's pretty much the same set list as in Austin and Camden.
When you read on his MySpace profile that he has 3,193 friends, you can actually bank on it.
