Back in the wee hours of the first day of this year at BB King’s on 42nd Street, the Benevento Russo Duo just finished a show opening Echo Park when Surprise Me Mr. Davis (The Slip’s Brad Barr, Andrew Barr and Marc Friedman along with modern minstrel Nathan Moore), clad in suits, stormed on stage and just about shook the room apart with Everything Must Go.
What unfolded over the course of the ensuing hours leading to dawn was a thick musical brew, each band playing a tune and giving way to the other before the boundaries began to dissolve and the concert became a true super jam with everyone sitting in together. Even so, it was really a Surprise Me, Mr. Duo show – they were force and flavor of the night, and that first moment when they first took the stage, that was one of the greatest rock and roll moments I’ve ever witnessed.
In the days that followed someone mentioned that it felt like seeing The Band in some club in 1970, and that seemed just about right – there is such skillful songsmithing, such virtuosity in performance, such joy and such a tortured voice in the quartet. The music glows and rolls and speaks as the greatest Americana does – all the back roads and small towns and small rooms in big cities; all the confused relationships, unrequited love and brotherly love. I can’t help thinking, whenever Nathan begins some political rant bookended by some semi-comical, semi-forlorn personal ramble, that this is Walt Whitman would be doing if he were still alive.
There is something about the sound of the band too, that sounds like The Band (although SMMD doesn‘t sound at all like The Band); liquid and funky, they sound brand new, like nothing I’ve ever heard, and at the same time, they sound weathered, older than the flaking paint on a tenement, older than a crumbling wall. With all that in mind, this week we have SMMD’s entire main stage set from this year’s HSMF, a bit more than an hour of the very finest music being made today. An especially huge thanks goes out to Kyle Porter & Harry McQuillen for their stellar recording. As always, enjoy!
2 Responses
Thank You! I went to see The Slip at the Tin Angel in Philly a few years back. When we arrived we discoverd that it SMMD and I was really blow away by what I had seen that night in a very small room!
That show was released as a download breifly a bunch of years ago, but not long after it was put up, the company folded. I think that was the first SMMD tour.
What a band.