Geese probably wouldn’t have want everyone at their Fox Theater show last Monday to treat their set as the Cameron Winter State of the Union, but sometimes a prodigy is just that prodigious. The band’s unibrowed and ornery-voiced singer is having a banner couple of months, coming off a feted live album at Carnegie Hall—where he was the fifth-youngest person to perform solo—and a corresponding concert film by Paul Thomas Anderson (who knows better than anyone what it’s like to be shit-hot in your twenties).
With Geese, his ostensible main project, he’d seemingly prefer to be a blotch in a landscape: a charismatic frontman with an indelible voice, no doubt, but no more The Project than Mick Jagger is the Stones or Robert Plant is Led Zeppelin. The group has hung together tight since they were teens being driven around to gigs by older bands and making startlingly mature if not quite driven or obsessed post-punk. If there’s conflict between the Man of the Hour and his far less apotheosized bandmates, it didn’t show on stage. So it was easy to do a thought experiment and treat them as a band I’d never heard of.
They’re pretty good, whispered the theoretical version of myself who didn’t know the first thing about Geese. They’ve got a polyrhythmic drive you don’t see in a lot of new rock bands, and though Radiohead and the Strokes are often brought up in discussions of their music, they have something those bands don’t, which is an allegiance to the skunkier end of the vinyl era: the pre-punk time when bands hired conga players with names like Rocky Dijon and Rebop Kwaku Baah, when coke was still countercultural, and the echoes of the earthy Beggars Banquet/ Music from Big Pink/ Basement Tapes revolution lingered in the air like a barnyard musk.
I like this so much better than the emaciation of the post-punk era. Radiohead strained to not be like Floyd; Geese cover “Interstellar Overdrive.” And that Winter, what a stylist. His sense of humor reminds me of dark-wit comics artists like Gahan Wilson or B. Kliban, an older style of misanthropy your dad might chuckle at, and if his knack of dropping implausible images on your head is sharper in his solo stuff, it carries through over the din of Geese. I kept thinking how they’d come across in the ‘70s, when it was harder to learn things about musicians.
A lot of my initial distrust of the Cameron Winter/Geese project has evaporated, but it’s easier now for me to quantify why I had it in the first place. There’s a whiff of salmon-for-dinner about their whole thing, and though they’re great at sounding squalid, you never lose sight of the fact that Winter is a coddled rock-camp kid and that his music skills were honed in environments he didn’t have to pay for. Knowing this sticks at a right angle to his whole uncouth-sailor-from-another-past thing in a way it never quite did with Bob Dylan, even though Dylan had to teach himself how to be a vagabond from similar upbringings.
Small wonder Winter’s a known fibber and fabricator in interviews, but now that everyone’s a sleuth, is it even possible to maintain a mystique anymore?
Winter has expressed some discontent towards finding himself in the middle of the media gristmill, not quite Chappell Roan levels of not knowing what the fuck is happening to you, but at least the suggestion he’s a little more famous than he’d like to be. Who wouldn’t rather be Jim O’Rourke than Julian Casablancas? (If you’re answering “who” to that first name: exactly.) He let the audience sing a lot of his lines at the Fox Theater show, not so much out of the desire to create some kind of communal ecstasy but to save his voice.
He sounded shot. His voice is so mellifluous and languid it’s hard to imagine it being how someone would speak, but he talks like Rocky punched in the jaw, too. He kept the banter at a minimum, and most of what eked out from his jaws was painfully inarticulate. Whatever brain process is reliable for lyrics about gorilla-fingered puppies and the like, it’s different than the one stumbling through his thank-yous.
I’ve generally liked Winter’s solo work better than Geese. He sounds freer, and his gift for piling up imagery has more room to roam. He keeps the two worlds separate, and I’ve heard some people suggest Geese is a tiring day job that he does between stints in auteurland, but I think he likes Geese because it lets him be part of a band rather than the next Dylan or whatever people want to make him.
It was interesting to see a man who’s essentially a tabloid celebrity at this point pretend to be just one spice in the melange. And it let me see him that way, too, which means I enjoyed him more at the Fox than I ever had on record. With his dangled-low hair and perpetually demonic half-grimace, it was easier to imagine him as a man who’d plausibly find himself in a situation in which he’d have a bomb in his car, as he screams on the hook of “Trinidad.”
Still, it was hard to get out of my head how much more moved I was by the opener, Bill Orcutt. Great on Geese to give him such a big platform; the girl next to me thought he was Rick Rubin. He’s been a local freak for a while, formerly part of the Miami noise-rock scene with his ex-wife Adris Hoyos as Harry Pussy, now a barbed boar-hog remnant of a freakier time in the Bay when the music scene was still countercultural, and one of the best guitarists I’ve seen live. Listening to him, I found myself hooked on microrhythms, attuned to every detour. I felt like a kid solving a maze, picturing mentally in my head what was around the corner even though I was just looking at a piece of paper. He plays in bars around town a lot. It’s not especially difficult to see him.
I wonder if the decision to book Orcutt had some kind of resonance with Winter’s recent solo-piano coup at Carnegie. There’s something different that happens with a solo instrumental performance than one with a band, something closer to telepathy, where there’s a shorter pipeline between the artist’s head and the sound coming out of the speakers. Watching a solo instrumentalist at work is almost like watching a karate performance, and I’ve come to love the experience.
That’s the strength of both Winter’s Carnegie Hall recording and a woolly Orcutt solo guitar tangle like How the Thing Sings. Listening to the audience talk over his set and fill his silences with their own noise, I had doubts Orcutt would want to be in Winter’s position. Much more likely that Winter looks at Orcutt with a bit of envy. Oh, to be a low-stakes indie legend! Winter’s been playing unannounced surprise shows under names like “Chet Chomsky.” Check the name of that artist you don’t know at your local bar. Even if it isn’t Winter, maybe you’ll like them.
