Before the White Stripes plugged in electric and convinced every two-piece with a dress-code that they should be headlining football stadiums, there was a perfect little musical niche called "cafe music." Built by almost no one, for barely anyone. Just a soloist, or a pair of musicians, facing down a small collection of eclectic drink-sippers.
Cafe music bore fruit, from Baez to Beck, and it’s still working wonders for Shoney and Slow Train at this pleasant haunt. Over the heavy hanging scent of flaming red sriracha hot sauce and the cool, yellow, 30-oz. steins, the blues duo (acoustic guitar and electric bass) burned down the house with a set that started just after a winter’s midnight.
Fascist-killer hitched low, Shoney took center-stage with a Napoleonic intensity that would have intimidated except for the giveaway smile. He pulled his pick across the strings like Lady Macbeth wringing her wet lingerie across a wooden washboard. So hard and so fierce that the strums doubled for drums. And, as Shoney cheated the guitar for percussion, Slow Train cheated the bass for lead guitar. Carter’s four-stringed behemoth rocked out like a locked-in Slash, building deep simplex patterns in the air over the pounding of Shoney’s acoustic scrawl. The effect was something like a three-piece blues band scrambled like an egg and boiled down hard to a Delta-spanked dialectic between two pulsating poles of cherry wine chutzpah. The effect was dead-on, niatch biatch!
With a furious cat scratch vibrato, Shoney howled his way through a set smacking of the Telepathetic-Beck, the ever insular Daniel Johnston, the obstinately textural Tom Waits, the "done-paid-his-dues" G. Love, and the simply intricate M. Ward. Standout moments included original song "Don’t Drink and Draw" – spartan, perfect, smart – and a righteously pants-messing cover of Screamin’ Jay Hawkins’ "Put a Spell on You." The intimacy of the cafe worked its wonders. As Slow Train sipped on a 30 oz, enjoying the show with the rest of the crowd during Shoney’s solo numbers, a line of girls had pushed so far forward that they nearly spilled over the low stage like an over-matched bassiere. As the blues grinded its way out of the acoustic scrape and bass thump, the girls’ hips grinded right along with it, forcing Shoney Lamar to give away just one more little smile in the very early hours of the morning.
My God, there is just no arguing with the swing of a girl’s hips.
