Bill Callahan

When I was fifteen-years-old I thought I had heard -- or at least heard of -- every pop record ever and was happy to be teaching myself mandolin (after childhood piano lessons), practicing Bach in the morning and bluegrass in the afternoon.

From the mandolin I took up the guitar, the banjo, the autoharp, the ukulele, the harmonica, and somewhere between then and my early-twenties it was only hyphenated punk bands like the Meat Puppets, Gun Club, the Pogues and X's Knitters I was listening to.

Contemporary popular music at that point had separated into that which I knew (of) and that which was new to me. When I heard something new on the radio, I would wait patiently and hope the DJ would tell me who it was so I could find its record and commune with it when I felt like it.

That's all contemporary popular music is to me these days: something I have never heard before.

Over the past few years there are maybe a half dozen artists whose music I have heard and sought out. Most recently, a billowing voice capable of hitting notes lower than my guitar's bottom E-string.

"Who's this?" I asked Amy over lunch at her place.

"Bill Callahan."

"Is this the new Scott Walker?" I asked Brian as we sat on his patio watching the sunset.

"No. It's Bill Callahan."

"Is this Bill Galahad?" I asked Scott and Lindsay on our drive into Vernon.

"Bill Callahan, yeah," said Lindsay.

On Tuesday Amy and I went to the Vogue Theatre to see Bill Callahan. It was my first time inside the Vogue in over twenty years, and my first time in a long time at a sit-down concert that wasn't classical.

Opening for Bill was Badge Epoque, a six piece proggy outfit (drums, congas, bass, guitar, keyboards, flute) that did not so much play their instruments as attack them, jump back from them, often on the off-beat. They were loud, without vocals, and in some ways the very opposite of Bill -- had they too not eschewed traditional blues-based I-IV-V or I-IV-I-V song structures.

Of the ten or so songs performed by Bill and his accompanist guitarist colourist (Brian Beattie?), the one that got the biggest woo-hoo was "America!" (2011) Bill has described this mostly one-chord (G Minor) song as his "love song to America," a song he wrote in 2006 after years of living abroad and hearing people trash his country, only to return home (during the George W presidency) and hear his fellow American's doing the same. But if this is a love song, why is America represented exclusively by white men (David Letterman, Kris Kristofferson, George Jones, Johnny Cash)? Why is attention given to military branches (Army, Air Force, Marines) and so-called enemy countries (Vietnam, Iran, Afghanistan)? Can a love song be satirical? allegorical? What kind of love is this, Bill?

Over the course of his hour long performance, Bill didn't say more than a couple dozen words to us. Early on he said that his pedometer had him walking over 17, 000 footsteps that day (he was locked out of his AirBnB), that we were a "delightful audience," and that he had reason to believe the Vogue was once a porn theatre (it never was).

Like Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht's "Alabama Song" (in A Minor), "America!" starts with an oompa beat. Yet where the Weill/Brecht version cycles through F# Minor and D7 in its verses, "America!" holds on the G Minor, with only a couple of drops to C Major much later. Moreover, whereas the loss in Weill/Brecht''s song is the Mother, Bill's song elevates the Father (literally, by making them an Air Force crew) in the form of a talk show host and three country and western singers. Again, it's a love song Bill is giving us, but what kind of love? The tough one? Critique?