Giant Sand Giant Sand again, but seen from roughly six feet further to the right of where Jeremy was standing the first time.

I arrived at the club to catch the last few tunes of the Jesse Sykes Trio's set. Sykes is a striking presence on stage, bearing an uncanny resemblance to a young Emmylou Harris, replete with straight dark hair falling to mid-back. Vocally, however, she more resembles a backwoods cousin of Beth Orton, with a very earthy yet dramatic flair. Her songs were slow and intense, and she scrunched her face up into an unintentionally amusing grimace for at least half of the lines she sung. Her band backed her up in very competent fashion, and while the whole thing was quite flawlessly executed, her songs were just a bit too drowsy and slow-paced to really get my attention.

About fifteen minutes after Sykes and her band finished their set, Howe Gelb ambled on stage, guitar in hand, resplendent in hole-y jeans and a devilish goatee. He strummed his guitar in an offhand fashion, and sang a few lines into the mic. I don't think anyone was actually sure whether or not the show was actually starting, or if he was just fucking around -- this was supported by the fact that the sound man didn't shut off the background music until Gelb had been playing for a couple of minutes!

After the sound man finally realized that Gelb was actually playing a song, and that this was what the audience had paid twelve bucks to see, he shut off the background music. Gelb didn't blink an eye either way; it seemed like he would have been amused had the background music continued to play. In fact, he probably would have tried to play along with it. Gelb continued in solo mode for several songs, albeit in a very playful fashion. He had two mics set up in front of him -- one dry, one effected with delay. He also had several CD players set up behind him, which he would periodically attend to, playing random snippets of music through the PA speakers. At one point, the CD player played a disc that turned out to be the Jesse Sykes CD; Gelb feigned playing along for a minute or two until the audience got the joke, and then he moved on to something else.

After the brief solo portion of the set, the rest of the collective currently known as Giant Sand took the stage, looking more like a loose-knit group of friends than a "professional" band. In addition to perennial sidekicks John Convertino and Joey Burns (known in other circles as Calexico), tonight's Giant Sand ensemble included a trumpet player, a violinist, a second guitarist and an electric bassist, many of whom also contributed background vocals. To underscore the evening's "just a buncha friends sittin' 'round the living room" ambiance, the guitarist opened a bottle of wine, glasses of which were poured and passed around to all and sundry (band members, that is).

On stage, Gelb looks like nothing so much as a mischievous imp. With a constant sly grin on his face, he seemed to delight in messing with the audience’s preconceptions, and in coaxing tremendous slabs of distortion from his amp. Gelb led his ensemble through songs foreign and familiar, constantly surprising the audience with his random mid-song directional shifts. Songs ranged from a version of "I've Been Workin' on the Railroad" (with a nice mariachi-styled break thrown in the middle) to some tunes from the last Sand studio record, Chore of Enchantment, to several from the new covers album, Cover Magazine, including the traditional "Wayfaring Stranger" and a searing, noisy rendition of X's "Johnny Hit and run Pauline".

Live, Gelb's creaky, craggy voice takes on a life of its own. While it sometimes seems lackadaisical and flat on Gelb's recordings, in a live setting his voice is a timeless instrument, implying wisdom and world-weariness with every syllable he utters. Gelb's use of two vocal mics only added to the dramatic effect; although in lesser hands it could have come across as cheesy and distracting, Gelb made prudent and sparing use of the effected mic, emphasizing particular lines or even individual words. All in all, the effect that the band produced was rather hallucinatory -- between Gelb's tricks with the microphone, his distorted blasts of guitar that disrupted the otherwise relatively bucolic atmosphere, and the fact that the band regularly changed direction on a dime, the whole experience was the ultimate example of a band being at once loose and tight.

Gelb didn’t actually address the audience directly until almost an hour into the performance, although it was hard to believe that so much time had passed. Although he hadn't actually spoken, Gelb had been communicating with us the whole time via his sly grin and expressive face. When he finally spoke, it was to ask "Loud or Soft?" As if he needed to ask.

"Loud!" came the reply.

"Loud or Loudest?"

"Loudest!"

As the band lurched into the aforementioned piss-take on the Doe/Cervenka chestnut, I felt as if my legs were about to give out (this had nothing to do with Giant Sand’s performance; just that I was really, really tired). Thankfully, this was about how long it took me to walk to my car, and thus ended a perfectly enjoyable, entertaining evening of loosey-goosey, desert-fried, hallucinatory rock and roll, Howe Gelb style. Much appreciated.

Article and photos by Jeremy Schneyer