Ben Gibbard and Jay Farrar at Lincoln Hall
Peter J. Preston
Gibbard and Farrar get literary.
Before the musicians get their props, Chicago’s newest venue should take a bow: Lincoln Hall is a fantastic new place to hear and see live music. Envisioned by the folks that own and operate Schubas, the city’s other uber-classy live room/bar/restaurant, Lincoln Hall takes that room’s vibe—clean, great sight lines, excellent sound—and expands it to something a little bigger. Where Schubas gets snug at around 150 people, Lincoln Hall looks to be about 500—and all tickets were sold to see a fitting show in the new room: Ben Gibbard (of Death Cab For Cutie) and Jay Farrar (of Son Volt and late of Uncle Tupelo) playing songs from their recently released tribute to Jack Kerouac, One Fast Move Or I’m Gone.
But it wasn’t just the two singer-songwriters recreating the solid disc, which pulls together snatches of Kerouac’s words from the novel Big Sur and sets them to music. They were backed by drummer Jon Wurster (Superchunk, Mountain Goats, and, uh, radio comedy duo Scharpling & Wurster), bassist Nick Harmer (of Death Cab), and Son Volt’s Mark Spencer on lap steel and keyboards. It made songs that can be a little less than muscular on the disc sound far more spirited and jammy, though never overdone. There was room for softness in Gibbard’s terrific “Willamine” and darkness in Farrar’s scary almost-solo turn at “Final Horrors.”
Here they are are live a few days ago at the El Rey Theatre.
Those looking for Farrar or Gibbard to throw fanboys some bones might’ve been disappointed: There was no encore filled with Death Cab or Son Volt delights. Instead, these guys stuck—and rightfully so—to the material at hand, playing the entire Fast Move disc and augmenting it with a few surprises, including a song Gibbard wrote for Kerouac ages ago and performed with the electronic group Styrofoam. (It might’ve made sense for him to bust out Death Cab’s “Bixby Canyon Bridge,” also inspired by Kerouac, but we’ll let that one slide.)
When they ran out of Kerouac, they leaned on another influential wordsmith, Tom Waits, covering his “Old Shoes (And Picture Postcards)” and allowing themselves just a little bit of jam time before wrapping things up. Like the new venue, it was all quite tasteful. Gibbard joked that he’d like to work with Farrar again on some literary tunes—maybe next time influenced by Beverly Cleary. It sounds ridiculous—and was meant to be so—but hey, so does repurposing an old Beat’s novel for an album, and look how well that turned out.
