Damien Jurado – 1:00 a.m., ND on Bushy St.
I hadn’t seen any of the FFF Nites lineup till I’d already flown down to Austin. But immediately upon learning that Damien Jurado was playing the ND, I knew where I’d be Saturday at 1:00 a.m.
Perhaps the funniest things about this is that, in an age of Spotify, eMusic, and Pandora, it’s easy to have absolutely no sense of how popular or how unknown a musician is. I was worried that the ND would be packed well before Damien was to come on stage, so we headed over there at about 11:30.
When we arrived, a loud, earnest, and promising band called Yellow Ostrich was just beginning their set. There were maybe 100-150 people there in a small venue with a small stage. The place was less than half full.
To my surprise, after Yellow Ostrich wrapped up, the crowd actually thinned out a bit. Unlike the RUN DMC show, where people were trying to worm their way through the crowd and squeeze as near to the front as possible, everyone seemed happiest to stand away from the stage. So I slowly walked to the front and figured I’d stand there till people started to politely jockey for position.
But that never happened.
And then Damien came out, mostly refrained from making eye contact, and began to play.
I’m not sure it’s possible to travel any further across the musical spectrum from Santigold and RUN DMC to Damien Jurado. First, he was solo (he mumbled an apology, saying that he usually tours with a band). Second, between songs, he probably said fewer than a hundred words the whole night. And third, he is not an entertainer, by any stretch. He is a singer-songwriter who looks and acts incredibly uncomfortable when doing anything other than singing his wrenching songs. There’s no act here, but the complete and utter lack of showmanship certainly contributes to the feeling of overwhelming authenticity.
I really don’t care to try to sell anyone on Jurado. If he’s not your cup of tea, that’s fine. But if you care about meaningful lyrics, or about the ability of music to communicate deep emotion, or if you have an appreciation for achingly beautiful sentiments presented without ornamentation, or if you can appreciate watching a person shine at one very specific thing—when he is likely uncomfortable in virtually every other arena of life—then you would have found this performance to be totally remarkable, perhaps made even more remarkable by the fact that there were maybe 50 of us standing in front of the stage, while a bunch of loud, hammered people continued to file in and out of ND’s during the set.
If we weren’t standing five feet away from Jurado, it would have been difficult to hear him. We were watching something extraordinary, but there were no neon flashing signs and zero self promotion that would have tipped anyone off to this fact. You had to be paying attention.
To be honest, I don’t even remember how I first heard about Damien Jurado. But the song “Working Titles” blows me away. In my book, it’s a perfect song, along the lines of Leonard Cohen’s perfect songs, “Take This Waltz” and “Hallelujah.” But admittedly, Jurado’s songs are pretty unrelenting, with little or no levity to take the edge off.
People love to tell stories about how they heard Nirvana or Kanye or the Black Keys play some tiny venue before they were discovered and blew up. But I don’t expect Damien Jurado to blow up, so chances are good that you will be able to see him in a tiny venue with a tiny crowd for the foreseeable future—and the unforeseeable future, for that matter.
But if you get that opportunity, Go. You won’t be able to tell your friends that you saw him before he got huge, but you will see something genuine, witness someone who writes songs to seek solace, and performs those songs because…well, I actually don’t know why he performs. Maybe he just needs to pay the bills. But I’d like to think that Damien performs—despite his obvious discomfort on stage—because this is his gift, and he believes that it should be shared.
Who knows. All I know is that when he closed his set, I was glad to be able to shake his hand and say Thank you.