Crowsong

Vintage Guitar
John Heidt
February 2008

Crowsong offers a couple of atmospheric new records that feature founder Randy Clark's guitar playing and interaction with band mates Joshua Zucker (bass) and Vince Littleton (drums). Here, they use one disc to highlight vocals,and songs with words, and another for instrumental tunes.

And no matter what music Clark sends at the listener, it's dominated by guitar that's tasty and full of chops.Shelter features cuts like "Peace In My Mind", with it's lyric about the old days, and guitar playing that's both stinging and elastic,a quality that is rare outside Neil Young.Folky rock tunes drive the first disc with cuts like "Anne Marie", which features great guitar sounds."Shadows Long Ago" is a rocker with a big, liquid sound. It's nice to hear a played who can conjure images with just a few notes.Clark's slide dominates cuts like "Life Under The Moon" and "Seven Crows".His vocals are heartfelt and earnest and, like his playing, make you believe in what he's doing.

Eternal is five cuts of guitar heaven; everything from surfin'/secret agent themes ("CattleCall" and "Western") to bluesy country("Companion Song") to vamps that turn out one interesting lick after another ("Mexican Summer").Songs and solos go on for great lengths of time, but don't feel like it.

Instead, they let the listener focus on how Clark and the boys simply make great music that soars and dips.
- VINTAGE GUITAR

Phil Dirt - Reverb Central - PO Box 1609, Felton, CA 95018-1609 USA
Crowsong - Shelter Eternal

This is a two CD set. Disc two is called Eternal and is mostly instrumental. This is lush Surfadelic music in the grand tradition. If you're a fan of The Mermen or The Surf Kings, Eternal will likely get you going!

Picks: Cattle Call, Mexican Summer, Companion Song, Western, Dark Was The Night Cold Was The Ground


Track by Track Review



Cattle Call
Surfadelic (Instrumental)

A big reverb crash and rich guitar tone open the song. Very surf based, with heavy western imagery, "Cattle Call" is a grand visual number with a huge sound and whammy power. Add tremolo guitar and a sense of adventure, and you're there. Very cool!


Mexican Summer
Surfadelic (Instrumental)

"Mexican Summer" begins with a spooky ambiance, which evolves into gigantic feedback and sustain much as Jim Thomas is prone to generate. It's a dramatic and commanding number with strong eerie images and darkness. Have I mentioned it's very large? It runs at a lumbering pace with thundering sound. Superb!


Companion Song
Surfadelic (Instrumental)

Slithery slide notes create a hickoidal theme in this thoroughly wonderful track. "Companion Song" is on the lighter side, with a playful rhythm and warm melody. This is a very nice track, perhaps influenced a bit by Ry Cooder in his Captain Beefheart and just after days.


Western
Surfadelic (Instrumental)

Tribal drums, rising thunder, an adventurous and engaging melody line, and Mermen-esq structures give "Western" a commanding sound. It's a large track with cool tremolo, multiple guitar parts, and superb drums.


Dark Was The Night Cold Was The Ground
Country Slide (Instrumental)

Sullen like post-battle sadness, "Dark Was The Night Cold Was The Ground" gradually rises from a spooky image to slide emotionalism that at times reminds me of Ron Wood. It's a guitar solo with rich textures and backwoods country blues blood. The slide guitar is just luscious!

- REVERB CENTRAL PHIL DIRT

On "Shelter/Eternal":

" The energy that emanates from "Eternal" is so intense that it almost makes your heart stop..." ..."these CD's are little masterpieces."
"Very impressive stuff, that we strongly recommend".

On all three albums:

"DCL", "Western", "Shelter/Eternal" are full of Americana, roots rock and swampy blues. Randy Clark has a warm voice, and sings his songs in a pleasantly relaxed fashion. Add to that his magnificent guitar playing, and we can say that these CD's are little masterpieces. All the songs on these CD's are a cross-breed of blues, folk with jazz and country, a shot of Indian and a big dose of singer-songwriter. This mix of influences forges a very dynamic and personal sound. Clark's own dynamic playing guarantees swinging melodies that are both rootsy and rousing. Very impressive stuff, that we strongly recommend.
- FREDDY CELIS

Guitarist Randy Clark stands outside the Red Devil Lounge on the Polk Street sidewalk smoking a cigarette minutes before his set. Fans file in at the door. A couple of his friends say hello, but mostly Clark enjoys his smoke without bother. Such is the life of an opening act on the club scene, where bands play for chump change and a couple of free beers.

[MP3s: "Anne Marie" | "Mighty" | "Peace in My Mind" ]
But tonight Clark is opening for a rare local appearance by Dick Dale, the king of surf guitar, and Clark counts himself among the king's disciples. Clark, 38, came to surf music through the savage rockabilly guitar of Link Wray and has managed to incorporate surf's twangy, staccato riffs into a style almost equally informed by the languid minor chords of Jerry Garcia or the stinging extrapolations of Neil Young.

"I grew up in the heavy metal era," says Clark. "Black Sabbath, AC/DC and all that. It was aggressive music and surf is, too. It's as American as baseball, based on the blues, but taking it to a different place, like Dick Dale and all those exotic scales."

Clark leads a three-piece band called Crowsong that has recorded three independent CDs since 1999. The latest is a two-disc set that features one CD of his largely acoustic, singer-songwriter material, and a second disc of psychedelic/surf instrumental epics. He gets his band booked at some crummy club at least a couple of times a month and makes a living giving guitar lessons at Haight Ashbury Music and the Blue Bear School.

Like most independent rock bandleaders, Clark has to juggle musicians. His regular drummer, Vince Littleton, also plays with the popular Neil Diamond tribute band, Super Diamond, so Eric Kurtzrock is playing drums at the Red Devil gig. Kurtzrock plays in a jazz group that has worked three nights a week for the past seven years at the Ghirardelli Square restaurant Ana Mandara, where he occasionally brings Crowsong to play all-instrumental ambient sets.

"Randy is a great improviser," says Kurtzrock, "something you always look for in a good jazz player and almost never see in a rock player."

Bassist Joshua Zucker estimates he currently plays with a dozen different bands, but he most closely identifies with Crowsong (he also works in the computer systems department of The Chronicle). "This local clubbing is a hard road," Zucker says, "but you've got to do it."

Clark, whose parents gave him his first guitar when he was 4, grew up in Holland Patent, a blip in upstate New York surrounded by dairy farms. A self-described "high school hippie," he went to Grateful Dead concerts and moved to San Francisco in 1992. "The Grateful Dead had something to do with me coming to California," he says, "the idea that you could do what you want in music."

Attending music school in Ithaca, N.Y., he came under the spell of the extraordinary acoustic guitarist Martin Simpson, who played at Clark's wedding and used to work regularly in the college town deli Clark booked. Simpson got him curious about slide guitar.

At the Red Devil Lounge, Clark unpacks a well-used 1961 Gretsch guitar, the Chet Atkins model, and plugs in a series of foot switches and outboard effects he arranges on the floor at his feet. The headline band is late setting up and only the bass player and drummer in Dale's band, the Del-Tones, conduct the sound check, the bassist running through some of Dale's trademark guitar licks on the king's Stratocaster. Clark goes to park his car thinking his sound check has been canceled, only to return and find out it's back on and he is late.

Clark played guitar for a couple of years in the Billy Nayer Show, a multimedia act that combined original films with live performances and had a big buzz going for a minute. In 1999, Clark spent some time playing with San Francisco psychedelic surf specialists the Mermen, whose guitarist-bandleader Jim Thomas worked alongside Clark during the day at Haight Ashbury Music. Crowsong got its start playing on an old plank from a pier thrown on the beach under Golden Gate Bridge for one of the infamous parties given by Ranger John Cantwell, the old hand at Alcatraz, where the Mermen were practically the house band.

From the very beginning, Crowsong was a vehicle for both Clark's artistic bents - the semi-acoustic folky material and the surf guitar instrumentals. A lot of his instrumentals are influenced by the spaghetti Western soundtrack music of Ennio Morricone, such as "Red Is the Color of Blood," the instrumental that opens the Red Devil set with booming, mournful clanging punctuated by a dizzying run of chords up and down the neck.

That morning, the group had played the acoustic act live in the studio of radio station KPIG in Santa Cruz. Now at the Red Devil Lounge, Clark is packing the set list with some of his most thunderous material.

"If there was a night for loud, crazy guitar numbers," he says, "tonight would be the night."

Clark wins over the crowd right away. He has dispensed with the glasses he wears offstage and, his long hair hanging in his face, he studies his fingers and makes constant adjustments to the knobs and switches at his feet. He puts his guitar through careful signal processing, kneeling at one point and playing the knobs on the floor, not the strings.

Opening acts on a three-act club bill usually are little more than canon fodder. But Clark packs a wallop in his playing and he scores repeatedly with the crowd.

Clark holds up a CD and invites the crowd to meet the band after the set. He hustles his equipment offstage to make way for the evening's second-billed act.

He grabs his free beer and heads out into the club to meet up with his wife and watch the rest of the show, just another fan who doesn't even have a preferred seat.


Listen to "Cattle Call" by Randy Clark and Crowsong:
cdn.sfgate.com/blogs/sounds/sfgate/chroncast/2007/10/01/Cattle_Call.mp3


E-mail Joel Selvin at jselvin@sfchronicle.com.

This article appeared on page E - 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle

- JOEL SELVIN

KPFA 94.1 FM "HEAR AND NOW" HOSTED BY DERK RICHARDSON

May 1st 2008

Crowsong performs live in the Hear & Now Led by guitarist Randy Clark, whose phenomenal chops bring echoes of Ry Cooder, Neil Young, Jeff Beck and Dick Dale into a riveting personalized style, the Bay Area's own Crowsong fashions a rootsy California folk-rock sound that twangs and soars, capturing both desert desolation and surf ecstasy. Tonight the band plays live in the KPFA studio, performing songs from its three recordings, including the recent double CD of songs and instrumentals, Shelter/Eternal.
- HEAR AND NOW HOSTED BY DERK RICHARDSON