At the 9:30 Club, 1,200 Paul Weller Fans Can't Be Wrong
It's written right here in subsection 218 of the "Sacred British Cows" chapter of the (Semi)Professional Rock Critics' Catechism and Field Manual that any discussion of former Jam and Style Council frontman and prolific rock-folk-soul journeyman Paul Weller must mention that he's Huge in the U.K. and more of an Anglophile footnote in the U.S.
So did y'alls hear that? In the mother country, he's a Hyde Park-filling megastar; here in the colonies, he's the guy who sings "A Town Called Malice". Which is plenty fame enough for him to pack the 9:30 Club on a Saturday night while he burns through a two-hour, double-dozen-song survey devoted mostly to the latter half of his 30-year-career, and particularly to his sprawling, willing, intermittently inspired new album, 22 Dreams.
I've always been more curious about Weller than knowledgeable -- I've got a couple of his well-thought-of solo discs, and a Style Council best-of, and I'm pretty sure a CD compiling the first pair of albums from his seminal mod act The Jam is one of the 400 or so discs lodged under the seat of my car. Fortunately, Weller is the kind of forceful performer for whom familiarity is not a prerequisite for satisfaction. Fortunate for him, too, since the seven numbers he played from his new album (mostly worthy, though the drippy piano ballad "Invisible" was a momentum-killer) were met mostly with blank stares from an otherwise unusually attentive and boisterous 9:30 crowd. (The instantly-digestible folk bounce of "Sea Spray" managed to get a singalong thing going, though.) "If you don't know these songs, fair enough, but you should go and buy the record and then you'd know 'em," Weller pitched, which was as much as he said at once all night.
Photo by Kyle Gustafson
Not a big one for chitchat, this guy: From the moment he strode onstage a quarter-hour ahead of his published start time (!) and lit into "Peacock Suit," it was clear he came to play, and that the soulful timbre of Weller's 50-year-old voice is not the product of studio trickery. It was also clear (from my exhaustive pre-gig research) that he observes one of the most crucial of my Inviolate Criteria for Live Rock Greatness, which is change up the setlist every night. 22 Dreams is a meticulously sequenced 21-track (the 22nd dream, apparently, is a stream-of-consciousness prose story in the CD booklet, and it's not like anybody asked Dylan what his first 114 dreams were anyway), opus, so I was a little afraid he might perform the entire 68.5-minute disc in sequence. He didn't. Phew!
Instead, we got a smartly curated tour of his latter-day songbook. "From the Floorboards Up" stomped with coiled authority, and a roughed-up take of the Style Council's "Shout the Top", introduced simply as "an old song," got the most rapturous response as anything in the show's first half. A distended, too-trippy "Wishing on a Star" threatened to derail the enterprise, but the Modfather reasserted control with a seated acoustic mini-set that included The Jam's "The Butterfly Collector" and the Led Zeppy "All on a Misty Morning" before surveying the dark pastoral folk of of "Wild Wood" and the Noel Gallagher-cowritten psych-rocker "Echoes Round the Sun".
The encore section of the show was pure bliss, with the curio "Oh Happy Day" bleeding into "The Changingman" and the explosive "A Town Called Malice". It seems Weller has the restraint, or the confidence in his catalogue, or the willingness to frustrate his audience, or all three, not to play this ridiculously communicative 26-year-old number every night. If you saw how it lit up the crowd, you'd appreciate just how profound an act of temperance this represents. "Malice" left everyone in such a stir that Weller had to pull out the really big guns to blast his way out of the building after the second encore the audience demanded, which is why we got a rustic singalong of "All You Need Is Love" to send us out into the sweltering night.
Er, that one's an old Style Council tune, right?
22 Dreams is out now on Yep Roc Records.