WORD x Word Poet rocks fest opener
By Jeremy D. Goodwin, Special to the Eagle
Updated: 08/25/2010 10:45:46 AM EDT
Wednesday August 25, 2010
PITTSFIELD — Two bands and a poet walked into a theater — and the poet rocked the hardest.
The second annual Word x Word Festival kicked off over the weekend with a triple bill at the Colonial Theatre featuring earthy rockers Stephen Kellogg and the Sixers, acoustic popsters Mike and Ruthy, and performance poet Derrick Brown. (Events continue all week and culminate with another Colonial show on Saturday.)
The bands offered tightly executed performances in various shades of earnest rock and pop, but Brown (accompanying himself with audio tracks he controlled onstage — a swooshing helicopter here, an R&B drumbeat there) slipped in a welcome sting with his crowd-pleasing verbal ballet.
Performing in the middle slot, Brown got the audience clapping along to his first poem, and weaved a zig-zag path from non sequitur humor (he cautioned a possible “side effect” of his performance would be “hallucinations of decorative stools”), to battle-worn meditations, to unexpected bursts of lyrical beauty. (To the latter point: “Your breath is something for sparrows to wander in.”)
Brown was introduced as a former paratrooper, and the imagery of violence and warfare permeated his work. This feature was so conspicuous, and at times so unexpected, that it called for (but did not receive) some sort of explicit acknowledgement. Otherwise, it’s easy for the armchair psychologist to suppose Brown is working out his military memories in his work even
when he doesn’t notice it.
For a love interest, he would “murder an army of sleeping Cubans.” Elsewhere, a desirable woman is described as “an electric chair disguised as a Laz-E-Boy.” Tears are called “lady war paint.” And in reference to the inescapable music of police helicopters criss-crossing the skies above his Long Beach home, he says to a lover: “They’re playing our war.”
At times, the humor seemed an alternative to forcing the audience to live with an uncomfortable moment. But the way Brown nimbly brought the audience along for an essentially dark but eventually life-affirming ride was, in its way, joyous. His one-man-show easily filled the space of the theater, and succeeded consistently. It lived up to festival founder Jim Benson’s introduction: “poetry as rock and roll.”
Northampton-based Stephen Kellogg and the Sixers delivered an earthy, warm set of tunes that veered through a tight spectrum of poppy rock, at times touching upon — but not lingering in — adult-contemporary flavors.
The smiling band offered songs rooted in the pleasures of family, friendship, and love, but never came off as cloying. This earnest stuff would never cut the mustard in Brooklyn, but that’s to the hipsters’ discredit. When Kellogg declared, in “Satisfied Man” (performed unaccompanied on acoustic guitar) that he’d be happy to die if he did so surrounded by friends and family whose lives were warmed by his presence, it came off as truly affecting rather than hopelessly sentimental.
Onstage instrument switches underlined the band’s able if unflashy musicianship, and the well-paced set achieved emotional depth with radio-ready smoothness, while still managing to rock in all the right places,
Mike and Ruthy’s acoustic-flavored pop was well-crafted but felt one-dimensional, its sweetness never tempered by anything savory. All round edges and saccharine smiles, it definitely has its role in the marketplace, but doesn’t feel particularly vital. Perhaps in a perfect world, this mildly Appalachian-tinged pop would be the mainstream pop of radio, but that doesn’t make it essential.
The fledgling festival is still working to articulate its unifying concept. Is it a poetry festival, as Kellogg described it from the stage during his set? No, but it’s got poetry. Is it a music festival? No, but it’s got music. The idea at Word x Word is to celebrate the word — as written, spoken and sung. We got the second and third legs of this stool on this evening, but when the written word is truly integrated into this performance festival, that’ll be the conceptual leap that truly ties it all together.
