From the Salmon

Sometimes starting out with a joke is wildly inappropriate.

Let me show you what I mean: What do M&Ms, the Velvet Underground, and Robert Redford’s genitals have in common?

Answer: They’re all things I didn’t expect to hear about at Wednesday night’s Iron & Wine/Calexico concert.

Not funny? Well, perhaps I’m getting ahead of myself....

With Iron & Wine and Calexico’s collaborative EP In the Reins (iTunes) living up to all of my eager expectations, I wasn’t about to miss the opportunity to see the two bands together in concert. So Wednesday night, my ibuprofen and I made the trip across the bay to The Warfield to see if the partnership worked as well on stage as it did in the studio.

When the tour was first announced, the publicity releases promised that there might be “special guests” dropping in throughout the tour. At the first few concerts of the tour, for example, Tim Rutili of Califone played an opening set. So I was anxious to see who, if anyone, might show up from the San Francisco scene.

Much to my dismay, there was not a special musical opener. Instead, the capacity crowd was forced to endure the obnoxious “comedy” stylings of Neil Hamburger. He bombarded us with one offensively tasteless joke after another (mostly involving celebrity genitalia) and punctuated his routine by hacking loudly into the microphone and spitting into a cup. I don’t know how he ended up sharing the stage with the night’s main acts, but it was bafflingly incongruous.

Finally, after minutes upon minutes of shock and awfulness, he yielded the stage to Calexico for the first set of the evening. This was my first time seeing Burns, Convertino and friends, and while It took a song or two for me to get past the rancid aftertaste of the opener, I really enjoyed their set. Calexico is a versatile band, to say the least. The six musicians swapped instruments effortlessly as they segued from one musical style to the next: from dusty desert ballads to surf guitar to mariachi to earsplitting Sonic Youth cacophony. In addition to a few newer songs that I didn’t recognize, they played “Sonic Wind,” Love’s “Alone Again Or,” and a fiery rendition of “Crystal Frontier.”

After only 6 songs and a regrettably short 35 minutes or so, the Calexico boys left the stage to be replaced not by Iron & Wine, but by more abuse from Hamburger the Horrible. His routine was tasteless as an apéritif; it was positively repulsive as a palate cleanser. As he renewed his barrage of filthy provocation, the audience began to turn on him. And he just ate it up, lobbing profanities right back into the crowd. At one point, he lobbed more than f-bombs, spraying the slimy contents of his spitoon cup over the first few rows of the audience. At another point, a woman climbed up on stage and confronted him before getting dragged off by Warfield security. As a piece of performance art, he absolutely hit his mark. But as a “warm-up” act for moody musical storytellers, he was an inexplicable and abominable choice.

When Iron & Wine’s Sam Beam finally took the stage, he faced an audience that was shellshocked, riled, and a wee bit hostile. He opened with a tender solo version of “Sunset Soon Forgotten” and was met with catcalls about his abundant beard. When Beam’s sister Sarah joined him for a lovely duet on “Muddy Hymnal,” the crowd was still restless, chiding him over a recent M&Ms commercial that featured his cover of The Postal Service’s “Such Great Heights.” It wasn’t until Sam was joined by his full band for “Jezebel” that the audience seemed to settle down. For the rest of his set, members of both bands came and went as Beam balanced barnburners like “Free Until They Cut Me Down” and “Freedom Hangs Like Heaven” with the whispered beauty of “Naked as We Came” and “Southern Anthem” (with clarinet!).

One of the highlights for me was a captivating solo performance of “The Trapeze Swinger,” although it came at a bit of a cost. The song features some of the best lyrics Beam has ever penned, and his words alone kept me under his spell for nine minutes. But while the studio recording contains just enough variety in accompaniment to move things forward, when it’s just Sam and a guitar ambling through eight verses of relentlessly repetitive melody and no chorus, it can become, well, mindnumbingly boring. If you’re not in it for the poetry, you might end up like the person a few feet behind me who started laughing uncomfortably as Sam went on and on. And on. And on. I still adore the song, but I’m sadly no longer able to ignore its weaknesses.

Mercifully, the concert transitioned from Iron & Wine’s set to the evening’s main event sans “comedian.” With 11 musicians onstage, they tore into “He Lays in the Reins.” Sam and Calexico’s Joey Burns shared vocal duties, and by the time the horn section blew the roof off the song, all was forgiven. I knew exactly why I was there.

This kind of collaboration tour offers a kind of one-time-only magic that is not to be missed. When am I ever again going to get the chance to see these two bands and surprise guest Mark Kozelek (Red House Painters, Sun Kil Moon) mix it up over the Velvet Underground’s “All Tomorrow’s Parties”? When will I ever again be able to witness “A History of Lovers” performed with two drummers, five guitarists and a brass section?

Over the course of the evening’s culmination, the bands played every track from In the Reins, often expanding on the studio sound in wonderful ways. In addition to the VU cover, they also transformed The Drifters’ “Save the Last Dance for Me” into a mournful border ballad. As an encore, Burns, Beam and Kozelek traded verses on the Stones’ “Wild Horses” before clearing the stage for Sam, Sarah and Joey’s delicate finale “Dead Man’s Will.”

While the night was a bit of a bumpy ride, the final set was magnificent. If you get the chance to catch the In the Reins tour, you’re in for a treat. I think I can safely say that I’ll never have a night quite like that again.

And that’s no joke.