Live at the Belly Up: Squirrel Nut Zippers (Belly Up Tavern, San Diego State University' PBS-TV, 2022)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After the Blue Bloods episode I watched a KPBS Live at the Belly Up show featuring the Squirrel Nut Zippers, a local San Diego band described on their Wikipedia page as playing swing and jazz. In fact, their Wikipedia page at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Squirrel_Nut_Zippers gives a surprisingly convoluted history of them, saying that they were formed in Chapel Hill, North Carolina in 1993 by James “Jimbo” Mathus (who was born and raised in Mississippi) and his then-wife, Katherine Whalen. When the couple broke up, so did the first edition of the band, and they didn’t reunite until 2007, after which they broke up again and didn’t re-reunite until 2016. Their current lineup features Mathus on lead vocals, guitar and amplified banjo, a violin player and singer who calls himself “Dr. Sick” (and he was easily the sexiest one of the crew, with his electrifying red pants and, midway through the show, he took off his shirt to reveal a T-shirt with a design that looked like a rib cage) and a woman singer named Cella Blue who sings with a thin, reedy voice but has the exuberance to fit in with the high-energy ensemble.

Mathus spoke for the band during the interstitial interview segments, and the band played through 15 songs – an unusually high number for a Live at the Belly Up episode even though this was not filmed at the Belly Up Tavern in Solana Beach, Instead it took place at a club in Little Italy, and Mathus encouraged his audience to get out of their seats and jump in time to the music. Mathus also mentioned the checkered upbringing he had, saying that his parents were musical and he played at being a musician since he was four. According to Mathus, he grew up in a really isolated part of Mississippi and he only gradually discovered the full range of American musical genres which he would fuse into the Squirrel Nut Zippers’ sound. He recalled that it was a big deal when his isolated community in Mississippi finally got access to the HBO premium cable TV channel (I’m probably one of the dwindling number of people who remembers that HBO originally stood for “Home Box Office”), and an HBO showing of the film Rock ‘n’ Roll High School with the Ramones was his introduction to punk rock. A pity he didn’t perform a swing-jazz version of “Rock ‘n’ Roll High School” in his set; instead he performed 15 songs in the obligatory one-hour time slot, which indicates that he keeps the songs quite short and doesn't let his band engage in the kind of jamming in which other Live at the Belly Up artists have indulged..

Some of them were oldies I recognized from the classic jazz and swing eras – Milton Ager’s and Jack Yellen’s “Happy Days Are Here Again,” Walter Donaldson’s “You’re Driving Me Crazy” (which Cella Blue sang and included the song’s rarely heard verse, which she sang at a slow tempo before speeding up for the chorus) and Jelly Roll Morton’s ”Animuile Ball,” as well as a tango-flavored reworking of “Can’t Take My Eyes Off of You,” written in the 1960’s by Four Seasons songwriters Bob Gaudio and Bob Crewe for a solo session bu the Four Seasons’ lead singer,Frankie Vally. These were mixed in with what I guess are originals by Mathus, possibly collaborations with his bandmates, in 1920’s and 1930’s style: “Lover’s Lane,” “Good Enough for Granddad,” “Wash Jones,” “La Grippe” (a satirical song about a new flu epidemic which Mathus wrote in 1994 and which became newly fresh and relevant at the height of COVID-19), “The Suits Are Picking Up the Bill,” an instrumental called “Memphis Exorcism,” two more Cella Blue vocal features called “It Ain’t You” and “Still Ballin’,” “Hell,” “Prince Nez” (another Cella Blue feature and a song with a cleverly punning title), and a finale, “Plenty More,” one of those pieces in which the singer assures his friend who’s just broken up with his (or her?) partner that iut;s O.K. because there are literally plenty more out there. It was sung by a quite good singer in a crooning style and featured a break in which the singer whistled, the way Bing Crosby and others did in the early 1930’s but which has become quite passé. All in all, it was a fun show featuring a band that is clearly out just to entertain – at which they are quite good.