Live at the Belly Up: The Wood Brothers (Belly Up Tavern, San Diego State University, KPBS-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 episode featuring a quite compelling band called the Wood Brothers, whom I hadn’t realized have been around for quite a while: they made their first record in 2005 for, of all companies, Blue Note. The surprise was that Blue Note has historically been a jazz label and jazz is about the one major American musical genre which their Live at the Belly Up performance did not include. (They finally left Blue Note in 2008 and their subsequent records have been for labels with reputations more appropriate to their music, Southern Ground and Honey Jar.) Also, though the Wood Brothers are a four-piece band, only two of the members are actual Wood brothers: Oliver Wood, who’s the lead guitarist, lead singer and principal songwriter; and his younger (I assume) brother Chris, who plays stand-up bass and harmonica (simultaneously, through a Bob Dylan-style harmonica rack). The version of the band seen on Live at tne Belly Up also featured two non-Wood members, one who played acoustic rhythm guitar and doubled on melodica (the miniature keyboard instrument which has keys like a miniature piano and reeds so you have to blow into it to get it to sound; Nat “King” Cole is seen playing it on some of his surviving concert videos), and a drummer who doubled on an electronic keyboard instrument and which he was somehow able to do by reaching over with his arm and playing the keyboard with one hand while still keeping a beat going with his other arm and his feet.

Basically the Wood Brothers are a so-called “Americana” band, a genre name that was associated ini the late 1960’s with The Band and Creedence clearwater Revival (who got lumped into the category even though they didn’t sound that similar, maybe because they both seemed to be harking back to older, earlier times in music). The Wood Brothers reminded me of Grant Lee Phillips, whom I’ve been a fan of since the mid-1990’s when I discovered them on one of those sport-lived video compilations you could get by mail order: I loved the song Phillips did with his band Grant Lee Buffaly called “Lone Star Song” and immediately bought the CD containing it, and it’s still a personal favorite. Though Oliver Wood’s voice doesn’t sound that much like Phillips’, they are quite similar as songwriters and their voices have a laconic, laid-back sound. The sparseness of their instrumentation reminded me of Grant Lee Buffalo (and of Creedence as well!). They played 12 songs – a relatively high number for this 52-minute program, indicating that they play simply and straightforwardly, and don’t do a lot of jamming within their songs – and the only fault I could find with them is that all the songs sounded too similar.

The song titles were “Little Bit Sweet,” “Alabaster,” “Little Bit Broken,” “The Mose” (ini which Oliver’s lyric refers to waking up to see his muse in her underwear – obviously a reference to a wife or girlfriend), “Keep Me Around,” “River Takes the Town” (yet another song about a river flood, which has become a standard subject for blues songs since the 1927 Mississippi River floods and the contest the Melrose Brothers publishing house ran for the best song about the natural disaster, which Bessie Smith deservedly won for her masterpiece, “Backwater Blues”), “Atlas,” “:Who Are Devil?,” their cover of the traditional folk ballad “Little Liza Jane” (first recorded in 1916 by Wilbur Sweatman’s band, the first jazz record ever made by an African-American band, which predated the supposed first jazz record, “Livery Stavle Blues” b/w “Original Dixieland One-Step” bo the white Original Dixlenakd Jazz Band, by a year) and “Luckiest Man,” the song on their program on which they came close to a real jam. It was a nice show and it’s a good thing that the COVID-19 restrictions have eased enough that Live at the Belly Up is running new programs instead of dredging through toeir vaults for things they could reissue (including one by blues singer Candye Kane, who tragically died of cancer in 2016 at age 54), and though the show started to drag after a while (at least until the “Liza Jane” cover and the original “Luckiest Man” livened things and helped the show finish strongly), they’re a solidly good band and it was nice tomake their acquaintance.