Live at the Belly Up: Samantha Fish (Belly Up Productions, San Diego State University, KPBS, 2020)

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

At 11 p.m. on Friday, December 23 I caught a Live at the Belly Up show on KPBS which I quite liked, featuring a 30-year-old blues-rock musician named Samantha Fish. In her interstitial interviews she said she grew up in Kansas City and started at age 13 as a drummer before switching to guitar and vocals at 15. So far she’s made 11 albums, some leading the Samantha Fish Blues Band and some on her own, and the copyright date on this show was 2020 (which would mean they got in just before the COVID-19 pandemic and the shutdown of all live venues for almost two years). Most of the songs she played came from her 2019 album Kill or Be Kind – a song she wrote about the dynamics of a dysfunctional relationship – including the spectacular opening song, “Bulletproof,” which she played on a guitar with a long neck and a rectangular body that reminded me of a cigar box (the body even had filigreed ornamentation around it to make it look more cigar box-like) and also the famous custom-built rectangular instrument Bo Diddley used to play. Most of the show she played on a white guitar with black trim, but she later switched to a lime-green one and I think she used a wood-grain solid-body electric on one song. She didn’t play acoustic guitar at all, and it would have been interesting to hear her on either an acoustic or a hollow-body electric playing more traditional blues standards, but she was quite spectacular in what she actually did. She loves to shred – which reminded me of the clips from Sister Rosetta Tharpe’s performance at a British TV concert in 1964 in which she shredded, and I was led to joke, “Ah, shredding! Another thing white people think they invented.”

Fish’s performance was great; her vocals reminded me of Janis Joplin’s but she is a much more disciplined performer than Janis ever was (let’s face it, a lot of us who were alive when Janis was watched her hurtling towards self-destruction with a sort of sick fascination; I remember being convinced when Janis was alive that her career couldn’t last long because, even if she’d lived, she would have burned out her voice in a few years). By chance I’d recently heard a CD of Janis Joplin and Jefferson Airplane guitarist Jorma Kaukonen from a tape they made in September 1964 when they were rehearsing for a folk-music gig and neither of them had any idea that both their careers would be totally changed by the 1960’s rock revolution – and aside from once again making me wonder how Janis’s career might have gone if she’d joined the Jefferson Airplane when their original female singer, Signe Toly Anderson, left, the stripped-down traditional blues on this 24-minute tape (including a cover of Bessie Smith’s “Nobody Knows You When You’re Down and Out”) sounded more like Samantha Fish’s music than the rock Janis is best known for. Fish performed 10 songs on Live at the Belly Up – it’s become a key indicator for me of how disciplined a band is and whether they’re really into jamming based on the number of songs they fit into the Live at the Belly Up’s one-hour time slot, and at 10 Fish’s show tended towards the jammier end of things, though not so much that she didn’t give a sense of discipline (a word I keep thinking of in connection with her).

Fish played with a fairly large band, including two horn players – a trumpeter and a saxophonist, both of whom contributed short, sweet solos – and a quite good drummer who kept a basic rhythm but also played loosely enough with the beat he reminded me of the way Mitch Mitchell played with Jimi Nendrix or Keith Moon with The Who. Fish’s songs were “Bulletproof,” “Kill or Be Kind,” “Watch It Die,” “Love Letters,” “She Don’t Live Around Here,” “You Got It Bad” (which she said was about the pressures of being in the music business and how it pretty much wipes out any chance of an off-stage private life), “Dirty,” “Little Baby,” “Fair-Weather” (the hyphen is very much a part of the song title) and her exciting finale, “Crow Jane.” Fish’s lyrics tend toward the elliptical but not so much so that they’re incomprehensible. She came out dressed in a tight black leather outfit which she showed off midway through the show when she took off the light white jacket she’d worn over it through the first few songs, and one can readily imagine straight guys (or Lesbians) having fantasies about her even though she’s not going out of her way to merchandise herself as a sex object, which is O.K. by me. Since this show and the Kill or Be Kind CD she’s released one more album, Faster (2021), which features an appearance by guest rapper Tech N9ne on a song called “Loud” – a fact which led me to think, “Et tu, Samantha?”