Live at the Belly Up: Stranger, Paul Cannon Band (Belly Up Productions, Peaks and Valleys Productions, San Diego State University, KPBS-TV, 2014)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After The Phenom Charles and I watched a Live at the Belly Up rerun from 2014 featuring two San Diego-area bands, Stranger and the Paul Cannon Band. Though both Stranger’s leader, David Ornelas, and Belly Up manager Chris Goldsmith identified Stranger as a reggae band, their music sounded to me much more like ska, the earlier variant of Jamaican pop-rock. The bouncy rhythms of Stranger’s music and the full horn section (trumpet, trombone and tenor sax, though only the saxophonist got to solo; the trombonist literally twirled his instrument on some songs, much like a cheerleader’s baton) are much more characteristic of ska than reggae. During their half-hour of the show’s 55-minute time slot Stranger did six songs – “Royalty,” “Now Is the Time,” “You Got It,” “Never Want the Night to End,” “Universal Love” and “Under Control” – of which the first four dealt with good times, partying and relationships while the last two took feints at social comment and got a bit preachy. I had the same problem with Stranger that I’ve had with a lot of the bands on Live at the Belly Up and other shows like it: their songs sounded too much like each other. The only one that stood out for me was “Never Want the Night to End” because of the guest vocalist, a woman Ornelas introduced as “Piracy Melsie” (at least I think that’s her name), who strolled onto the stage wearing a skimpy black top and matching black shorts and jacked the energy level up considerably. David Ornelas had a serviceable voice; Piracy Melsie (or whatever her name is) was a good deal better than that, singing with real insight and passion and vastly improving the quality of the music.

I suspected I’d like the Paul Cannon Band better, if only because Chris Goldsmith introduced them as blending country music, folk and soul, and I did even though they were hardly that special, either. Paul Cannon said he started out as a solo singer-songwriter, bringing himself and his acoustic guitar to open-mike nights. Then he added a cello player, and by the time he did this Live at the Belly Up gig he had a four-piece band with himself on vocals and acoustic guitar, an electronic keyboard player (judging from the tenor sax that stood in a holder next to him, I suspect he doubles on other instruments even though he didn’t play anything but keyboards all night; I wondered if he was the cello player Cannon said he used to use), electric bass and drums. Cannon did five songs: “Lucky Ones,” “On the Mountain,” “Broken Palace,” “Truth,” and the closest he came to a hit, “Homegrown.” I found his vocals O.K. but a bit annoying because of his overuse of the Bob Dylan drawl, though at least two of the songs had strong local connections. “Homegrown” actually mentions San Diego and achieved major radio play on a local station, which led to its adoption by the San Diego Padres major-league baseball team as a theme song.

And while Paul Cannon said he had no idea what “Broken Palace” meant when he wrote it, within a year or two he’d befriended San Diego Chargers professional football player Junior Seau, who suffered from long-term concussion-related injuries that caused him so much ongoing pain he committed suicide on May 2, 2012 by shooting himself in the chest. At the time Paul Cannon’s Live at the Belly Up episode was filmed Seau had been dead for only two years (or less), and one could tell that the traumatic wound of losing his friend was still raw for Paul Cannon. On “Lucky Ones” and “Homegrown” Cannon and his band were joined by two women backup singers who, as Piracy Melsie had done with Stranger, added a great deal to the band. They were Lindsay White and Veronica May, and while May looked female White had her hair cut very short and was wearing a white dress shirt, a necktie and tan slacks. Only the absence of a basket in her crotch and the hint of breasts under that white shirt gave her away as female – and even so I’m not altogether sure whether they’re a woman, a man or non-binary. In fact, the two looked like a Lesbian couple, with White as the butch and May as the femme, though I have no idea what their sexual orientations or gender identities are. Overall, this Live at the Belly Up episode featured two very good local bands but neither seemed to have much to offer beyond that. If I’d been to the Belly Up Tavern the night this show was filmed I’m sure I would have enjoyed it, but other Live at the Belly Up shows have featured either bigger bands with broader reputations or San Diego-based acts like Sara Pettite who were stronger than either Stranger or the Paul Cannon Band.