Live at the Belly Up: Jack Tempchin (Peaks and Valleys Productions, Belly Up Productions, San Diego State University, KPBS, 2024)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After that KPBS showed a Live at the Belly Up episode I was particularly looking forward to because the featured performer was Jack Tempchin. Never heard of him? O.K., you’ve heard of the Eagles’ song “Peaceful Easy Feeling,” haven’t you? Well, he wrote it. Tempchin played 10 songs in the Live at the Belly Up hour-long time slot, a relatively low number. I often judge Live at the Belly Up shows by how many songs get played in the time slot; the fewer the songs, generally, the looser the band is and the more they like to jam on their material. In Tempchin’s case, the low number of actual songs is less due to him jamming and more to him doing the usual folksinger “thing” of giving long-winded explanations of each song before he sings it. (I still remember that screamingly funny routine Andy Griffith did on a 1958 episode of the Milton Berle Show in which he droned on and on and on about a song and never got around to actually singing it. When he was asked why, he said, “I’m not a song-singer, I’m a song-explainer.”) My husband Charles, who arrived home between Death in Paradise and Live at the Belly Up (actually he got back from work with about 20 minutes of Death in Paradise left to go), thought Jack Tempchin looked like the late Utah Phillips: the same big fedora hat, the same scraggly grey beard, the same tousled longish hair under the hat, and the same penchant for telling long anecdotes between the songs. Tempchin grew up in San Diego County and earned a place on the fringes of the L.A. singer-songwriter movement. He began with a nice ballad called “More of Less” and then went into the first of a number of songs he co-wrote with the Eagles’ co-leader, Glenn Frey: “The One You Love.” Then he played a song called “You Can Go Home,” co-written with ex-Byrd and ex-Flying Burrito Brother Chris Hillman, in which the singer returns to his old high school and meets up with the girl he dated then – only now she’s with someone else, and the song’s punch line is, “You can go home/But you can’t go back.”

Though Tempchin played on a stage with a plethora of acoustic guitars, he only actually used two of them: a blue plastic one and a white plastic one, both of them designed to be used with electric amplification even though they’re not strictly speaking electric guitars. (An electric guitar works by having a pickup mike under each string; the sort of guitar Tempchin uses has a hollow body and the pickup is inside the instrument, picking up and amplifying the combined sounds of all the strings instead of amplifying each one individually.) After four songs, including a lovely romantic ballad called “Slow Dancing” which was later covered by Johnny Rivers and which Tempchin said was about a woman he knew in his days living out of a Volkswagen van and said he’s still with her (that’s nice), Tempchin brought out two other musicians. One was a Black electric-bass player named Norman Sancho, and one was a white lead guitarist (though still playing an internally miked hollow-bodied acoustic) named Jesse London, who was a quite good “picker.” I was a bit surprised that his extra musicians did not include a drummer, since there was a fully set-up drum kit at the back of the stage. I was also surprised that Sancho didn’t play the Fender-style electric bass that was part of the stage setup, but instead brought out a more compact instrument that lacked the conventional tuning pegs, which made me wonder just how he tunes it. The first song he played with his extra musicians was a Tempchin/Frey co-composition called “Party Town,” in which Tempchin asked the audience to sing along – but only the words “Yeah, yeah” on the choruses (did he get the idea from The Beatles?). It was a harder-rocking song than I’d expected from Tempchin and his crew. He followed it with a plaintive ballad called “Waiting,” which he co-wrote with John Brandon (though I don’t know who that is: Google lists two John Brandons, a writer and an actor).

Then he played a song that in some ways was his best selection of the night: another Tempchin/Frey collaboration called “Smuggler’s Blues.” Tempchin and Frey wrote it for a movie called Snow Blind, about the cocaine trade, but the film never got made and Frey held on to it until he did an episode of Miami Vice in which he played a drug dealer and also performed the song on the soundtrack. Frey’s version was faster and rocked harder, but Tempchin’s (which I liked better) was slower, bluesier, and featured him playing slide guitar. Tempchin’s next song was “Bender,” about a man who’s determined to complete a week-long bender on both alcohol and drugs before he gives them both up completely. Tempchin’s final two songs were both major hits for The Eagles: “Already Gone,” which he co-wrote with Robb Strandlund, and the inevitable “Peaceful Easy Feeling.” There was a table for years outside the Wienerschnitzel in Mission Hills, San Diego that had a plaque on it saying it was where Tempchin wrote “Peaceful Easy Feeling,” but that’s been questioned. The truth was he only put the finishing touches on the song there and it was really inspired by a woman he met at a live gig and asked to come home with him. She said she’d meet him back there after the show, but she didn’t. Tempchin grabbed a conveniently handy blank piece of paper and started sketching out the song then and there. I’ve frequently complained about previous Live at the Belly Ups that the performers’ songs sounded too similar to each other; that was not a problem with Tempchin, who did a nice blend of folk and rock material and didn’t stay in one groove too long. Tempchin has a serviceable “folk” voice rather than a great one, but it’s good enough to put over his material and get other, bigger stars to record it.