Live at the Belly Up: The Charities (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 Death in Paradise I watched a quite good Live at the Belly Up show shot in 2024 at the eponymous club and concert venue in Solana Beach (which is why I’ve never been there: I’m sure I’d like a lot of the music played there, but the transportation difficulties are just insurmountable). The band was a white neo-soul group called The Charities, led by a kind of dorky heavy-set dude named Brock Van Pelt (by coincidence, “Van Pelt” is also the last name of Lucy and Linus in the Peanuts comic strip). Van Pelt is the group’s front person and also was the spokesperson for it in the interstitial interviews. He said that The Charities came together from people who had worked in various bands and wanted to continue their musical careers. A Web site at “Jam in the Van” (https://jaminthevan.com/band/the-charities/) identifies them as “six brothers,” but there are only five of them (or at least that’s how many there were on Live at the Belly Up) and they have multiple last names and radically different appearances, so “brothers” is probably purely metaphorical. The Jam in the Van Web site says, “The exchange of energy between the audience and the band builds into an experience that cannot be expressed in the studio. That is not to imply any distaste for the recording process, however. Wherever they have found themselves dwelling, they have built their own recording studio and utilized their collection of analog equipment to capture their musical adventures. Their latest studio work and first official album, GBLO (Get Blasted, Listen to Oldies), came out of their home studio just outside San Luis Obispo, CA. The good times with The Charities are only just beginning!” Unfortunately, that “album” doesn’t seem to be available on physical media – though they have issued a 45 rpm single. “Bring Your Love” b/w “Angel Eyes,” on Nu-Tone, one of the labels issued by Penrose Records, an intriguing enterprise affiliated with Dap-Tone which I ran into on a recent church convocation in Riverside with my husband Charles. (They played both songs on last night’s Live at the Belly Up program.)

Van Pelt explained in the interview segments that he was originally involved in hip-hop (the euphemism for rap by people who actually like it), only as he explored that genre he got interested in the origins of some of the beats rap D.J.’s “sample” for their songs. Accordingly he started exploring 1960’s soul records in his mother’s collection, and ultimately came up with an infectious band sound that’s at its best when it’s reproducing the quieter, gentler ballad-soul styles of the 1960’s. They opened with “Angel Eyes,” in which Van Pelt sang a falsetto lead (the contrast between his falsetto singing voice and his lower-lying speaking voice in the interviews is dramatic) and soared eloquently over his band. Van Pelt and The Charities stayed in ballad-soul mode with “Can’t Own Love” and “Get Back, Don’t Stop,” though on the latter song they got a bit funkier. Then it was back to balladry with “Movin’ On,” “Comin’ Right Back” (featuring a vocal by their keyboard player,. Mike Butler), “Call for You” and their recent single release, “Bring Your Love.” After “It’s Not Our Time” they got more energetic with “The Plug,” featuring the kind of chicken-scratch guitar by Sage Provins (easily the band’s most physically attractive member) I remember vividly from innumerable local soul bands in the Berkeley-Oakland area in the mid-1970’s. The Charities then kept up the dance grooves with “Mistakes” – a great song in which Van Pelt lamented all the nights he’d partied too heartily – and a medley of “Sugar Sweet” and “Do the Right Thing” before their closing number, “Funk Upon a Time,” which intriguingly opened with “In the Hall of the Mountain King” from Grieg’s Peer Gynt and created a nice, laid-back dance groove (even though from what I’ve seen of the Belly Up on this show, it’s too crowded to serve as a good dance venue). I quite liked The Charities, though it’s a regrettable sign of the times that almost none of their music can be had on physical media. G.L.B.O. is available only as a download or a stream from Amazon.com and presumably other sources, and it doesn’t contain any of the songs they did on Live at the Belly Up anyway. During the show, instead of promoting a physical CD or LP, Van Pelt kept urging his audience to look up his band’s music on Spotify!