Live at the Belly Up: Donavon Frankenreiter (Belly Up Tavern, San Diego State University, KPBS-TV, 2015)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After Love Me Tonight Charles and I watched a Live at the Belly Up episode featuring Donavon Frankenreiter, who’s billed on his Wikipedia page as “an American musician and surfer.” He’s been recording steadily since 2004 and recalled in one of the interstitial interview clips that he’s been playing at the Belly Up Tavern in Solana Beach for years, at first opening for more prominent artists (he’s recorded a seven-song EP with Jack Johnson and G. Love) and now headlining. He was considered important enough that for this show he was given the whole hour-long time slot instead of having to share it with another act. He performs with a three-piece band, with Mike Duffy on drums and Matt Grundy on an odd double-necked guitar: most double-necks I’ve seen have a 12-string guitar on the upper neck and a standard six-string one on the bottom, but Grundy’s instrument has a bass guitar on the upper neck and he can switch back and forth during a song, playing bass as Donavon sings and then switching necks so he can do a lead solo. Frankenreiter’s own instrument is an oddball electric guitar he calls a “guitorgan” because it can make a sound like that of a small organ – if you were just listening to this group and not watching them you’d probably think they had some sort of keyboard player. He also mentioned that he’s been married for 20 years and he and his wife have two sons, Ozzy, 11 and Hendrix, 7. (Of course I joked, “If they have two more kids is he going to call them ‘Clapton’ and ‘Page’?”)

Before he performed his song “On My Mind” he told this bizarre anecdote that this was the first original song he wrote. He had come home one night from a gig in a cover band and had complained to his wife, “I’m tired of being a human jukebox.” She made the quite logical suggestion that if he was tired of playing other people’s songs he should try writing his own. So he wrote “On My Mind,” a love song presumably addressed to her, only he was too nervous to sing it to her face, so (by his own account) he literally sat on her ass and played her the song so she couldn’t see him. This sounds like it would have been uncomfortable for her, but fortunately she endured it and actually liked the song – so he was able to make the transition from cover artist to original singer-songwriter. There’s nothing particularly great or unforgettable about Donavon Frankreiter’s music, but it’s comfortable and accessibly blends country, pop and rock into an engaging whole. In fact, I liked him best when he and Grundy put down their electric instruments and did a couple of songs, “”Freed” and “Heading Home,” and Grundy picked a particularly beautiful acoustic guitar solo on “Heading Home.” There’s nothing especially “major” about Frankenreiter’s music, but it’s nice and comfortable – if I’d been there at the Belly Up the night this performance happened I’d have enjoyed it – and I’m glad that he’s made it to age 48 and got at least a certain degree of acclaim both for his surfing and his music (albeit he sounds nothing like either the Beach Boys or Dick Dale, the two acts most people think of immediately once they hear the term “surf music”). I’m happy for him even though his music didn’t grab me the way Sara Petite’s did when I saw her on Live at the Belly Up and went to her Web site to order her CD’s.