Live at the Belly Up: The Heavy Guilt, The Earful (KPBS, 2014)

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

Last night’s KPBS airing of the show Live at the Belly Up (the venue, the Belly Up Tavern in Solana Beach, has been open until 1974 – though how it’s weathering the SARS-CoV-2 storm I have no idea – and this show was from 2014 and was therefore a welcome bit of nostalgia for the days when bands actually performed live and people sat together in harger rooms to hear them “live.” The episode they ran last night featured two bands from the local San Diego scene, The Heavy Guilt and The Earful. The Heavy Guilt is fronted by singer-guitarist Eric Canzona and describes itself on its Web site as “rock in all its shades and tints, heavy and dynamic, haunting and sparse, the past looking forward.” Canzona said in an interview that the band was the result of a meeting between himself, keyboard player and occasional singer Josh Rice, and percussionist Alfred Howard – the last being the band’s Black member and someone my husband Charles and I actually knew in our local political-activist days. He began as a rapper with a group called (if I remember correctly) K23, and he was one of the first people I heard who could actually justify rap as an artistic form – though like a lot of other rappers with musical talent he found the form too limiting and started singing.

I’m not sure what he’s doing with the rest of his career – his Web site lists him as being in a band called Playing for Change with David Carr and Alex Pryor, and judging from the Web story on them, which says that when they met Howard, Carr and Pryor “knew he was the poet we had been searching for to contribute to our UN 75 Peace Through Music Event!” That happened last March and it’s not clear whether that band will be a going concern or just a one-off, but it seems like they gave Howard considerably more to do than he has with the Heavy Guilt, where he’s relegated to banging on wooden tables, ringing bells and occasionally playing a mini-keyboard – though he does seem to be doing more to drive their music than their woman drummer, whose name I can’t find on their Web site. I’d describe The Heavy Guilt as an emo band except they play with much more power and drive than is usually associated with emo (for all the derivation of the genre name as short for “emotion,” emo bands tend to sound rather droopy). Canzone is an active front person and he projects an aura of nerd cool rather than drop-dead gorgeousness, but he’s still easy on the eyes as well as the ears. His voice isn’t great but it’s strong enough to put over his songs, whose moods can be pretty well guessed at from their titles: “In the Blood,” “Goin’ Home,” “Through the Tangles,” “Before the Fall” (for which they introduced Greg Peters as second guitarist, though I didn’t hear that he added much), “God Burning Eyes” and “The Coast.” (Once again, thank you to the producers of Live at the Belly Up for including chyrons with the actual song titles instead of keeping us guessing.) “God Burning Eyes” was announced as a feature for Josh Rice, who said he was influenced by and strongly admired Tom Waits. That had me primed for the worst – I’ve liked some highly unlikely voices over the years, including Randy Newman’s, Captain Beefheart’s, Yoko Ono’s and Lou Reed’s, but I draw the line at Tom Waits – but the song itself sounded less like Waits and more like Procul Harum in their early “A Whiter Shade of Pale” days in which organist Matthew Fisher was a key part of their sound.

The Earful are the brainchild of songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Brian Teel and play hot, jumpy, dance-inducing mid-1970’s funk before it degenerated into disco. The announcement (or warning) that the Earful was going to feature a rapper on one song briefly had me dreading the result, but the one song on which they used voices – “Activation,” featuring two Black men named Passion John and Big Fellow who both sang and rapped – was actually a pleasant surprise even though, as is a fault of all too many rap records, when they were rapping they talked so fast it wasn’t all that easy to understand them. (That’s one of the many things I don’t understand about rap: if you’re going to purge music of melody and harmony so all you have left are rhythm and lyrics, can’t you at least make it possible to understand the lyrics – especially for all us white people out here who aren’t bilingual in English and Ghetto?) The other songs they played were quite exciting funk jams – their Web site insists they’re a band that wants audiences to dance to their music, and even within the cramped confines of the Belly Up they seemed to be achieving that.

I remember hearing bands like this at a lot of political events in the East Bay (Berkeley and Oakland, especially) in the mid-1970’s (in fact I have some old cassette tapes I recorded of them “live”), and though this is lightweight music it’s pleasant and fun, and the band was enviably well rehearsed and didn’t make a virtue of sloppiness the way all too many rock bands have since the 1960’s. I remember hearing the San Francisco psychedelic bands in the mid-1960’s and, aside from the Jefferson Airplane, most of them were pretty ill-rehearsed – so much so that when I first started listening to James Brown records, his voice and the grunt-like nature of so many of his songs didn’t impress me (I suspect Brown was the sort of artist who was never really captured on records and you really had to see him live), what did impress me was the tightness of his band. The Earful’s music is pretty lightweight, and over longer than half an hour it might get to sound too much the same, but they were fun and I particularly liked the exciting solos of their trombonist and saxophonist (regrettably unidentified on their Web site except for a collective listing of Adrian Terazzas Gonzalez, Roy Brown, and Derek Cannon as playing “horns”).