Live at the Belly Up: Deer Tick (San Diego State University, Jacobs Television Center, KPBS, 2018)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night I got home in time to watch a couple of shows on KPBS, including a Live at the Belly Up episode from 2018 featuring a quite good band called Deer Tick (singular). The core members of this band, who hail from Providence, Rhode Island, are John McCauley (lead vocals and rhythm guitar), Ian O’Neill (lead guitar and occasional vocals), Christopher Ryan (bass guitar), and Dennis Ryan (drums). They’ve been playing together since 2004 and have already released seven studio albums (plus one compilation) on an independent label called Partisan Records. Their most recent release is a live album on an even more obscure indie label, Dads In Charge Records, that does not appear to be available on CD, though it’s out on Spotify and presumably more of those cursed “streaming” services by which most people get their music nowadays. Deer Tick is (are?) a 21st century band but they hearken back to a lot of older styles – I described one of the songs on last night’;s program as 1950’s rockabilly meets 1970’s punk, and my husband Charles noted that one thing they have in common with 1970’s (and later) punk is the sheer brevity of their songs. I once have noticed about bands that appear on Live at the Belly Up or Austin City Limits is how many songs they can crowd into the show’s 52-minute running time (less station ID’s, credits and so-called “enhanced underwriting opportunities,” which is PBS Newspeak for commercials). Some groups like the Mick Fleetwood Band (a blues-roots band led by the drummer who lent half his name to a far more famous band he also plays with) or the Tedeschi-Trucks band (he’s Derek Trucks, nephew oif original Allman Brothers Band drummer Butch Trucks, and she’s Susan Tedeschi, Derek Trucks’ wife) jammed so extensively that they only got eight songs into their Live at the Belly Up appearances.

Not Deer Tick: they got 16 songs into the 52 minutes – “Don’t Hurt,” “Jumpstarting,” “These Old Shoes” (a quite clever and amusing song about a man so desperate to get home to his girlfriend he successively takes a plane, a train and a car – only they all crash or break down and he ultimately ends up walking there, an intriguing update of Ella Mae Morse’s “Old Shank’s Mare”), “Look How Clean I Am” (one of two songs on which Ian O’Neill sang lead, which he wrote as a put-down of how record company owners and uther music executives exploit musicians’ personal bad habits to sell their records), “The Bump,” “Easy,” “Tiny Fortunes” (the other song on which O’Neill instead of McCauley sang), “White City,” “It’s a Whale,” “Wants/Needs,” “Sea of Clouds,” “Dirty Dishes,” “Walls,” “Baltimore Blues, No. 1,” “Ashamed,” and “Mr. Nothing Gets Home.” I noted that, like the Beatles, Deer Tick have a left-handed bass player –º and Charles joked htat, unlike the Beatles, they had their drummer behind Plexiglas panels “so he can’t escape.” McCauley and O’Neill did the interstitial interviews and were quite charming. Charles was abit confused by their description of the band as a four-piece when there were clearly five musicians on stage, and it turned out from their Wikipedia page that the fifth member – keyboard player Robert Berry Crowell, who sat on a swivel chair and played at least two different instruments and is also listed on Wikipedia as playing saxophone and guitar – had already given his notice in early 2017 but continued to play with the band on recordings. Deer Tick are not a great band, but they’re good enough that I successfully hunted down a couple of their CD’s and ordered them online at https://www.hellomerch.com/products/deer-tick-vol-2-cd (with a link to a catalog page that got me to order Volume 1 as well). There’s a charming story on the Deer Tick Wikipedia page that the band recorded a duet between McCauley and Vanessa Carlton on “In Our Time” for th eir album Negativity, and thereafter McCauley married Carlton in a ceremony officiated by, of all people, Fleetwood Mac member and co-lead singer Stevie Nicks.