Live at the Belly Up: Marc Broussard (Belly Up Productions, San Diego State University, KPBS, 2020)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night at 11 I watched yet another Live at the Belly Up episode from 2020 (at least that’s the copyright date, though it’s possible these were pre-COVID shows taped in 2019 before the pandemic lockdown) featuring Marc Broussard. From the description of him on the KPBS Web site – “singer, songwriter, performer, humanitarian” – I expected Broussard to be one of those wimpy’ “sensitive” white guys with guitars who cluttered up the pop music scene in the early 1970’s. Broussard was indeed a white guy with a guitar, but he didn’t sound at all like that: he turned out to be a very Black-sounding singer who named Stevie Wonder and Donny Hathaway as his biggest influences. He also said he learned to play guitar at nine and his dad was also a professional musician, who was always playing records in the house when Broussard fils was growing up – only the records he played were mostly instrumental jazz and it wasn’t until Broussard had enough money to buy records for himself that he started listening to pop, rock and soul. I’m surprised he didn’t mention John Fogerty as an influence because a number of his songs showed a very strong influence from the kind of “swamp music” style Fogerty invented with his band, Creedence Clearwater Revival. In fact, Broussard’s best songs were relatively slow “swamp” workouts like “Eye on the Prize,” “Baton Rouge” and his solo romantic ballad, “The Beauty of Who You Are.” Elsewhere, though, he went for a more superficial funk-dance sound as on his opener, “Rock Steady,” and as the show progressed I got more and more irritated by his penchant for sticking bits of songs at the ends of other songs and what he did to Stevie Wonder’s masterpiece “Higher Ground.” For the first verse Broussard did an effective transformation of “Higher Ground” from the gospel-derived raveup Stevie Wonder wrote into soft, relatively slow swamp rock, and I was really impressed. But when the chorus – “I’m so glad He let me try it again” – he sped the song up to Wonder’s original tempo and kept it fast throughout the rest of the piece. What made it worse was that he tacked on bits of two other songs at the end – something he did throughout the latter half of the program.

His fourth selection, after “Rock Steady” (not the Aretha Franklin hit of that title), “Eye on the Prize” and “Baton Rouge,” was billed as a “Love and Happiness Medley” and opened and closed with Al Green’s “Love and Happiness” (a surprisingly dark song despite its anodyne title) with something called “Grandma’s Hands” ant the Temptations’ late hit “Papa Was a Rolling Stone” shoehorned in between. So we were warned that he was going tto do oddball medleys, and he did. After the “Higher Ground” medley onto which he spliced two more songs, including one that appeared to be called “Roaring Good Time,” he did a song called “Come Around” onto which he spliced James Brown’s “Sex Machine.” After that he did another Stevie Wonder cover, “Superstition” (whose title KPBS’s chyron artists got wrong as “Superstitious”), only this time his tag song was the Isley Brothers’ “It’s Your Thing.” For his last song he chose a piece he co-wrote with his father called “Home,” based on a melody his dad hummed to him while they were in a car together and to which he added lyrics and an overall song structure. Once again, what could have been a haunting, powerful ballad in the swamp-rock style got ruined when midway through Broussard sped up the tempo (again!) and added still more bits that had only a tenuous relationship to the song he’d begun playing. Marc Broussard is a frustrating artist because he’s got real talent and skills – and he has an excellent band, including a quite capable lead guitarist and a drummer I found not just musically but physically attractive (he had one of the most incredible vertical hairdos I’ve seen on a white guy!) – but he needs to focus more on the style he does well and stop trying to emulate the sounds of classic soul artists like Stevie Wonder, the Isley Brothers and James Brown.