Laura Marling at Bimbo's

Two weeks ago I was reading the New York Times article about Laura Marling and for some odd reason, even though the description of her music didn't really appeal to me, I clicked on the stream to listen to her new album A Creature I Don't Know. The first two songs, "The Muse" and "I Was Just a Card" sounded good enough- better than I expected for an artist unfortunately tagged as an "English folk singer,"- there was a rough, jagged quality to Marling's voice- amused, yet angry, which appealed to me and the songs had unusual touches, but the third song, "Don't Ask Me Why" grabbed me with its graceful melody and lyrics and hasn't let go since I first heard it. The song has a refrain that was disturbingly appropriate for what I was feeling that particular day:

Those of us/ Who are lost and low/ I know how you feel/  

I know it's not right but it's real/ But it's real

I ended up listening to the entire album at least half a dozen times that day and a couple of times the next morning before going out for a walk.

When I first moved to San Francisco in 1993 I lived in a tiny, dark basement apartment between North Beach and Russian Hill. I was dead broke, didn't have a job, and spent a lot of afternoons on a bench in Washington Square Park trying to figure out what to do next with my life. I rarely visit the neighborhood anymore and when I do it's usually to sit on one of those benches and try to see what's coming next- just like I used to do all those years ago.

That's what I was doing on the morning of the recent Labor Day, and after sitting on a bench watching people play with their dogs and listening to some derelicts banging out a fairly decent, though drunken, version of "Sympathy for the Devil" on a guitar and some cans, I got up to make my way down Columbus, headed for the Bay. As I walked toward Bimbo's I looked up and saw Laura Marling was going to be there on the 17th. How serendipitous, I thought. When I returned home that afternoon I bought tickets.

Last Saturday night GG and I were standing outside of Bimbo's in a line longer than I anticipated, talking about the recent misfortunes of some people close to us, waiting to get in. In the back of my mind I thought the line was too long for us to get a table once we were inside but it turned out I was wrong and we easily found a table along the wall, giving us a perfect view of the stage. The first round of drinks came pretty quickly. There are many things I love about GG, not least of which is her enthusiasm for bourbon on the rocks, which rivals, and probably surpasses, my own.

An hour and two more rounds later, the lights dimmed and Alessi's Ark took the stage to open the show. Alessi's Ark is basically Alessi- a diffident young woman with long straight brown which has never held product nor felt a blow dryer. She was greeted enthusiastically by the young Lilith-fair types who were crowded up front of the stage. Backed by a single guitarist (whose name isn't "Ark"), she proceeded to play pretty much the same slow song for an hour, pausing every three or four minutes to rename it and then play it again, with somewhat different lyrics each time. After the fourth or fifth version, GG leaned over to me and said "She makes Bread sound like Metallica."

I chortled at this truism and a second later some wit in the audience called out "Free Bird," causing some bourbon to exit my nose. Alessi took all of this in stride, commenting that it's okay to like Lynyrd Skynyrd, which endeared her a bit to me, but I was still pleased when she was finished with her set, which lasted 30 or 40 minutes, though it felt like three days. When it was over GG and I tried to figure out how she ended up on this tour and decided that there must be an old connection between her and Marling- two friends who started out in the same place, one now taking the other along though they are clearly no longer musical peers.

While there was a steady exodus of people to the back bar during Alessi's set, during the break the club became packed- it looked sold-out. The floor was filled with a lot of young women, many of them in pairs and trios, along with guys who wore obvious "my girlfriend dragged me this?" looks on their faces. There was also a sizable contingent of the curious of a certain age and the usual suspects who decided this was the cool gig to see this weekend- one of whom blabbed incessantly about herself during Marling's set to the point I got up and asked her to shut up, which she did.

Marling came on at 9:30, backed by five other musicians and began the set with "Rambling Man" from her previous album, I Speak Because I Can. Her demeanor with the audience was loose, though she too exhibited diffidence. Maybe it's tick of young British females? The band was tight from the beginning, needing no time to warm up, and "Goodbye England (Covered in Snow)" felt very evocative on an atypically warm San Francisco evening. I can't remember the name of the pianist/guitar player but he was excellent on both.

My hope for the show was for Marling to play some songs from her previous albums and then perform A Creature I Don't Know in its entirety. It didn't go that way, though she did perform most of the album, highlights of the set being the gorgeous, Zeppelin-esque "Sophia" and the medley of "Don't Ask Me Why" and "Salinas," strung together as they are on the album.

The the centerpiece of the album, "The Beast," was strangely left out of the set and I found this extremely puzzling. Closing appropriately enough with "All My Rage," the performance felt briefer than it actually was, lasting perhaps an hour and a half. Not brief in a bad way, but in the way which leaves one wanting more, which the audience clearly did. Diffidence aside, Marling is an alluring presence on stage- not seeking any attention but claiming it effortlessly, she's not quite mesmerizing, but she's close. She's still at an early stage of her career and it will be interesting to see how her stage presence grows. In five years I suspect she's going to as commanding onstage as anyone, especially if her songwriting and guitar-playing skills continue to grow at the present exponential rate. In that time, perhaps she'll also get around to understanding how to build tension through a setlist, instead of seemingly deciding to just play the tunes in an apparently random order (even though that's unlikely). As an artist with such strong material, she could benefit from being more fearless in front of an audience- what in the end turned out to be a very good show felt like it could have been truly great had she just set the beast free.

There are a few more U.S. gigs, some of which are already sold-out. Check Marling's website for details of the tour and I can't recommend A Creature I Don't Know strongly enough. It's my favorite album in years.

As we made our way back toward my part of town after the gig, the ugliness of North Beach on a Saturday night was beginning to bloom. Two hours after we walked through the neighborhood, two bystanders would be hit by police gunfire in an incident on Broadway. We headed for the relative safety of the Tenderloin, bought some pizza and beer, and talked until two in the morning.