RockNRoll Cupcake:1/10/09

Jeremy Messersmith with Best Friends Forever and Caroline Smith & The Good Night Sleeps, 7th Street Entry 1/10/2009

Caroline Smith & The Good Night Sleeps- Tying My Shoes

You can’t see it from behind the guitar, but Ms. Smith is wearing a shirt emblazoned with  ”Santa Cruz.”  The Santa Cruz boardwalk is home of The Giant Dipper, one of California’s oldest wooden rollercoasters, a clicking beauty of bygone economy.  It pushes up to the top with sweet resolve, carrying candy floss and children, sailors on dates with blondes who laugh loudly at silly jokes.  From the top you look out onto the crystal Pacific, wry in the face of eternity, and then plunge, your heart stopping not because of the severity of the angle, but you are very aware of the fragility of the rollercoaster’s structure, of the structure of your bones plummeting to earth, of the bones in the hand holding yours and the way she yells giddily and twists it up into a laugh as you get off  at the bottom and the sun shines on you as you go to buy a funnel cake and fill up and enjoy each others’ company.

Best Friends Forever

Did anyone else grow up singing the Wee Sing series?  The Wee Sing Silly Songs, tunes about being a nut, and chili, and Little Bunny FooFoo – all with horrible puns and grating choruses that we all sung along like happy little wide-eyed earnest rag dolls?  Anybody?  Something tells me Best Friends Forever did, spinning off into Wee Sing Spastic Hipster Klezmer.  I’ll take their delirious basslines and staccato drumming, but there is something unsettling about the awkward FUN we are HAVING because we are BEST. FRIENDS. FOREVER.

Jeremy Messersmith-Virginia

Dan Wilson was in attendance to watch his young friend and protege hush the crowd with his arrangements as the first line of defense from the Too Much Love barbarians thumping at the thin door.  The two man orchestra of Messersmith and Andy Thompson had the kids closing their eyes, kissing in the corners, ignoring the tawdry come-ons of cheap pick-up lines, and holding each other in the swell of quiet sound, the vastness of a packed city.  With his beard, wool tie and owl glasses, Messersmith looked like he could have given us a lecture on the economics of a developing market, which is, with simplicity and musical grace, what he does.  Take what you have and listen, tell its story, feel the curve of its history and kiss the rest good bye and good night.