It’s not every day that you roll up into a show and fully expect to bump into members of Spoon waiting for Jack and cokes at the bar and Death Cab for Cutie‘s Chris Walla’s wet shoes while jockeying for a spot in the pisser. But then again, it ain’t every day that San Francisco’s all analog recording studio — the same blessed old space whose famous rich sound helped turn Ben Gibbard‘s act and many more into worldwide indie icons — turns a ripe old age of 10 (technically, 12 [1997 for the o.g. purists] but nobody’s ever heard of a 12th anniversary fundraiser celebration, so bear with us here). And we’ve never one witnessed a 30-piece orchestra accompanying the indie rock maven responsible for it all in singing “Happy Birthday”, so the birthday party for one of indie rock’s most celebrated studio spaces at San Francisco’s Great American Music Hall is an event indeed.
Tucked in between metal-roofed industrial buildings on a scruffy San Francisco side street, stuffed floor to rafters with rare mics, giant boards and other rare and vintage 30-year old recording equipment, Tiny Telephone is where, under John Vanderslice’s watchful ear, Death Cab cranked out their top hits, and whose warm, distinct sound is celebrated by other legends of the college radio rotation like Deerhoof, Mountain Goats, Mike Watt (the Minuteman co-founder, duh), and Mates of State. Tonight — after a brief DJ set by a plaid-clad and awfully-bored looking Aesop Rock — it is Vanderslice’s stage, shared by the studio’s aforementioned house band, the 30-piece Magik*Magik Orchestra, replete with strings, woodwinds and a chorus section.
Vanderslice, who kicks off an East-Midwest tour with the Mountain Goats next month, has been busy in said studio, recording new tunes for his upcoming seventh album and doesn’t play hard to hear tonight. He busts out numbers from the as-yet unnamed LP on acoustic with a two-person backing band on keyboards and drums, and favorites like “Tablespoon of Codeine†from 2007’s Emerald City with the full weight of the orchestra behind him, loading lines like “So I said some things that can’t be said / About a ritual tower that uses of more American dead / And what happened in September was a fake / But they’re chasing demolition or remote control planes†with all the righteous ethereal energy a string section can muster. Whatever sonic magic that it is that blesses music made inside Tiny Telephone – and it does have ‘it’, whatever it is – somehow makes it across town to the Great American Music Hall, a great space in its own right.
The vibe tonight is special: the orchestra is in perfect harmony with the front man, from the cello to the alto tenor in the choir; and every man, woman, child and indie rock star in the audience is smitten from the first note. It’s hard to have a nice, intimate feel-good party with people you don’t know, but somehow it happens tonight. “It feels pretty good in here, doesn’t it?” Vanderslice asks at one point. Yup. Sounds about right, too.
Magik*Magik Orchesta: myspace
John Vanderslice: website | myspace
