Eclecticism

Okay…it’s finally time to take a few minutes break from math and play catch-up on this weekend.

Friday night was the concert for the release of Eleven Saints, Jason Webley‘s latest release, written collaboratively with Jay Thompson.

I showed up at The Paradox about an hour early, as Jason’s big shows tend to get pretty full pretty quickly. Only a few people were there quite that early, though, so I started wandering around and taking a few shots. Only a few minutes later, a girl sitting against the building said, “I think I know who you are.” Turns out she’d recognized me from my prior Webley photos and from the forum on Jason’s site, so I plopped down and we chatted while waiting for the doors to open.

A bit after eight the doors opened, and we all (the line had grown to extend around the street corner by now) worked our way into the Paradox. Carrie (the girl I’d been chatting with) went on in to find a place to sit, while I wandered between the lobby and the auditorium watching people trickle in. chrismathewsjr brought along the Jason doll that he’d rescued after it floated away at the end of the 2003 Deathday show, which was fun to see again — I’m thrilled that that piece of Webley history didn’t end up disappearing into the Sound or some similar fate after we all sent it floating into the sky.

Eventually the hall started getting pretty full, so I figured it’d be a good time to find a place for myself. As I was heading in, an older gentleman caught my attention. “Excuse me,” he asked, “are you the guy who takes all those photos of Jason at the shows?” “Probably so,” I agreed — while I’m certainly not the only one to show up camera in hand (Josh, for instance, has photo archives dating back to 2001), I was lucky enough to have my Camp Tomato 2005 set mentioned in Jason’s e-mail alert about this weekend’s activities. “I just wanted to say thank you,” he said. “I’m Jason’s dad, and we love that you’re doing this.” Pretty cool, I thought.

Pretty soon, the show got started, with Alex Xavier the Eleventh (last seen getting pelted with tomatoes at the end of last year’s Halloween show after trying to kill Jason) taking the stage to perform the introductions — though he was soon brought to a halt by the four Goddesses rushing on stage and urging us all to boo Alex away. They were soon stopped by Jason, who came on stage to explain that over the winter, he and Alex had talked and come to an understanding: Alex could be a little bit more good…and Jason could be just a little bit more evil. And with that, Alex finished welcoming us all to the show, and Jason took the stage.

This was a fairly different show from previous springtime shows. As Jason has completed his death/rebirth cycle and isn’t releasing a full-length album this year, the show ended up a little more random. Jason started off with a couple songs (initially declaring that since he hadn’t really written anything new, he was just going to perform all of the Footloose soundtrack on accordion…and even did a few verses of three or four songs from the movie), then introduced Jeff Harms to do a short set. Many of Jeff’s songs are silly little short pieces about random objects, dolls he’s seen in a store, lemons that have gone bad, and so on. During the song about lemons, he brought a couple friends out who sat on stage, scratched the peel off of some lemons, then tossed them out to the crowd, introducing “the first scratch-and-sniff song.”

Once Jeff was done, Jason came back — though instead of more music, we were treated (after some amusing technical difficulties) to a couple of videos. The first was an amusingly maudlin short film by Andy Brodie that Jason had written the music for, as well as having a small part as a funeral home embalmer. After that came a fifteen minute documentary about Jason that had been filmed over the winter in London by Charlotte Ross while Jason was on tour.

Jason then announced that he had one more video to show us, but to break up the monotony, Jay Thompson was going to spend a few minutes reading us some of his poetry. Jay came on stage and spent about fifteen minutes reading a number of short pieces, one of which even included a mathematical formula — I don’t remember what it was anymore, but it was rather impressive that he was able to work that into a spoken word piece.

Once Jay was done, it was time for one of the highlights of the evening: the premier of the video for ‘Eleven Saints’, the title track of the new EP. It’s a really fun video — it’s done in the same cutout stop-motion animation style of the pre-concert video at his 2004 Halloween Show, and hopefully it’ll be posted to the ‘net at some point in the near future (Jason alluded to such, it’s just a matter of watching for it to show up either on his site, his MySpace page, or perhaps other 18 [sites]19), as trying to describe it just wouldn’t really do it justice.

Once the video was done, Jay came back onstage, and he and Jason did a couple more songs from the EP (and from its accompanying bonus CD), including ‘Big Old Spool’, which featured disco dancers onstage and the Tomato Goddess being rolled into the auditorium balancing on a big old spool. Jay then left, and Jason was joined for a few songs by Ellie, the granddaughter of Jason’s friend Joan, who is the inspiration for the song ‘Goodnight, Joan’. I must admit, I was quite taken by their slow, acoustic guitar and voice, ballad version of Def Leppard’s ‘Pour Some Sugar on Me’!

Once Ellie left the stage, the rest of Jason’s band came up along with Jay and the Goddesses to lead us in the Tomato Scout Oath and the Tomato Scout Anthem. Next came ‘Eleven Saints’, which got the crowd all riled up and set the tone for the rest of the evening — Jason’s usual blend of silliness, mayhem…and mess. Bags of bright red balloons were opened and tossed into the crowd, pillows were ripped open to send feathers flying, a boat was passed hand-over-hand over the crowd, and finally, tomatoes went flying through the air.

Jason and Jay donned sunglasses as they played the silly techno-ish song ‘Story of Boy’, then had the band lay down a disco-ish beat so that they could keep the dance club theme going as they segued into a club “remix” version of the ‘Drinking Song’! Soon they had the whole room spinning in circles, throwing their arms ’round each others shoulders, and swaying back and forth to the final chorus.

And not much later, after a few last mentions of Saturday’s second annual Camp Tomato, the music wound down, Jason and the band left the stage, and we all filed back out into the evening air — many of us to gather again at Woodland Park the next day.

That, however, is another post entirely.

In the meantime, here’s my full photoset for the concert.

“Ramblin’ Blues” by Jason Webley with Jay Thompson from the album Eleven Saints (2006, 3:16).