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Trachtenburg Family Slideshow Players, Baby Gramps, Ching Chong Song Along a complicated process of getting on and in, Ching Chong Song opened the quirky evening in the basement of Blueberry Hill with a short set of oddities. Ching Chong Song are the Brooklyn duo of Dan Gower and Julie LaMendola, and offer a warped version of the folk band from A Mighty Wind. Gower plays keys and LaMendola plays, well, a saw, and both offer vocal energy to relatively quiet numbers. With a very short interlude, Baby Gramps charged the stage with his steel guitar, wild beard, and overall demeanor. No one really knew what to expect from this old but hyper energized singer-songwriter. Yet, half way into the first song “Big Rock Candy Mountain,” most of the crowd were amazed, wowed, or at least mystified by Baby Gramps voice and guitar playing. It helps that “Big Rock Candy Mountain” has an uber-catchy chorus that borders somewhere between a children’s song and a song about hallucinogenics. After the song, Baby Gramps got up and started to dance around and hug one of the poles in the Duck Room, adding to his aura. At this point, you started to wonder whether Baby Gramps was actually like 25 and just had an outfit on; a thought that passed upon closer inspection. The next twenty minutes was a mixture of Baby Gramps own style of blues and jazz, along with his contribution to the pirate album Rogue’s Gallery (Anti-), “Old Man of the Sea.” Baby Gramps is certainly someone to check out live. After a marginally longer break, Jason Trachtenburg came out and started with his introduction of the Family Slideshow Players, and, as usual, setting the tone for the quirkiness of the evening. For those unfamiliar with TFSP, the dad sings and plays keyboards/guitars, the young daughter Rachel plays drums and sings, while the mother Tina Pina clicks through slides from the 1950s-1970s. The songs are written around the slides to tell varying stories all with political and social commentary plugged right in. As the TFSP describe themselves on their website – “[we] are an indie-vaudeville conceptual art-rock pop band. We take vintage slide collections that have been found at estate sales, garage sales, thrift stores, etc., and turn the lives of anonymous strangers into pop-rock musical exposes based on the contents of these slide collections.” That’s their story and in the past year or so, TFSP have themselves put an exclamation point on the band’s uniqueness. And they, or at least Jason, remind you of the fact at the beginning of the show. Rachel and Tina Pina came out several minutes into Jason’s ranting introduction, in new outfits to boot, to start the show and, as Tina put it, to shut Jason up. TFSP opened their set, conveniently enough, on “(Theme From) Trachtenburg Family Slideshow Players,” one of the few where Tina sings. Unlike the last time we saw them in Chapel Hill and according to Jason better than the recent previous shows on their tour, the Family was tighter, cleaner and sounded great thanks to Duck Room’s equipment – best sound in STL. This allowed TFSP to whisk their way through such wonderful songs as the “Look At Me” (the story of Gina and Cappy, two retired military nurses, whose slides will be used throughout other songs as well), “Don’t You Know What I Mean?,” “World’s Best Friend,” “Eggs,” and “Beautiful Dandelion.” Early on Rachel wanted to know if STL’s notorious concert go’er Beatle Bob was in attendance, he wasn’t, and Jason’s statement that everyone in STL loves BB caused a raucous riot in the negative. One of the highlights of the show was when the Family brought out their small seventeen year-old terrier on the stage, who proceeded to first watch the slides, then watch Jason, then lay down, and just kind of stare vacantly. The Family closed on their first song and best known song “Mountain Trip to Japan, 1959,” a strong ending to a great set.
Read our quasi-interview with TFSP
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