Brian Slattery Photos
Loralee and Bruce Crowder.
A new documentary from Gorman Bechard, the New Haven Documentary Film Festival’s executive director, sparked a gathering of New Haven musicians who came together to pay tribute to a departed rock icon at Cafe Nine Tuesday night.
The occasion — part of the documentary film festival, which runs through Aug. 15 — was a sneak preview of Bechard’s Where Are You, Jay Bennett? The film chronicles the life of the gifted musician who rose to fame as a member of the band Wilco, only to be dismissed from it due to creative differences with the band’s founder, Jeff Tweedy. After Wilco, Bennett released five solo albums before dying in 2009 at the age of 45 from an accidental overdose of fentanyl, which he’d been prescribed to alleviate severe hip pain.
After the film, Bechard explained that Wilco was one of his favorite bands ever; he’d seen them over 70 times. But the band was “never better than when Jay Bennett was in it,” he said. He described the elation he felt at discovering them because “I was looking for a replacement for the Replacements,” the band that helped pioneer alternative rock in the 1980s and 1990s. “Had Tweedy and Bennett figured out a way to keep on, they would have been better than Lennon and McCartney,” he said. “Together they were invincible.” But he also felt that Bennett was “the soul of the band,” and felt himself drawn to Bennett’s own story, particularly as he was essentially left behind as Wilco rose to the kind of fame few musicians ever achieve. Bennett kept writing and recording music, scrawling the lyrics on doors and pieces of cardboard and playing all the instruments himself, in a quest for a kind of shambolic perfection than Bechard identified with. “There was something about his process,” Bechard said, though possibly one of Bechard’s colleagues saw it most clearly.
“My color corrector said, ‘you’re making a movie about you,’” Bechard said.
Bechard then turned over the evening to guitarist and musical organizer Dean Falcone, who — with a band of Rich Dart on drums, Brian Stevens on bass, Rick Mealey on keys, and Bruce Crowder on percussion and keys — backed a parade of singers and musicians based in New Haven and elsewhere to present a 23-song set of Bennett’s music, showcasing the breadth of his songwriting and the fact that his legacy lives on in those he inspired.
The evening began with the New London-based Daphne Martin, singing “It Might Have Looked Like We Were Dancing,” which featured prominently in Bechard’s documentary. “This is going to be pretty intimidating to sing,” she said, after learning about the circumstances in which Bennett wrote and recorded it. “But I’m going to do my best.” Performing solo, accompanying herself on guitar, she gave the audience just that, and was rewarded with applause.
Val McKee, Pat Dalton, and David Johnson.
Pat Dalton, a person thoroughly enmeshed in New Haven’s arts scene as a musician and sound engineer, performed a small set of songs, sometimes with accompaniment by Val McKee and David Johnson. “If you know my music, you know that Wilco is a really big influence, and this feels like a culmination,” Dalton said. “Rest in peace to Jay Bennett. That guy was a genius and he’ll be missed.”
With the song “War on War,” the band settled into a hard groove embellished by guitar and keyboards, gathering energy for the night and rocking it through “Nothingsever,” which brought out Falcone’s humor. “Too many chords,” he said of the song. “I’m changing the name to ‘Too Many Chords.’” Martin returned to transform the song “My Darling” into a torch song.
Frank Critelli.
And Frank Critelli found power in the song with just his voice, accompanied only by Falcone on guitar. S.G. Carlson and Stefanie Harris took their turns at the mic, letting the energy level rise again.
Falcone had plotted out the setlist and it was an arc well-planned, as Jay Russell brought the set to a newly rocking height with “Kingpin.”
“This is going to be loud — sorry,” Russell said to the band, while telling the audience that he’d been given a Wilco onesie as a present on the occasion of his first child’s birth, and that he recalled “Kingpin” being on heavy rotation in Rudy’s when it was released 20-odd years ago.
“I hate it when super-talented dudes die, and it’s been happening a lot lately,” he said.
Seth Adam gave a shoutout to his fellow “Wilco nerds” as a trio of horns took the floor in front of the stage. The big sound they made was a harbinger for the set’s inevitable ending, and drew a comment from an audience member that “everyone needs a horn section.”
Loralee and Bruce Crowder then had a mini-set of their own that kept the audience there at Cafe Nine, even as it was getting late. “People are hanging out,” Falcone observed. “This is great.” Alex Burnet made the song “Beer” her own, easily mining its happiness and sadness, and turned her voice into a yowl for “Can’t Stand it.” Jeffrey Thunders took on the punk of “Passenger Side.”
The evening ended on the song that Bennett was still perhaps most famous more, the music for which he co-created with Tweedy using lyrics from Woody Guthrie: “California Stars.” Where the original has a shambling hootenanny feel to it, the version that came off the Cafe Nine stage was a wall of sound as all the performers gathered on the stage to play and shout it together.
“Thanks for listening to this disaster,” Falcone joked at the end of the show, which had been anything but.