by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2016 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night I watched a KPBS presentation on their series Live
at the Belly Up — after the legendary
live-music venue, the Belly Up Tavern in Solana Beach, which has been operating
since 1974 but to which I’ve never gone (nor am I likely to) because of its
location and the sheer arduousness of getting there and (worse) getting back at
the usual time live-music venues close for the night — featuring a rock band
with the rather clunky name “Lukas Nelson and the Promise of the Real.” The
official promo for the show on KPBS’s Web site called them “a torch-bearing
band of guitar-barring American rock. Based out of California and Hawaii, this
band's music is a diverse collection of sounds and styles with multi-genre influences such as Jimi Hendrix, Neil Young, B. B.
King and Pearl Jam.” Lukas Nelson himself was interviewed in a few segments
that were cut in between his first few songs, and he named Stevie Ray Vaughan
as another musician that influenced him (along with such de rigueur rock names as the Beatles and the Rolling Stones) —
and he certainly knows his way around a guitar even though he’s hardly at
either Hendrix’ or Vaughan’s level as a virtuoso. (One can at least hopes he outlasts those two musicians,
who’ve become almost as legendary for their early demises as for their
playing!)
After the band’s third song another interview cut-in, not with Nelson
but with the talent booker for the Belly Up, who mentioned that Lukas Nelson is
the son of country music legend Willie Nelson. Not surprisingly, having that piece of information sprung on me dramatically
changed the way I heard him; instead of evaluating him as a reasonably cute
rock musician with a good set of guitar chops and a serviceable if not
deathlessly great voice, I was listening for similarities to his famous dad —
and also looking for them. Lukas Nelson looks believable as Willie Nelson’s son — especially if
you’ve seen some of Willie Nelson’s early album covers (on the Hello,
Walls album — Willie Nelson’s first solo
album from 1960, capitalizing on the success of Faron Young’s recording of the
title song — the photo is of a baby-faced, smooth-cheeked, clean-shaven young
man who’s barely recognizable as the long-haired, long-bearded, grizzled-faced
Willie Nelson we know today) — and one can hear similar vocal inflections,
especially on slower songs. Live at the Belly Up helpfully gives chyrons telling the titles of the
songs the band is playing — a practice I wish Austin City Limits and other pop-music shows on TV would emulate —
though I missed one of them. The show began with a song called “Peaceful
Solution,” which I couldn’t help but wonder if the band had written it in response
to the last Presidential election: “There’s a peaceful solution/A peace
revolution/Let’s take back America.” In fact, according to the band’s Wikipedia
page, it was written by Willie
Nelson and Lukas’s sister Amy Niccore and was on the group’s first full-length
album, Promise of the Real, in
2010.
Given Lukas’s illustrious parentage, it’s not surprising his group
actually got a few major breaks usually not accorded to struggling rock bands,
including a 2008 mini-tour opening for (you guessed it) Willie Nelson and
subsequent tours opening for B. B. King and Neil Young — indeed, unknowingly
I’d already heard Promise of the Real since they backed Neil Young on his album
The Monsanto Years and the tour
Young did in support of it (which produced a live album called Earth). The band’s Belly Up show featured some intriguing
covers, including Paul Simon’s “Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes” (Lukas
Nelson — whose dad gave him the interesting middle name “Autry,” after another
country-music legend — sounded especially like Willie on the song’s slow
introduction, less so when it sped up) and Roy Orbison’s “Dream Baby,” which
segued into a quite good song (I’m assuming an original) called either “I Get
Antsy” or “Forever Is a Four-Letter Word,” about the singer’s disinclination to
get married, settle down and do any of that commitment stuff. The band’s other songs were “Living It Up,”
“Find Yourself,” “L’il Girl,” “Don’t Lose Your Mind” (a ballad during which
Lukas sounded especially like his dad), “Bloody Mary Morning” (one of Willie
Nelson’s biggest hits in the 1970’s and another one in which the family resemblance between their
voices was unmistakable) and a finale called “Start to Go” in which Lukas
Nelson pulled one of Hendrix’ most famous stage tricks: he raised his guitar to
his mouth and started picking the strings with his teeth. The man who
originated that gimmick was blues guitar great Aaron “T-Bone” Walker, who also
started the trick Hendrix copied of playing the guitar behind his back —
Hendrix toured the chit’lin’ circuit with bands that opened for Walker, studied
him and learned to do those things.
Heard without a knowledge of Lukas’s
origins, Lukas Nelson and the Promise of the Real (as opposed to — the pun is
just irresistible — Donald Trump and the Promise of the Unreal) is a reasonably
good rock band, not especially original but blessed with genuinely talented
musicians (the Wikipedia page names Corey McCormack as the bass player, Anthony
Logerfo as the drummer and Tato Melgar as the percussionist, but I suspect the
percussionist — mostly playing congas and tambourine — on the show was
different, a grizzled old guy who would look more in place in Willie’s than
Lukas’s band) that get a good, infectious sound together. Heard knowing that Lukas Nelson is Willie Nelson’s son, the
Promise of the Real has obviously got breaks struggling rock bands usually
don’t — like opening and/or playing backup for Neil Young, B. B. King and John
Fogerty as well as Lukas’s dad — but also faces the burden of the inevitable comparisons
that have sunk a lot of previous entertainers who were hoping to score on the
basis of their famous dads (like Frank Sinatra, Jr., Gary Lewis, Jakob Dylan
and Harper Simon). One thing I didn’t realize is that Lukas Nelson and the
Promise of the Real actually got their start at the Belly Up in 2008 — before they released a
full-length studio album they put out an EP of live performances — though I
missed the copyright date on this show and therefore I can’t be sure, but this
is probably a more recent (like 2015) return to a venue that helped launch
them. I’d like to hear more from Lukas Nelson and the Promise of the Real but I
wasn’t so knocked out by them I’d like to rush to a record store (or a Web
site) and buy their CD’s.
