Dirty Three/Calexico
The Showbox, Seattle, Friday, June 12, 1998

On the verge of ending a six-week tour in support of their Steve Albini-recorded Ocean Songs, the indie trio from down under turned in a performance worthy of that overwrought Foster's Lager ad campaign: Dirty Three is Australian for instrumental rock.

The set featured the exhilarating tropes you'll see at most any Dirty Three show. Violinist Warren Ellis stomps on stage, while guitarist Mick Turner and drummer Jim White quietly follow. Ellis grabs the microphone and says, "This song is about going through a car windshield bum-first, and you're angry about that because it's your bum and not your head because your head is softer than your bum." Then he turns his back to the audience, legs akimbo, and coaxes a quiet, lilting melody out of the violin. Turner stands more or less sideways, as if preparing to climb stairs. He and White never speak a word and almost never crack a smile. Ellis pivots on one leg, still playing, and hawks a gob into the air, which describes an arc and lands where his foot was a moment earlier. The violin melody tears louder, sadder, angrier, and he waves the violin in front of the amp as the speakers wail. The tunes have titles such as "Everything is Fucked" and "Sue's Last Ride" -- the last dedicated, so Ellis' story goes, to a friend of theirs who died in a car wreck. When the music reaches its peak, you hear everything that went into Sue's life -- and hear it all pulsing out.

This evening's crowd, bolstered perhaps by the presence of tables near the low stage, helped the band out with some unexpected twists. Taking advantage of his proximity, Ellis was able to take a big pull from a bottle of red wine and spit it up like a spouting whale. A beautiful blonde in semi-formal attire with tattoos across both shoulder blades stood and bombarded the stage with empty plastic cups. A second beautiful blonde jumped on stage, nowhere near the band, and slowly, sensuously ground her behind into the speakers. In the midst of the melee, Ellis planted a booted foot on the table nearest the stage, stepped out onto it, lay upon his back, hoisted the bottle to his lips, then stood and bounded back onstage. He tossed down his violin, pulled yet another beautiful woman out of the front row, and attempted a tango. The drinking and the damage done, they left their instruments on and stalked off the stage for the last time. The whooping from the audience held sway even after someone loped through the sudden darkness to cut the power. Lucky no one had to follow....

Calexico, a two-man outfit comprised of alt-country session staples John Convertino and Joey Burns (Giant Sand, Friends of Dean Martinez, Victoria Williams) opened the show with a compelling ten-minute instrumental. Convertino banged a large drum kit while Burns strummed two or three different guitars (not all at once), keeping time and disbursing resonant echoes of the kind that open CCR's "Midnight Special" and leave you floating in the middle of a sonic swamp. Throughout the set, Convertino summoned the breadth of human feeling with his drums, exuding hesitation and regret in a sweep of the tom-toms, the overwhelming beauty of what that hesitation made unavailable on his bass drum. They even sang a thirty-second version of Leonard Cohen's "Suzanne," a song the Dirty Three used to do but don't anymore, when someone yelled out for it. The new version was about Suzanne's drug dealer. Oddly, it was one of the evening's more concrete moments. But this show wasn't about tangibles, it was a celebration of the abstract. And a convincing one at that.

ANDREW HAMLIN