A residency is a wonderful thing for a live music lover. A residency is that rare, regular occurrence that gives a musician and his audience something to look forward to, knowing that once a week for, in this case, a whole month, you each get to go back to the same local bar and sip your favorite beer with generally the same crowd of people and listen to the songs you really love. So it was at one of the better pubs in town, The Poet and Patriot in Santa Cruz, California this past October.
Marty O’Reilly first played the Poet as a young college kid back when he was starting at the University of Santa Cruz. He sat in on open mic nights, tipped pints at the bar and engaged his new community. Now he was giving back, years later, to that same community that embraced him. Every Thursday night in October Marty sat down on the same stool, plugged into the same PA and provided a three hour break from the election, the struggles of Standing Rock and our everyday grind. Normally the front man for Marty O’Reilly and the Old Soul Orchestra, these gigs were billed solo, just the guy, his harmonica and guitar, playing songs he wrote or just songs he loves to play. Sometimes it is hard to separate a band guy from his band and have the music translate on a similar level. Not with Marty O’Reilly. Marty’s a powerhouse player and an even stronger singer. And while it is nearly impossible to classify the sound of The Old Soul Orchestra as a band, it is fair to say that a Marty solo show will find its legs rooted in Blues and Gospel, drawing heavily on the roots of what makes American music great.
O’Reilly plays with the conviction of a veteran Chicago blues man that belies his Sonoma County roots. He plays straight ahead and aggressively, weaving songs into medleys with such skill that the listener might not know when one song ends and the next begins. His guitar attack is fierce, he beats strings with rapid strums and furious note runs. He sways and convulses, throwing his whole body into the music, his head thrown back and mouth agape as he bridges verses. The song can swing wildly and he can end abruptly leaving sonic ellipses on the last line. And when he settled into Thursday after Thursday, it was apparent that these nights begged exploration of every nook and cranny of the songs. This is not to say Marty went down some jam band rabbit hole, he just . . . explored. The audience expected the departure; they were accepting of the journey and willing to go along lyrically and musically. This is what made these gigs so special.
Marty’s original songs are incredibly interesting. On night one, about halfway through the first set, O’Reilly went deep. He began a tune entitled, “The Captain’s Daughter Part 1.” It chronicles a tale of shipwreck survival by cannibalism. A hungry first mate speaks of how he once eyed the beauty of the captain’s daughter when he first saw her come aboard ship but now, rations exhausted and hunger pangs driving him to distraction, he looks upon her thigh in a “brand new light.” The song is dark and brooding with an underlying sneakiness that makes it sound as though the listener is in on a secret of which captain’s daughter is not yet aware. But there the song ends, without resolution. And for a long while there was no resolution until Marty was asked to write part 2 by a fellow musician. This night Marty played them together, back to back. Part 2 completes the tale with a twist the audience could not expect. The story cuts to a woman wandering the beach of a deserted island only lonely because to satisfy her insatiable hunger and her base survival instincts she had to eat a member of the crew. Apparently, the first mate’s plan did not go quite the way he wanted. This is the songwriting of Marty O’Reilly. We hear about canaries dying by suffocation in mines as a destitute mining family thrashes about for survival, a letter received by a geographically distant boyfriend from a soon-to-be ex with little more than a picture of her smiling beneath a towering redwood and her smile saying more to the worrying man than he ever wanted to hear. O’Reilly does not write a song in a straight line, his listeners have to pay attention to understand what he is saying and that made for a quiet and attentive crowd of regulars every Thursday. They hung on his words, cheered his musical crescendos and banged on tables to lend some barroom percussion.
The last night of the residency was a last minute show addition, again at The Poet, for Friday night the 28th of October. Joined by his musical cohort, Chris Lynch on Fiddle, and the special addition of local musician Jeff Kissel on stand up bass, this would prove a fitting exclamation point to a solid run of Thursdays. The music was punctuated by speeches from local politicians trying to take the city council of Santa Cruz back for the people – the working people – and they certainly spoke to a sympathetic crowd. But it was the music that really brought the fire and it had to have been the pairing of “Letters > Preach ‘Em Now” that brought the house to a fever. These two songs were written years apart from one another but have since found a partnership that should be the cornerstone of most Marty shows. Kissel’s percussive stand up bass playing (he literally pounded the beat out on the face of that bass) set the foundation for Lynch’s soaring fiddle to weave in and out of O’Reilly’s slide resonator runs on the rage that is “Preach ‘Em.” These three musicians have played together for so long that their communication is breathlessly effortless; it is musical telepathy and an absolute privilege to watch.
The month long residency ended that night as it should. The musicians unplugged, moved into the center of the room and took their places with the people at a table. Glasses clinked all around and the audience joined the band with the victorious lyrics of that grand old gospel tune, “Up Above My Head.” The call and response was infectious and eventually the whole bar joined in with laughter and smiles that brought everyone closer together. But the period on the end of the sentence, the real end to four weeks of rad was a softly rendered original, “Cold Canary Gas Light,” that found finish with everyone (seriously, everyone in the room) harmonizing on the final verse. And how perfect is that? A month of music ends and the audience leaves the bar with the harmonies of strangers still buzzing in their heads. There should be more moments in life like this.
