Jackie Greene

Friday, October 22 • Doors 8pm • Show 9pm • $15 Flat • Over 18 Only • $2 Surcharge for Minors • Buy Tickets

Performing With a Full Band

w/ The Apache Relay

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Discussing the latest release of Giving Up the Ghost, his fifth album and first on 429 Records, Jackie Greene – singer and songwriter, guitarist and keyboard player, acoustic solo artist and electrifying band leader – hesitates to spell things out too much.

“Could we leave some questions unanswered?” he asks. “So people can make up their own minds about things?” Many people have already made up their minds about Jackie Greene, the Americana phenom from Sacramento who made his first album only six years ago and has steadily built up a passionate following among both rank-and-file fans and some of the biggest names in music. Tours with a who’s-who of American roots music – Buddy Guy, Elvis Costello, Susan Tedeschi, Willie Nelson, B.B. King and Ramblin’ Jack Elliott among them – and performances everywhere from the Newport Folk Festival and the Monterey Jazz Festival to Bonnaroo, have meant that Greene was recognized quickly by those who know talent, and who saw something rare and promising in him. Their early enthusiasm has only grown with each new album.

Nevertheless, Greene himself is less and less keen on defining himself in a world that wants him to be its latest “New Dylan.” Instead, 27-year-old Greene is thinking big – about death or, more accurately, transformation. He named his new, game-changing album Giving Up the Ghost for a reason. “The phrase refers to the destruction of certain notions and practices that I used to hold in high esteem,” he says. “I’m just sorta sick of being the kid with the harmonica rack. I don’t want to be Bob Dylan.”

And as he prepares his band to head out for another year of serious touring, Greene is giving himself and his band the same sort of license he gave himself as a songwriter. “The recording is the recording, and the live show is the live show, and in my mind that’s different, it sounds way different, and that’s good,” he says. “Live is still the best way to experience music, because it’s pretty pure. If you want to hear something the same way over and over, you can listen to the record, but if you want to hear the song, you go hear it live. You might get a fucked-up version of the song, I might play it on the piano instead, and it might not work, but that’s just how it goes.”

Greene is just as philosophical about his commercial fate as the release of his fifth album looms and the pressure grows for him to sell the large numbers of records his enormous talent clearly warrants. “I don’t know where everyone else gets that from,” he says. “I don’t feel that pressure. I’ve stopped feeling pressured about anything, because I realized that when everyone says, ‘This is it, it’s going to go big,’ and then it doesn’t, you let yourself down. I’ve stopped giving a shit about that. It makes me feel better about me. If this record totally flops, I’ll just make another one. I’m attached to ‘em, I created ‘em, but the commercial thing isn’t a reflection on my art or anything else. It’s its own thing.”

Thus freed from some of the musical, lyrical and commercial constraints he had once put on himself, Jackie Greene is pushing forward into new territory, and with Giving Up the Ghost, he is expanding his own, and others’ notion of who he is. The new album features the sounds of a talented youngster giving himself some room to move, to explore new textures, surprising chord changes, and other characters that may or may not be him. “Ultimately,” he says, “My hope is that these songs will someday ignore their creator and tell their tales all by themselves.”

By David Barton 

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 5th, 2010 at 7:21 pm and is filed under Past Shows. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.