Bob Feldman Tribute – Fitzgerald Theater (St. Paul, MN)
Red House Records owner Bob Feldman was a round man with a sharp mind and a cavernous laugh who embraced music with contagious passion and exquisite taste. On the very rare occasions when he disagreed with the artists on his roster, he’d settle it by challenging them to leg wrestle (Peter Ostroushko was better at it than Greg Brown). Otherwise, he blessed their muses with the best sound quality, artwork, and guerrilla marketing he could muster.
Feldman passed away at age 56 from an assortment of illnesses back in January 2006. On this night, nearly two dozen Red House artists delivered a high fidelity testimonial to his beloved, irrepressible character at the Fitzgerald Theater in Feldman’s hometown of St. Paul, Minnesota. The portrait that emerged from this procession of short sets was of a man who loved Dylan, opposed the Iraq war, and understood the creative tension and synergy between innovation and authenticity.
The three-hour concert began with an elegant, remarkably efficient chronicle of Feldman’s legacy: A slide show (set to music by the five-piece house band) individually depicting every one of the nearly 200 albums released by Red House under his ownership. It also imposed a somber tone. Greg Brown, who lived in the red house that prompted the label’s moniker and personally inspired Feldman’s leap into the business, tersely announced a “song for Bob,” then tamped down his emotion with grim determination while performing the children’s tune “Two Little Boys”. Eric Peltoniemi, the first Red House employee and its current president, likewise shadowboxed with his feelings throughout “So Many Times”.
Claudia Schmidt punctured the gloom with “Chickadee Blues” and “Bend In The River”, the latter of which encouraged audience participation on the chorus, but her earnest joviality merely felt like the flip side of grief. It was left to guitar wizard Dean Magraw, who beat back cancer six years ago, to raze all the parameters for emotional correctness. Deploying an e-bow, he opened with a haunting rendition of “Amazing Grace”, a luminescent benediction promptly supplanted by his churning cover of Dylan’s “All Along The Watchtower”, replete with variously snarling, chirping, hiccupping vocals. To drive home the point, he stood up gleefully, saluted the air with his guitar, and bellowed, “Are we having fun yet?”
Magraw gave everyone permission to relax, providing the perfect segue for Spider John Koerner (looking more like Pete Seeger every day) and Tony Glover to unearth a pair of dirt-caked folk-blues standards. The feel-good vibe was cemented when one of the concert’s three producers, Marian Moore, came out and explained why the evening’s proceeds would go toward the Bob Feldman Redwood Forest Fund. It seems the first time he was among the giant trees with his wife, the writer Beth Friend, and his then-infant son Ari, an enthralled Feldman stripped naked to maximize the spiritual connection.
It wasn’t hard to imagine Feldman when Eliza Gilykson flipped the gender of the protagonist on Dylan’s “Love Minus Zero” (“He doesn’t have to say he’s faithful/’Cause he’s true, like ice, like fire”). Reinforcing the point, she introduced “Tender Mercies” by recalling how Feldman supported her antiwar sentiments at the time when they were least popular. John Gorka furthered the theme with a stirring new song, “Writing In The Margins”, inspired by a conversation with a soldier after a gig in Michigan, and Robin & Linda Williams took it another step by covering Jamie O’Hara’s “50000 Names Carved On The Wall”.
The night now hummed with variety. Dave Moore displayed his aw-shucks persona and down-in-the-holler harp chops on “Just A Dog”. Schmidt, Prudence Johnson and the female vocalist from Trova put cream and honey in the harmony of “River”. And Cliff Eberhardt belatedly addressed the evening’s paucity of soul singing with a gruff and gritty “Missing You”, followed by a slow-building, ultimately satisfying take on “The Long Road” that had his old pal Gorka sitting in for Richie Havens as his duet partner.
It was left to Ostroushko, who had performed yeoman duty on mandolin and fiddle as part of the superb backing house quintet all evening, to provide the concert’s most poignant moment. With Feldman’s wife sitting at the rear of the hall, he played the “B & B Waltz”, originally intended as a gift at Bob and Beth’s wedding. It was a song of sumptuous sophistication yet rooted in rustic, Old World charm. Ostroushko then told of how Feldman had taken his CD, The Heart Of The Heartland, with him to play by the Red Sea on his trip to Israel, only to report back that the whole experience “‘just didn’t work for me.’ The reason it didn’t work,” Ostroushko continued, “was because Bob was a Minnesota guy.” Then he performed the title track, as subtly hypnotic as a windswept prairie in the summertime.
Greg Brown returned to play “Further In”, about the cycles of aging and acceptance. It became clear that, whether by purpose or defensive necessity, Brown would remain unexpectedly low-key and pensive on this night, his head bowed beneath a hat. Then all the musicians filled the stage for the Beatles’ nursery rhyme, “Good Night”, followed by a ragged but righteously boisterous version of the 1967 Arthur Conley hit “Sweet Soul Music”, a nod to Feldman’s long tenure as a DJ for a small community radio station in the Twin Cities.
The curtain closed and then opened to a standing ovation and a final bow. A triumphant Magraw had snatched Brown’s fedora, and even the latter couldn’t suppress a sheepish grin.