Searching For The Wrong Eyed Jesus is a fucking great album title and it followed majestically at Seattle's Tractor Tavern that its creator Jim White has some truly quirky humour, cool mannerisms and a deadpan delivery style in the flesh.
As this tour cut through March it marks his latest album release Transnormal Skiperoo on David Byrne's eclectic Luaka Bop label. He is chauffered and cajoled by Beat dude Pat on guitar and NYC's Fiona on bass. Three way vocal harmonies, live loops and a mean sounding drum machine made this show kick. We get a fair helping from the newie, as well as groovesome tunes from the aforementioned album and White's other back catalogue gems. His between song banter sawed logs off the rotten tree of Christianity and put them straight into the wood burner... We get stories of religious scrapes, journeys and past lives with a barbed black humour. We got the surreal conversation between Jim, Pat and some of the audience on the worst city to map read in, eventually settling on Jim's choice the city of Stockholm, which he likened to a "three dimensional game of chess with Dr. Seuss".
White also auctioned off a newspaper stand he found on the road (he is reputedly an avid collector of discarded detritus whilst on tour) to the lowest bidder in the room.
White then explained that he preferred that rather than go backstage and wait for the applause to rise to his required ego level for an encore, he'd rather stay onstage and played another 3 songs solo and then departed stage left to applause that was hotter than the sun.
Stay on the crusade and keep searching...
Jim searches here. http://www.jimwhite.net/
