Stagestruck

MARK EITZEL
@The Mercury, Austin, TX
June 28, 2001
Maybe it was because it was a Thursday night. Maybe it was because the headliner wasn't young, cute and surrounded by carefully-coifed lookalikes. Maybe the mass audience just didn't know what they were missing. At any rate, there was, shall we say, a less than capacity crowd for the Austin stop of singer/songwriter Mark Eitzel's tour supporting his terrific new LP The Invisible Man. The masses didn't know what they missed.

Following a solid but unimpressive set by tour opener For Stars, the former American Music Club frontman and his three-piece band hit the stage with the melancholic "Shine." Strumming a semi-hollowbody Telecaster, Eitzel performed with a confidence that belied his nervous reputation. He rarely let his performance anxiety get in the way of putting the tune across with passion and precision. In line with the electronic rhythms of the album, the band featured not a drummer but instead a programmer/synthesist manipulating the beats, resulting in a smooth, groovy ride through the new material. And it was almost all new material; with the exception of a moving "Western Sky," from AMC's California, the songs in the main body of the set were all taken from the new record. He and the group nailed them all, generating beautifully moving explorations of a heavy heart, immersing the willing crowd in his unfettered emotions in a way few performers outside of, say, Billie Holiday would have the guts to even attempt.

"To the Sea," his paean to Jeff Buckley, "Bitterness" and fan favorite "Steve I Always Knew" took gentle but glorious flight like birds searching the skies for lost mates. "Proclaim Your Joy," the good-natured should-be hit from the new LP, became a cheerfully irascible diatribe against George Dubya Bush, while album opener "The Boy With the Hammer" closed the set proper with a blanket of psychedelic shimmers and ambient feedback. He returned for the encore wearing an acoustic guitar for the first time that evening, reluctantly acceding to a request for "I've Been a Mess," from AMC's ill-fated Mercury. His ambivalence toward the work of his former band certainly didn't show in his passionate performance of the melancholy tune. After a second encore with the full band, he quit the stage to sell and sign tour CDs. Though Eitzel described the set as "kind of suckass," he couldn't have been more wrong. As he has throughout his long career, he took his pain, put it to melody and achieved transcendence. Michael Toland