“Are you ready for some romantic Italian music?” guitarist Antonio Gramentieri calls out to the audience.
Well, honestly, no.
The crowd at City Winery in DC was actually there for the more Tex-Mex flavored ballads and rockers from longtime songwriter Alejandro Escovedo, who has toured with all kinds of configurations over the years, from bands to duos to solo. But wanting to hire a band to back him on a European tour two years ago, he ran into an outfit from a small town near the Italian alps, Don Antonio.
Not only did they manage to bring a full sound to back Escovedo’s songs, they helped inspire his new album The Crossing. Where once it might have been the story of a Mexican-born kid hitchhiking his way from Mexico to an LA amid the punk boom, now it’s about a trip by young Diego and Salvo, who meet while working at Salvo’s uncle’s Italian restaurant in Galveston. The two share a love of punk rock, beat writers, and filmmakers like Antonioni.
And they go off to LA, “looking for an America they both believe exists,” Escovedo explains. So while it’s not exactly about immigration, he goes on, and more about two kids going after something better. There a number of similarities in the two cultures, as he notes Southern Italy has its own immigration from the African countries south of it.
Escovedo by now has accomplished a lot, produced a lot of great music, and even survived Hep C (he shows a PSA to raise the issue), so concept albums come to him now fully formed. And as a performer who has enjoyed collaboration with others, the international alliance suits him well.
Also, it gives the European band a new life in the states. Don Antonio, a sextet that depends on a dual sound of sweet saxes, opened the show with their instrumental music, approaching light jazz in parts. Gramentieri said it would be silly for them to try to approximate American rock ’n’ roll, which he described as all edges, while their own music has more curves.
And yet, that’s largely what the group is called to do in Escovedo’s headlining set. Following the place-setting ballads that start the show with deep remembrances of family, “Footsteps in the Shadows” and “Texas is My Mother,” it’s all hard charging rock to songs like “Teenage Luggage” where he’s “looking for America in a record shop.” It’s a natural lead to his old “Castanets.” On “Outlaw for You,” Escovedo shouted out heroes from the Stooges to Johnny Thunders. He even added “I’ll be Beto O’Rourke for you!” in the chorus.
He says he tried to keep today’s obvious politics from dominating the record, but sometimes it couldn’t keep from seeping in from the exhortation “the government lies, children die” on “Something Blue” to the incendiary “Fury and Fire,” in which he yells “call us rapists, go and build a bigger wall, we’re gonna tear it down.”
The reliance on songs from The Crossing meant only a few nuggets from Escovedo’s deep catalog, though he found time for “Sensitive Boys” and “Always a Friend” to cap the main set, segueing into a smorgasbord of genre influences from the Motown of “Tracks of My Tears” to the reggae of “Lively Up Yourself.”
Escovedo doesn’t just recall his heroes, he brings them in, so Joe Ely, who shared a stage with Alejandro on the same stage just last August, is on the album as are Wayne Kramer of the Mc5 and James Williamson of the Stooges. He points out that Peter Perrett and John Perry from the British group The Only Ones reunited for their first recording in decades to play on the track “Waiting for Me.” So for further homage, he closed the surprising and rewarding show with another surprise: a cover of The Only Ones’ classic “Another Girl, Another Planet.”
SETLIST
Footsteps in the Shadows
Texas is My Mother
Teenage Luggage
Castanets
Outlaw for You
Something Blue
Waiting for Me
Overloaded
Flying
Sensitive Boys
Fury and Fire
Amor Puro
Sonica USA
Always a Friend / Tracks of My Tears / Lively Up Yourself
Sally Was a Cop
Another Girl, Another Planet
