Personal Performance at the World Cafe

A few weeks ago, Phillyist writer Spencer Williams experienced a nearly private performance at the Tin Angel. Last night, I got the same treatment when I caught my first show upstairs at the World Cafe Live. There were, at most, about twenty people in the audience. It's an intimate space, but even then, that's a small crowd. Which made it a really perfect venue for me to be seeing The Mendoza Line, a band I've loved since high school. That's not entirely true, actually. I loved them while I was in high school, and continue to love the songs of theirs that I knew back then, but, well, years later, they're still making music, and it's music that I, unfortunately, wasn't familiar with until last night. Sure, they didn't play a single song that I knew from back in the day, but it didn't really matter: it was still a solid, and solidly entertaining, set (punctuated by interludes that went: "Married on MySpace, but single on Friendster") that provided an excellent soundtrack to our meals. Plus, there was a lap steel on stage. And that's more or less all it takes to win me over.

Because the upstairs venue at the World Cafe is significantly more casual than the downstairs space, there wasn't much of a to-do onstage when the Mendoza Line's equipment was struck and Willard Grant Conspiracy took the stage. Front man (and the band's sole permanent member) Robert Fisher sat through the entire set, and warned us that we might want a whiskey before he started playing. And if not a whiskey, at least two beers. It was a subdued set, befitting of the quiet, mostly empty room. The songs were all about loss, even when they weren't, and Fisher's voice had just enough of a hard-worn edge to it to make you believe in all the words he sang.

At the end of the evening, Fisher and his fiddle/saw (yes, saw!) player unplugged from their amplifiers and took chairs in the audience, playing three very intimate unplugged numbers for us (including an old lullaby). I was five feet, at best, from Fisher's guitar, and I had goosebumps. There were only about a dozen people who still remained. And it was pretty damned fantastic.

Image via Dig Internet Radio.