It's Been a Leon Time Comin'

This post is based on actual events. The names have been changed to pronouns to protect the innocent.

I took off early from work on Friday afternoon to pick up my father from his office in Koreatown, so that we could sit in interminable Los Angeles traffic together. Normally, he would take the train home from work at around 4, but we got an earlier start because the entire family was going to see Leon Russell perform in San Juan Capistrano that night.

The entire ride home, my father compared the time we were making in the car to the pace he'd be travelling in the train. Would we possibly beat the train back to Orange County? Or would the train make better time, thus confirming once and for all the absolute correctness of his preferred commuting method? At one point, near the end of the 90 minute, 55 mile sojourn, it seemed as if the train might actually cross right over the freeway while we drove. This was before Dad realized that we had left Los Angeles several hours before the train, thus invalidating the entire experiment and rendering the point moot. That disappointment aside, we still did alright by getting home in 90 minutes. Glaciers move faster than traffic on the 5 freeway on a Friday afternoon. You'd get to your final destination faster riding in a rickshaw pulled by comic legend Dom Delouise than travelling by car.

Anyway, after a brief respite from the road, both of my parents and I piled back in the car to head to the well-hidden Coach House, a building so poorly-identified and difficult to find, I half expected to see Dick Cheney running a shadow government in there. On the plus side, had Dick Cheney really been in there, he could have just shot me in the face, thus sparing me the next 5 hours of discomfort.

But now I'm getting ahead of myself. Let's backtrack. My parents, brother, brother's girlfriend and I found ourselves in the Coach House of San Juan Capistrano because of the recent release of George Harrison's Concert for Bangladesh on DVD. We play it a lot at the video store, and I remembered that my parents had the old LP mixed in with their rather sizable collection of Old Fart Rock. So I bought the disc for my Mom on Mother's Day. Right away, she was excited to see Leon Russell, who apparently had been a favorite of hers back in what Leon calls the "Just Say Yes" era.

I had heard of the guy, but mainly via his performance of the Rolling Stones' "Jumpin' Jack Flash" in the Concert for Bangladesh. I would later find out that he's primarily famous as a session musician, sitting in for recordings with a large variety of music legends from Bob Dylan to the Rolling Stones to George Harrison to B.B. King to Eric Clapton to Willie Nelson. I, um, obtained an early Leon album for my folks online and grew to appreciate it myself.

While watching the DVD, I theorized that Leon was dead. I don't know why I thought this...It's just what I thought at the time. Of course, I was wrong, but what's creepy is that Leon's fellow Concert for Bangladesh performer Billy Preston really did die only a few days later. Dum-dum-dum!

Of course, Leon is very much alive and making albums with weird pictures of himself on the cover. Sometimes with tiny dogs.



And when I let my parents know that Leon's latest tour would be coming through Southern California, tickets were purchased with great and immediate haste.

Which brings me back to the Coach House, so called because the seating is as comfortable as the Coach section of a commercial aircraft, and the food's nearly as good.

The Coach House is one of these venues that wants to feed you a meal and drinks when you come to see a show. See, they don't make a lot of money on the actual box office - the performers get most of that scratch. They need you to wolf down overpriced martinis and week-old shrimp cocktails to start turning a profit.

We were told to arrive between 6 and 7 p.m. for dinner, and I filed in with the 'rents at around 6:30. My brother and his girlfriend followed soon after, detained because of some kind of horrific Laguna Beach traffic jam. (That's the sort of mishap that never bedevils those charming kids on "The O.C.," who never have time to sit in traffic with all the unwanted pregnancies and lavish pool parties.) In my case, "dinner" was to consist of a plate of chicken fingers and 5 Heinekens. Someone at my table ordered a plate of vegetables coated in cheese sauce that looked like a leftover prop from a John Carpenter movie.

If I had to choose two words to describe the ambience of The Coach House, I would probably choose "redneck hellscape." Or possibly "shitkicking inferno." The place was so goddamn hot you'd think the opening act was The Human Torch. You could tell the drinks were watered down because they evaporated before they reached your table!

So it's hard to enjoy a conversation and a meal, because the entire time you're sitting there, it's like being locked inside The Wicker Man. But, you know, I like to think of myself as an easygoing sort. I'll sweat bullets and drink my beer for a while waiting for a concert to start, it's cool...

But this was not cool. There were not one, not two but an ungainly three opening bands. The first act was a guy playing an acoustic guitar while his friend played drums. (No, I'm not going to remember any of the opening act's names because they were bad and pissed me off.) The songs weren't so horrible musically. A bit generic, but not horrible. What ruined it was his reliance on the lamest, most trite, cliche "folk rock" lyricism imaginable. The Fiery Furnaces can pull off a song composed of nothing but place names, but I don't want to hear any more scruffy, unkempt singer-songwriter guys telling me they took the 5:14 from Shreveport down to Aberdeen. It's lame, guys, alright? Even if you've been to all those bullshit podunk cities.

The next act was another two guys, one of whom seemed to think he was Frank Black. He'd wail in this inappropriately high registers, sometimes clashing brutally with the song's actual melody. I liked these guys the best out of all the opening acts, cause at least they were peculiar and interesting. By this time, I'd just about had it with the Coach House. It was around 9:30, meaning I'd been there approaching three hours, meaning that I had already sweat through all my body's excess water and was moving on to vital tissues and hemoglobin. When the third opening act took the stage, I would have left if I hadn't arrived in a car with my parents. As it was, I went to the outdoor smoking lounge for some fresh air.

This last band was horrible horrible horrible. It was like watching Big and Rich's weenie younger cousins. Um, Little and Broke. Yeah, that's the ticket. Imagine eight middle-aged guys from Orange County all dressed like Garth Brooks pretending to be the bar band from behind the chain link fence in Roadhouse. Okay, now imagine them sucking even more than that band you just imagined. That was these guys. I've got a great new name for them, if they don't like Little & Broke. Rascal Asshats.

(Bonus CBI points are available for anyone who can name the Roadhouse band in the comments without looking it up.)

One the only band to challenge Black Eyed Peas for the title of Worst Band Alive left the stage, it was finally time for Leon. Which is a good thing too, because I really couldn't handle seeing any more 55 year old wrinkly broads with stretched-out, faded tattoos dancing around with their hastily-sculpted fake boobs hanging out for all to see. 25 in one night is about my limit.

Once Leon and his band actually took the stage, things picked up briefly. Although the vibe didn't actually get any hotter, as this was physically impossible.



I didn't take that photo above. It was too dark inside for my cell phone's camera to work. But it accurately conveys what I saw of Leon Russell, jamming on his keyboard at the side of the stage. Wisely, he doesn't focus exclusively on his own material. Despite the astounding length of his career (starting at age 14 playing backup for bands in his native Oklahoma), Leon's only had a few great albums on a handful of hits of his own. He's far more legendary for his performances in tandem with the biggest names in rock, and accordingly, he plays a lot of covers during his live show.

I think his cover of Dylan's "It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry" was the evening's highlight (he also took on "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall"), but Leon's take on the Rolling Stones' "Wild Horses" and his Ray Charles covers were also pretty terrific. He got to a few of his own songs as well, including the modest hit "Hummingbird." The years have been pretty kind of Leon's voice, which was always really gravelly and deep anyway, and his new band does a pretty good job of reinventing these well-worn classic rock standards. Thanks to the Coach House's crackerjack sound team, the music was distorted and difficult to hear for the first few songs, but this was soon straightened out. And much credit to Mr. Russell, who interrupted the show to inform the cheap bastards to turn on the air conditioning, a request they promptly ignored.

We wound up leaving early, not because of dissatisfaction with Leon's performance, but because it was near midnight and I had to work the next day and my brother was sleepy and my Mom didn't feel well. I think she probably caught malaria or something. I felt kind of bad, considering how much dough the entire experience must have set back Moms and Pops. We all had a pretty good time, but you never want to leave a show early when you've already been sitting there for four hours. Trust me, I know. I've left more shows early than most have attended. I'm a coniesseur of leaving shows early, so you can take my word on this.