Halfway through his band’s two-plus-hour set on Saturday night, Jim Waive stepped to the edge of Bel Rio’s short stage, which ends quite abruptly before the drinkers and dancers, and took a request from Sons of Bill singer James Wilson. Waive leaned over, raised his head, smiled, and stepped back towards the microphone.
“This here’s a request for something sad and beautiful,” Waive said. “I hope it’s both.”
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Jim Waive (pictured) and the Young Divorcees split the difference between old country and new riffs on Saturday at Bel Rio. |
It felt a bit early in the evening for the Young Divorcees’, “Fool”—Waive’s stab at a “Tennessee Waltz” of his own, about splitting assets and taking a lover’s Jesus down from a shelf, “because I don’t love you no more.” Among the tunes that the Divorcees keep in their holsters, however, it’s the group’s undisputed classic, a tune that Waive himself calls the band’s “anthem”—the song that both lays out the Young Divorcees’ mission and makes sure that the band is fulfilling it.
There are only so many ways a band can reinterpret old country songs as different old country songs without making the lyrics of Hank Williams or Merle Haggard sound like a corral of clichés; you might say that “Fool” runs the same risk. But each time Waive pops the heel of his hand against the body of his guitar to start the waltz, the song unfolds with jukebox precision and lossless emotion—the same shift from indignation to resignation in the lyrics, the final lover’s plea of Charlie Bell’s pedal steel, the cracked leather in Waive’s voice.
So, every Young Divorcees gig is an exercise in interpretation: Play an old song in a new way that makes it sound old. On “Big River”—the group’s best cover song, in this writer’s opinion—Waive turned Johnny Cash’s country blues number into a bluegrass rave by drawing out the song’s chorus into a repeated “cry, cry, cry!” Special attention was paid to Hank Williams: The quartet threw a little extra cayenne on “Jambalaya,” and the waltz “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry” got a longer stride, anchored by bassist Jen Fleisher, who swooned in the arms of her bull fiddle.
Lead guitarist Charlie Bell deserves praise for his role in the translation process. Dressed for each gig in the same slim suit, Bell resembles Woody Harrelson’s cowboy hat-wearing assassin in No Country For Old Men and plays as sharp as he dresses—no missed buttons or notes on his watch. Bell typically writes ricochet-bullet riffs that he can recreate live, but on Saturday he roamed a bit further, challenging himself to hit the same targets from a few new angles.
The best of Waive’s songs get the same treatment when the band is in peak shape and perfect harmony, a state that’s hard to maintain over the course of more than two dozen songs. Throughout the night, Waive’s voice sounded a bit husky, although it was more distracting to guess at the cause (A cold? Bad microphone? Dirty ears?), and didn’t visibly disturb the packed Bel Rio crowd. And despite Nick Reeb’s better solos on songs like “Lonesome,” original fiddler Anna Matijasic’s borderless riffs and hooks on Waive compositions like “Trouble’s You” are always missed.
But all the proper components of a great Divorcees gig were in place for the bulk of the gig, including a handful of dancers that moved to remember and to forget in equal number, some recalling the rhythms of Patsy Cline, others firing their legs like pistons to graceless, muscular instinct during “Old Dominion Girl,” already on its way to being a local standard. Sad and beautiful and, at its best, both.
