Music Union : Live Your Music

Saturday, July 18, 2009

Detroit Bar, Costa Mesa, CA

by Josiah Daniel Golojuh

Matt Vasquez, lead singer of Delta Spirit, has the best wail in rock and roll, and a band with just the right amount bravado and attitude to compliment his voice. But what happens when you take away the band? On Saturday night at the Detroit Bar a crowd of mostly friends, family, and musicians found out.

The set began with Matt’s impromptu band performing in what Matt refereed to as, “our second practice”. The band, a bassist and a drummer named Frank, comprised of veteran musicians Matt called “the real deal”, from his days as a 16-year-old sneaking into the Detroit Bar. After a few songs, Matt was alone on stage, the slightest of shakes in his hands as he showed the audience his set list scribbled on a children’s menu from a local Mexican restaurant. Matt gave his love and appreciation to his band, his real band, Delta Spirt, most of whom could be spotted in the crowd. He thanked them for allowing him to pay his rent, owned up to his fear, and played through it.

Playing a solo version of one of Delta Spirit’s most bombastic songs, “Children”, Matt had to fight the tears. The song returning to him from the audience seemed to lift the watery-eyed frontman off the stage. After the song’s conclusion he thanked the crowded as he chocked back a tear. In a shared moment, we learned the isolation of a solo show on a stage. As though each member of the crowd stood alone, guitar in hand, under the harsh stage lights, and there experienced the potential humiliation and rejection that could come with any performance increased tenfold when your band, your brothers, are not there to back you up.

Later, Matt talked about who you NEVER cover, Michael Jackson and The Beatles, conceding slightly on the latter when he recalled how to play John Lennon’s “Mother”. He tore through it with as much emotion as Lennon had in his original rendition. But it was a cover of a song Matt said he “wrote for Bruce Springsteen back in the seventies”, that defined the night. Matt’s version of “Racing in the Street” swelled, pulsed, and bled with emotion. A bewitching combination of the poetry of Bruce Springsteen, desperate people in unforgiving circumstances, but painted in swift brush strokes across the screen of a drive in movie and Matt Vasquez’s soulful wail. With the line, “Tonight my baby and me, we’re gonna ride to the sea, and wash these sins off our hands” he was not just singing it, he was living it. It was a song sung by a man young enough to sing it and mean it in a way that the Boss no longer can.

Playing a Springsteen cover sets a pretty high standard and after the solo emotion filled stuff was out of the way those “real deal” back up players again took the stage. With them, Matt Vasquez did his best Bruce Springsteen and blew the roof off the place.