Welcome to the World of Joe West Music

Ruckus: She's a Total Blam-Blam By Gabe Gomez Published: October 10, 2007

The interviews I've botched, the drama that surrounds local radio and the busload of bad music I've endured over the last year got me thinking that it's about time to do something I've been hankering to do: See Xoe Fitzgerald
Ben Wright and Joe West put on their alter-egos and fly through a killer set. Time Traveling Transvestite. Because after spending the best Christmas ever at a gay nightclub watching a killer drag show, I learned that I am down with dudes in nylons lip-synching Mariah Carey songs and other such camp.
A power outage on Sept. 29 crippled The Mine Shaft Tavern for the majority of the day and shut down its kitchen, so the protein for the evening came from the fermented food group; getting plowed like a turnip patch was a happy consequence.
"We're the Joe West Situation," West said of the "opening act." "We're warming it up for Xoe." Both of West's bands are made up of Ben (Bacon) Wright on lead guitar, Paul (Feathericci) Groetzinger on drums, Noah (Neegs) Baumeister on bass and West (Xoe) on rhythm guitar and lead vocal. The Situation plays original tunes and covers such as Glen Campbell's "Rhinestone Cowboy." Perhaps West and the boys were attempting to be ironic and funny by playing a schmaltzy country song about a cowboy in the city, away from his family and his familiar surroundings, but I didn't buy it, especially when the band kicked into Merle Haggard's "Okie from Muskogee." These two songs express a sense of alienation and a search for identity in both foreign and familiar places.
The Situation set the tone for the evening and, perhaps, gave a little insight into West as an artist and his performance as Xoe. I know. It sounds like some touchy-feely humanities seminar, but considering Xoe Fitzgerald is essentially a dystopian performance about the issues of exploration and other worldviews, it ain't no co-inky-dink. Compound this revelation with Xoe's wall-to-wall rock opera style, largely influenced by David Bowie's 1976 film, The Man Who Fell to Earth, (filmed partially in Madrid) and you're ready to rock.
The Situation breezed through the set and allowed enough time for The Mine Shaft to fill with a mix of locals and West supporters. We were all waiting for Xoe, like handsome prairie dogs waiting for the wafts of twilight; Xoe has only performed a handful of times so it was, indeed, a special occasion. Three pints of beer into my evening and I saw West on stage wearing a gold lamé pantsuit and a blonde wig. He talked with his bass player, Neegs, who wore tight leather pants; they both twisted knobs and set the smoke machine just right. Feathericci wore what can best be described as a French schoolgirl outfit. He walked around the bar in total comfort, an unlit cigarette hanging from his mouth, like a character in some wayward schoolgirl B-movie.
Then there was Bacon, who sported a stripped ankle length skirt with a vest. Like survivors of nuclear fallout, the band looked like a cross between a Mad Max film (before that terrible one with Tina Turner) and the New York Dolls. The smoke filled the stage as I began my fourth beer. For the next 1½ or two hours (I can't quite remember) the band wove a story of time-travel-laden tunes paired with the David Bowie classics, "The Man Who Sold the World" and "Heroes." By the time I started on the Booker's whiskey, someone in a robot costume was on the dance floor. This, I felt, was totally reasonable. West then changed into a Jean Paul-Gaultier-meets-GI-Jane number, complete with helmet and Barbie-rocket tits. The remnants of Americana have largely ceased by this point and have been replaced by a '60s or '70s T Rex and Iggy Pop raw simplicity with a Ziggy Stardust glam foundation. For the crescendo, West threw on a frilly red number, complete with butterfly wings. I was, by then, thoroughly fucked up, shaking my ass on the dance floor, watching a grown man wearing a camisole and butterfly wings sing about alternate universes, unity and life-after-physical death. The guy dancing next to me wore a hot-pink-and-black cat suit with extremely high heels, makeup and a wig to match; he was having fun too.
The rock spectacle is dying art, save for the pageantry of the aforementioned drag show. Costume changes, smoke machines and even pyrotechnics have sneaked out the back door. I blame this largely on television and the exultation of the mundane in favor of live theatrics. So what can you really say about a rock opera performed at a bar on a Saturday night in front of a modest crowd? You don't have to say anything. Being swept up in the performance is all you really need.

Ruckus: A Clean Well-Lighted Place By Gabe Gomez Published: August 22, 2007

Music—not unlike sex, dope and humiliation—has healing powers. Its creation and appreciation is as instinctual as laughter. We use that same innate joie de vivre to create the places where we listen to music—environments where our love of rhythms, beats and melodies can be unleashed. Whether it's an outdoor amphitheater like Paolo Soleri or the inky hues of Evangelo's, where we listen to music says as much about us as the music itself.
The Santa Fe All-Stars have a gig at Tiny's Restaurant and Lounge every Wednesday during August. The band's recent show at the Santa Fe Bandstand (where they killed it) solidifies my desire to see them twice in one week and write a profile about the band playing at one of Santa Fe's most beloved venues. But my purpose is trumped by something I never expected to happen.
The $3.75 bottle of Budweiser I'm nursing and admittedly bought because—in my own deluded sense of reality—I thought it would help me "blend in" with the crowd, leads to the bigger realization that I've never been inside Tiny's, even though I have a vague recollection of its décor and clientele. I expect to walk into a stygian room with gnarly red glass candleholders on café tables, vinyl lounge chairs and creepy older people on the prowl for sketchy car sex. I get none of that; it's bright, convivial and there's not a pinky ring in sight. Elvis liquor decanters sit beside Laurel and Hardy decanters, which are beside the hundreds of other decanters that line the wall. And there is, of course, the music from the All-Stars. The band is quite literally flawless in its delivery, though the name still drives me bat shit every time I hear it because it reminds me of a Little League softball team. The band meanders from Tom Waits and Townes Van Zandt covers to slow waltzes and foot stompers. The room fills with local musicians as the night goes on.
"This can be any place," local drummer Mark Clark says about the bar/restaurant, noting the deliberate absence of all things Santa Fe. He's right. Tiny's doesn't resemble anything else I've seen here. The place even has a disco ball and bordello-style watercolor prints on the walls above the booths.
"It could be New Orleans," I think to myself, and realize that this is the thing that has been eating at me for three weeks and the reason I have what professional psychologists call a mild freak out or a "monkey falling out if its tree" episode.
Aug. 29 marks the two-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina's landfall in Waveland, Miss., which subsequently sparked the floods that destroyed my home in New Orleans; it's the reason I moved to Santa Fe. I had gone for a run on the morning of Aug. 27, 2005. When I returned to my house, my wife had packed my bags.
"Walk through the house and take anything else; we're leaving," she said. I laughed and entertained staying home through the storm. We had gone through this before. Every year for five years we had evacuated because of a hurricane threat. We had even attended a hurricane party at one of our favorite bars and got hammered while the wind and rain ravaged the trees outside. So I left everything. By the time we finally returned (two months later) more than 500 hundred books, three acoustic guitars and my entire music collection had been soaking in toxic water for more than three weeks.
The reminders of the flood are beginning to appear everywhere—in opinion pieces, editorials and the recycled television footage from 2005 that shows the mayhem at the convention center in New Orleans and at the Superdome. So now I'm at Tiny's listening to four of the finest musicians in Santa Fe (Joe West, Susan Holmes, Sharon Gilchrist and Ben Wright), hoping that listening to some music and putting some ink to paper about a stellar band in our midst will realign my head.
After a brief set break, local musician Pete Williams joins West and Wright onstage to play the upright bass for "House of the Rising Sun." Their rendition is so sparingly beautiful, it causes something I've never experienced in Santa Fe: complete silence from the audience. The scene and the sound dig deeply into the confines where I've stored the memories of those fucked-up days after the hurricane and flood: The violent sounds of gas generators, the rotting-food smell that permeated the city and the mountains of warped and muddied lives draped in front of houses in ruined heaps. I have to leave the room before breaking down and making a scene.
It's been a year since I moved back to Santa Fe and the outsider feeling is almost gone. My first evening at Tiny's won't be my last. The term "locals' hangout" is mentioned often in casual conversations; I wonder how many of us at the bar are truly local—and why it matters to qualify ourselves or any place in Santa Fe in this way.
This is home and the sound it creates spills through the bars and the streets like a new flood, replacing the damage from the one before.

Gender-Bending Genius
Xoe Fitzgerald/Joe West Situation/Lone Monk
Mineshaft Tavern Madrid, NM 1/13/07

First let me start off by saying as a disclaimer that I opened the show solo as Lone Monk playing a set of originals and covers. I wouldÊlike to thank Joe for giving me a chance to play in such a cool place.
The Mineshaft has to be the best place in NM for a live show. It has that wild west anything can happen vibe that is very exciting and it is the perfect atmosphere to take in the honky-tonk bard and his exceptional band. Incidentally the bar is under new ownership and this was one of their first nights and it was door to door with thirsty customers ready to soak up the great music. I would like to wish the ladies best of luck and hope that this auspicious night would be the first of many successful evenings to come. The Joe West Situation started the evening off with a set of country classics which included 'Okie From Muskogee' and Rhinestone Cowboy,' as well as fan favorites like 'The Human Cannonball' and '$2000 Navajo Rug,' and also a chicken fried version of 'Shake Your Booty' thrown in for good measure. The band is real tight and guitarist Ben Wright plays acoustic with wah-wah pedal, occasional e-bow lines, and lots of good taste and economy, not crowding a single measure with over-playing. The rhythm section of Noah Baumeister and DJ Paul Federici on the drums were locked in tight and hot all night. After about a 45 minute set they took a break and got ready for the fiesty, always radiant Xoe Fitzgerald to take the stage. The crowd could only imagine what they were about to become part of. There were a couple of dudes in dresses milling around in anticipation. I over heard some grumbling about the fact that there were going to be trannies in the bar. I must admit I saw none, well not done up nice.
When she took the stage with her band they were now transformed into no shirt, leather pants wearing rock and roll animals. DJ Paul looked like a scary Kabuki zombie and played like he was a man possessed- they all did. Ben Wright was wailing like Mick Ronson or Steve Hunter the whole show- amazing!!! Xoe was wearing a gold lame outfit with nice tan platform boots and a white wig that Andy Warhol would have died for. She was radiant and eloquent telling her story with total "I don't give a fuck what you think" attitude and it practically made me weep and streak my mascara. She told of her birth in Madrid, being the love child of an alien Ziggy Stardust who knocked up her mom while in town filming a movie.
Borrowing two songs from her "father's" repertoire "The Man Who Sold The World" and "Heroes", I must honestly say that her own compositions were as strong and comforting and blended well with the Bowie tunes that were their impetus. The crowd was packed, writhing, dancing, copulating, breathing in every word of the songs heard for the first time and all knowing this was a magical rock and roll spectacle and that they would speak of this occasion for many years to come. Xoe made a couple of wardrobe changes throughout the evening. Once coming out in a camouflage dress w/ plastic army helmet. She ended the evening with white fishnet stockings and a red negligee, adorning red butterfly wings. Mike the Can Man was wearing the amazing robot costume and dancing with the ladies as his x-ray eyes glared out at the crowd which was now oozing as one symbiotic organism. This story was very sad and symbolizes to me the effectiveness of guitars and drums in overcoming sexual identity confusion. Some of Xoe's outfits were auctioned off at the end of the show to help raise money for her home for homeless time-traveling transvestites called 'Fallen Angels of the Galaxy' or F.A.G. The show was recorded and all I can do is pray for it's DVD release so I can enjoy this experience again and again. Rock-on Xoe!!!