A Bloody Show: John Wesley Harding & Friends Live at Bumbershoot 2005 [DVD]

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About A Bloody Show: John Wesley Harding & Friends Live

Product Description In the long list of to-dos for a veteran musician, a live album, the ubiquitous summer festival appearance, and now the DVD all rank near the top. It makes sense, then, that acclaimed singer-songwriter John Wesley Harding would take these rock-star staples and not only combine them but create something completely new in the process. A Bloody Show captures John Wesley Harding as his best: performing a daring set of previously unreleased material in front of a sold-out crowd at the Bagley Wright Theatre in Seattle. In keeping with the communal spirit of the Bumbershoot festival, Robyn Hitchcock, the Love Hall Tryst, The Minstrel in the Galleries, and Scott McCaughey of the Minus Five join John Wesley Harding on stage to bring Songs of Misfortune to life. The genesis for A Bloody Show actually begins, however, with probably the last item on the rock and roll to-do list: historical fiction. Misfortune, penned by one Wesley Stace (the Bruce Wayne to Harding's Batman), follows the rise, fall, and redemption of orphan Rose Old against the backdrop of Victorian high society. Widely praised, Misfortune would go on to receive nominations for the Guardian First Book Award, the Commonwealth Writer's Prize, and the James Tiptree, Jr. Award, and was named one of the best books of the year by The Washington Post and The Boston Phoenix before eventually becoming Songs of Misfortune, a largely a cappella performance of the songs featured in the novel by Harding's Love Hall Tryst project. The final step in the journey from the page to the disc came when the organizers of Bumbershoot approached Harding to bring the projects together in a live performance. Harding rises to the occasion in A Bloody Show. This ambitious project achieves that rare synergy of old and new, mining the theatrical ambition of yesteryear while mixing various forms of storytelling media in a strictly 21st century way. In total, the show spans a captivating 75 minutes and comes bundled with the 14-track bonus album The Tryst Demos, an acoustic album featuring reworked versions of the songs featured in the live performance. A unique record of one of the most exciting concerts of an already accomplished career, A Bloody Show is John Wesley Harding breathing new life into the familiar. Amazon.com Two disparate media make felicitous bedfellows in A Bloody Show, a performance by singer-songwriter John Wesley Harding and various collaborators: Misfortune, his critically-acclaimed 2005 novel (written under his real name, Wesley Stace; Stace's nom de musique, was taken from a recording of that name by Bob Dylan, who himself copped it from 19th Century American gunfighter John Wesley Hardin); and Songs of Misfortune, a selection of tunes mentioned in the book and recorded that same year by Harding and his a cappella quartet, the Love Hall Tryst. This straightforward, simply-staged Seattle gig, organized in barely a week and included in that city's annual Bumbershoot festival, features readings from the book, principally by Harding and fellow Brit muso Robyn Hitchcock, interspersed with songs from the album performed by the Tryst and a Harding-led rock band known as the Minstrel in the Galleries, with occasional accompaniment by a string quartet. The music comes mostly from traditional British sources, and thus is filled with tales of murder, adultery, and other eternal sins, a fact that the author-musician acknowledges with droll understatement ("We're going to be entering the infanticide portion of the set fairly shortly," he wryly warns the family crowd). Those songs and Leonard Cohen's "Joan of Arc" are masterfully rendered by the singers, bolstered by the use of acoustic guitars, mandolin, and hurdy-gurdy; the rock band, meanwhile, bears a passing resemblance to folk-rock pioneers Fairport Convention even while falling well short of that lofty standard. It's quite an undertaking; while Harding submits that "We didn't screw up too bad," A Bloody Show is ac