Jake Clemons at Whelan’s on December 3rd 2013
How important are first impressions? What useful information can we extract from them that will serve us in some way for the foreseeable future? Very little if Jake Clemons‘ gig in Whelan’s is anything to go by. He arrives on the stage with slightly tinted shades and a grand old afro and looks every bit the jazzman sax-player. He soon draws the saxophone’s mouthpiece to his lips and blows a low note which continues into a quiet lament. The band arrives during this taking their places at drums and keys, picking up guitars and bass and then we’re into a jazz fusion session. This all takes place in the first four minutes of the gig and is the highlight.
Before this promising opening comes Cork-native Nicole Maguire accompanied by an electric piano. Her guitar-based songs are reserved and not particularly commanding but she has a fine singing voice and when the piano is in the organ setting it makes some pleasantly endearing sounds. A cover of Joni Mitchell’s River, a song even the anti-Christmas brigade can get on board with, concludes her set and we’re all sufficiently lulled for a bit of rocking.
And so Jake arrives and offers up an inspiring introduction with his sax and band. But then comes the fatal error. He puts down the saxophone and picks up a guitar and suddenly we’re into the realm of generic ’90s pop-punk for the rest of the night. It’s a remarkable transformation that you don’t really believe until at least three songs later, three long repetitive songs. But it’s undeniable, and suddenly the wizened-looking saxman of the opening bars has transformed into some pretentious floppy-haired punk.
We’re in the realm of one idea songwriting, where the verse-chorus-verse-middle eight-chorus structure dominates. There’s no point mentioning specific songs because they all are the same and they are all littered with pseudo-insights. We get the story of when an Irishman (we can only conjecture who) is sitting in a bar in NYC with Jake after the death of Clarence telling him “you have to be two people, Jake, you have to be two people, Jake, you have to be two people, Jake”. And apparently we don’t need hope for the future because when we open our eyes in the morning we’re born and when we close them again at night we die, a philosophy Jake has probably not run by his creditors.
The set has all the substance of a helium balloon, and like a helium balloon it’s pleasant enough to have in the background while we socialise and talk, but you’re not going to pay to see it and then stand for an hour and a half staring at it just floating there pointlessly. Stick the needle in and the thing goes pop with little resistance. A telling “ooh” from the audience follows a shout of “play something by Bruce” at the beginning of the encore – itself one of the many unearned liberties taken by the headliner over the course of the evening. The venue was filled, but all indications suggest that this was the cause of Clemons’ surname above anything else.