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Wino Wednesday: Wino Performs The Obsessed’s “Streamlined” Acoustic, May 2009

This tour was the first for Scott “Wino” Weinrich after the death of Jon Blank, bassist for the Wino trio that put out the Punctuated Equilibrium album earlier in 2009. By the time they got to Atlantic City, which was in July, there was a fill-in bassist alongside Wino and Clutch drummer Jean-Paul Gaster, who pulled double duty, but in the first going, it was Wino solo opening for Clutch, and this version of “Streamlined” comes from that run of shows. It was filmed May 16, 2009, in Bloomington, Indiana, less than a month after Blank‘s death following the Wino trio’s return from a successful European tour that included a stop at Roadburn that would later be released as a live CD in Blank‘s honor.

“Streamlined,” which appeared on The Obsessed‘s 1994 to-date swansong full-length, The Church Within, is plenty tense anyway, but in this acoustic arrangement its motoring riff gets even more stripped down. The bare essentials of “Streamlined” only come in at 1:12, and it’s about as naked a structure as I’ve heard from Wino, who wouldn’t release his Adrift solo acoustic debut for more than another year and was still new to playing on stage by himself. Of course, he pulls the song off — even in that new context, “Streamlined” was still 15 years old — and what’s most striking of all about the runthrough of the track is that it’s still got fuzz on the acoustic guitar.

Some tones just can’t be stopped, I guess. Obviously this was a difficult period for Weinrich, and the resulting document of it in this video isn’t quite like anything else I’ve seen from him before or after, kind of capturing the transitional moment as Wino started to come into his own as a solo performer.

A fascinating way to spend a minute of your time. Enjoy and have a great first Wino Wednesday of 2014:

Wino, “Streamlined” Live in Bloomington, IN, May 16, 2009

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