Saint Vitus‘ October tour had ended on the 25th in New Orleans, so whether Wino just stayed on the East Coast or was back to the West and then over again to play this acoustic show in Johnson City, Tennessee, I don’t really know. It seems to have been somebody’s birthday or some other such occasion, held at The HideAway, and also a stop on the Samothrace tour — local sludgers Navajo Witch played as well — so a more than solid bill one way or another. Wino played a 42-minute set to an increasingly tanked crowd, as you can hear in the sundry whooping and hollering in the clip below, and along with covering the likes of Bruce Springsteen and Motörhead, also broke out a couple new songs.

I might have one of the titles on the new cuts wrong (it sounds in the video like he’s saying it’s “Freedom something” but I can’t make out quite what), but otherwise, this is how it breaks down:

Green Speed
Hold on Love
Crystal Madonna
Adrift
Whatever
I Don’t Care
Dark Ravine
Shot in the Head
Iron Horse
Waltz Across Texas
Freedom…
Dead Yesterday
Forever Gone

Of those, “Shot in the Head” is Savoy Brown‘s, “Waltz Across Texas” is Springsteen and “Iron Horse” is Motörhead, everything else is original. By the end of their touring cycle in support of the collaborative Heavy Kingdom album (review here), Wino & Conny Ochs were performing “Crystal Madonna” regularly, though it has yet to surface in a studio version, and “Freedom…” and “Forever Gone” are new songs. The rest, and indeed “Iron Horse” and “Shot in the Head” come either from Heavy Kingdom, or from Wino‘s 2010 Adrift acoustic debut (review here).

It’s a cool show and seems like both Wino and the crowd are having a good time, so between that and the new songs, it was an obvious pick. Hope you enjoy and have a great Wino Wednesday:

Scott “Wino” Weinrich, Live at The HideAway, Johnson City, TN, 11.18.13

After ending their supporting slots for Clutch‘s annual holiday tour (review here), Wino, Saviours and Mondo Generator for a round of tour dates that’s currently winding down on the West Coast. I missed them when they started off the run in Brooklyn owing to illness, but the kind souls at Digitalive Productions taped the entire Wino set last Friday, Jan. 4, at Pittsburgh’s 31st St. Pub with three cameras in HD and with soundboard audio. I don’t mind saying I watched the whole thing this morning and short of being in 3D or actually being the show itself, it’s about as close as modern technology can bring you to the real thing.

Of particular note is the finale of Savoy Brown’s “Hellbound Train.” Wino‘s been kicking the song around for a while now — he also played it on tour with Conny Ochs last year — but as it closes out the set here, he’s joined on stage by Nick Oliveri of Mondo Generator and Saviours’ Sonny Christopher Reinhardt and Scott Batiste. The four-piece run through a pretty basic arrangement of the song, though flourishes like Scott Batiste‘s cymbal crash near the finish are worth noting, but still, just to have those dudes on stage at the same time is pretty killer. Not that Wino can put out a record with every tourmate he has, but a collaboration with Oliveri on bass would be awesome.

Other highlights of the set include “Crystal Madonna,” which is another song he performed with Ochs, and “Adrift” and “I Don’t Care” from the Adrift acoustic debut. If you’ve got 35 minutes, I’d recommend a front to back viewing session, full screen if need be.

Happy Wino Wednesday:

Compared at least to the discography he’s amassed in bands like The Obsessed, Spirit Caravan, Saint Vitus, etc., Scott “Wino” Weinrich‘s acoustic catalog is pretty small. There’s two collaboration releases with Conny Ochs, his own Adrift full-length, the Songs of Townes Van Zandt tribute, and the split 7″ with Scott Kelly. Actually, I guess that’s more than some acts put out in their entire career, but this is Wino we’re talking about, so it’s fair to say that he’s still probably just getting started in the form.

Nonetheless, one of his most powerful unplugged cuts to date is the politically-driven “Manifesto.” In classic protest-song fashion, it’s a lyrical recitation of belief, living up to its title with an innate sense of defiance and lines like, “I believe religion is a tool of war.” At the same time, there’s also something affirming in it, an aspect of hope that’s not lost in the seething tension Wino creates on guitar or in his vocals.

Watching this clip of Wino performing the song in Belgium on an early acoustic tour in Oct. 2010, that hope is all the more prevalent as he hops down from the stage to sing it to the crowd on the crowd’s own level. No mic, no P.A., just as raw and natural a performance as can be — one person and one guitar. The camera here is perfectly positioned to capture his expressions and the passion at the core of his delivery, and of all the Wino Wednesday clips I’ve posted in the last 65-plus weeks, this one might be the most intimate.

Check it out and have a happy Wino Wednesday:

Yesterday the announcement came down the wire that Wino would be opening for Clutch‘s holiday tour this coming December. It’s the kind of news I like to get. If you missed the dates, here they are:

WINO w/ Clutch, Mondo Generator, Saviours:
12/26/2012 9:30 Club – Washington DC
12/27/2012 The Orange Peel – Asheville, NC
12/28/2012 Buster’s Billiards & Backroom – Lexington, KY
12/29/2012 Newport Music Hall – Columbus, OH
12/30/2012 Starland Ballroom – Sayreville, NJ
12/31/2012 The Palladium – Worcester, MA

It’s a pretty killer bill, and Wino will be performing solo acoustic to open the shows, as the PR wire confirms:

Following the ongoing Saint Vitus North American tour, his thriving recent tours of Europe and North America alongside his comrade Conny Ochs in support of their collaborative album Heavy Kingdom, preceded by several tours with close friend and Shrinebuilder bandmate Scott Kelly in support of their split 7” release last year, today the legendary SCOTT “WINO” WEINRICH confirms his latest round of live performances, as the man will bring his solo acoustic set to the road once again, this time in support of the almighty American rock machine Clutch.

WINO has supported Clutch on tour in recent years, with both his backing band as heard on his 2009-released Punctuated Equilibrium album as well as solo as his 2010-released debut acoustic album Adrift. On this special run of year-end dates WINO will join Mondo Generator and Saviours supply opening support for Clutch, with a six-show run from Washington DC up the East Coast and ending in Worcester, Massachusetts on New Year’s Eve. Tickets for this short but incredible tour will go on sale this Friday, September 21st.

Given all that newsly awesomeness, I thought it was a good time to take the opportunity to revisit Wino‘s 2010 acoustic debut, Adrift (review here). That record seems a long time ago now, but it’s only long in terms of all the stuff Wino has done since, with Saint Vitus, Premonition 13 and the Wino & Conny Ochs collaboration — not to mention touring for those projects and playing live with The Obsessed for the first time in more than a decade — and one track that has continued to stand out from it is the closer, “Green Speed.”

It helps that it’s a wailing heavy rock song — whatever kind of guitar it’s played on — with an uptempo chugging riff and buzzsaw-sharp electrified solo, but what really gets me in listening are the vocals, with have that seething underpinning of righteous anger that’s unmistakably his own. “Green Speed” was kind of buried at the end of Adrift, and sure enough, was different from a lot of the rest of the album, but it’s a cool track nonetheless, and seemed to me easily worth highlighting in honor of the upcoming tour.

Enjoy and have a happy Wino Wednesday:

Somewhere along the line I got the silly idea that it would be an early show. Wednesday night at the Saint Vitus bar in Brooklyn, Wino & Conny Ochs, with Sean Ragon from Cult of Youth and Kevin Hufnagel from Dysrhythmia opening — three acts, I figured an 8:30 start, Wino/Ochs on around 10, and then call it a night, everybody gets up and goes to work the next morning. Since I mentioned it, it’s probably fairly obvious that’s not the way it worked out, but since I’m still alive to mention it in the first place, also fairly obvious that I lived to tell the tale.

The tale? Pretty familiar by now, I expect. Traffic, more traffic, Brooklyn. Dark room, Vitus brew, Earthride over the P.A. I hadn’t been to the Saint Vitus bar in a couple weeks, but I’ll be back there come Monday for Eggnogg, so it was what it was. After catching them at Roadburn in April, I knew what to expect from Wino & Conny Ochs, but that did nothing to lessen my excitement at the prospect of seeing them again. As previously reported, there’s new material to be heard.

And being long since familiar with Dysrhythmia‘s ultra-tech approach, I was interested as well to see how guitarist Kevin Hufnagel fared in a solo context. Apparently he’s done noise-type solo work before, but this set was more stripped down; just him on stage with a couple pedals and what I’m fairly certain was a baritone ukulele that he ran through them. A little delay here, a little looping there, and through it all, a current of blinding finger-picking. Dysrhythmia have never wanted on the level of technical proficiency, but in this sphere, even the scales and on-a-dime turns had a natural feel.

Playing seated and rocking back and forth, Hufnagel impressed though, and not just in technique. One rarely thinks of a ukulele as a tool of atmospherics, but as he stuck an emery board between the strings to add a fuzzy sound to the finish of his set, he’d conveyed a richer sense of mood than the string resonance of his instrument might immediately indicate. He was followed not promptly by Sean Ragon, who seemed dead set on not starting until he got some reverb on his vocals that I don’t think ever came, but nonetheless unleashed a burst of post-Joe Strummer acoustic aggression once he got going.

It wasn’t as drastic a change as if Dying Fetus went on after Hufnagel or something like that, but the vibe was notably different, and not being familiar with Ragon‘s work in Cult of Youth or out of it, I didn’t know what to expect from his set. The crowd — incrementally making its way from the back room to the front — was more into it than I was. Ragon had his thing on lockdown, but my head was in another space entirely, so I extricated myself to the front barroom and enjoyed the second of the evening’s standard three beers. There was a growing host of familiar faces, and had I not been rank, I might have doled out some quality fat-guy hugs, but I worried about offending both myself and others.

Just as I was dealing with that and about halfway through my beer, Ragon came out from the back room. He wasn’t bolting exactly, but clearly a man walking with purpose. I guess Kevin Hufnagel had the long set and he had the short one, or maybe that’s his thing — play loud, fast, angry acoustic songs for 15-20 minutes and then split off the stage like you broke it. A pretty respectable ethic, to be honest. It’d still be another 45 minutes or so before Wino & Conny Ochs went on just past 11PM, but the Saint Vitus bar offers no shortage of other entertainments. I already mentioned Earthride on the P.A., and after that, it was Hour of 13.

Word had been shooting around the venue as well that both Scott “Wino” Weinrich and Ochs had gotten tour tattoos in the basement earlier in the night. I didn’t even know that was a thing, though I guess it makes sense. Within the first 30 seconds of their set, it was readily apparent that these two dudes were super-tight, musically and personally. In April, they’d filled the old church Het Patronaat with righteous bluesy harmonies, and they did the same for Saint Vitus bar’s unrepentant dinge, opening with “Somewhere Nowhere” and “Labour of Love” to cover beginning and finish of their debut collaboration, Heavy Kingdom right off the bat.

They’d already been on the road together for more than two weeks, so they played the set like it was a given, Ochs in a flowing white linen shirt that screamed “I get ladies” fairly loudly and Wino in a sleeves-gone black t with the word “heavy” on it, as if to emphasize the improbability of their pairing and the improbability that it would work as well as it does. Ochs had a bandage on his arm, Wino showed raw skin with that freshly-peeled look that’s always a marker of new ink. They played most of the Heavy Kingdom record — and at one point between songs, Wino named the two of them as a band called Heavy Kingdom; whether or not subsequent releases will come out under that name, I don’t know — and threw in a cover of Joy Division’s “Isolation,” which was spirited and well met in equal measure, and the title-track from Wino‘s solo acoustic debut, Adrift.

“Adrift” was a surprise, but a welcome one, and it sat well alongside Heavy Kingdom highlights like the swaggering “Dust” and “Dark Ravine.” New song “Crystal Madonna” was dark and quiet in comparison to much of the set, and seemed to be the dividing point between those who were sticking it out to the end of the show and those not, but if there was a shift in mood, it was hardly unprecedented in Wino & Conny Ochs‘ sound, and in any case, the Ochs-led “Here Comes the Siren” was even bleaker. I was glad for the chance to see that song in-person, though, and whether the duo release their next album under the Wino & Conny Ochs moniker or Heavy Kingdom, “Crystal Madonna” — she turned out to be plastic — that song is sure to be a standout. At the end of it, Wino said it was a true story.

No less true seemed the post-divorce balladry of “Old & Alone,” Weinrich‘s sneering vitriol and latent anger coming through as clearly as the fuzz he’d hooked up to his acoustic guitar for periodic solos, Ochs stomping his foot on a bass drum to keep effectively minimal time that nonetheless underscored a groove inherent in the songs. Following a short, on-stage break after their “last song,” they tore through “Manifesto” from Wino‘s 2011 split 7″ with Scott Kelly, topped it with a mostly a capella “Find the Cost of Freedom,” a Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young cover that can also be found on their Heavy Kingdom-concurrent  Labour of Love Latitudes session, and built the ending to a raucous rock finish with Ochs speeding up his guitar and drum stomp just to the brink of losing control before cutting it off.

I cut out on the quick, the prospect of an hour-plus post-midnight drive staring me down (that was before I accounted for construction on Rt. 3 in Jersey), but though the evening had its ups and downs, there were good people and good times had, and seeing Wino & Conny Ochs as firmly unified as they were — you might say they got tattoos together in the basement of the venue before playing (only the most sterile of environments will do) — bodes well for the prospect of a quick follow-up to Heavy Kingdom, and that’s something to look forward to, whenever it might arrive.

A couple extra pics after the jump. Thanks for reading.

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This week’s Wino Wednesday clip comes courtesy of one Andrew Lusby, who along with sending in a few much appreciated kind words about the site, included a link to some HD video of Wino & Conny Ochs performing their new song “Crystal Madonna” on their current US tour in support of their debut collaboration, Heavy Kingdom. His story to tell, so let’s let him tell it:

I recently saw Wino & Conny Ochs in L.A. and I was blown away. I happened to record most of their set and the quality came out pretty good. They played a new song titled “Crystal Madonna” which I think sounds great. Figured you might want to use it for a Wino Wednesday or at least enjoy for yourself. I’m guessing it will show up on the next album which Conny told me was definitely going to happen…

Besides playing most of Heavy Kingdom and some of Wino’s solo material they also played some great covers including “Hellbound Train” (Savoy Brown), “Hotel Vast Horizon” (Chris Whitley), and “Isolation” (Joy Division).

Badass. Thanks to Mr. Lusby for the clip and the info. The complete list of Wino & Conny Ochs tour dates is here.

Have a great Wino Wednesday: