Oak Cliff, 3.22.2025

On a cool, calm night a couple of days after the Spring Equinox, the backyard at The Wild Detectives was the site of an early candidate for my show of this young year. I hadn't seen my fellow Sputnik baby Mike Watt since his Missingmen played at the Granada on Lower Greenville back in 2010. I still cherish the memory of seeing him playing Stooges songs with Ron Asheton when J. Mascis and the Fog's More Light tour docked at SXSW 2001 -- a key link in the chain of events that saw Iggy and the Stooges reunited a couple of years later. Got to talk to him briefly and learned he is newly sober and using a crutch due to knee problems that started when he was a kid. He had surgery back then and doesn't want to go back under the knife. He was wearing a jacket like the one Patrick McGoohan wore in The Prisoner; Watt's a fan and his sister made it for him.

Tonight was the ninth stop on MSSV's "Haru Tour 2025," with another 42 dates to follow for punk rock bass warrior Watt and his bandmates, guitarist-singer-songwriter Mike Baggetta and drummer Stephen Hodges. (In an earlier post, I misidentified Hodges, who drummed on Watt's Contemplating the Engine Room and has had an illustrious career working with the likes of Tom Waits, Mavis Staples, and David Lynch. Mea culpa.) Baggetta inhabits that Nels Cline sound world, using devices that mess with time and timbre in ways I can't really comprehend, manipulating the controls like an electronic musician, but also plays blazing skronk, well-integrated into intelligent rock song structures. Watt and Hodges gave him a big pocket to operate in, and Hodges took a brief solo on the closing "Human Reaction." New album On and On, their third as a unit, has quickly become a fave around mi casa, and we got to hear a big chunk of it on the Wild Detectives stage. On the way out, I wished Watt fair winds and following seas.

I've been digging the members of Austin improv supergroup THC Trio in different contexts for the last few years, but this group is the first time the three of them -- saxophonist Joshua Thomson (Atlas Maior), guitarist Jonathan F. Horne (The Young Mothers, (Exit) Knarr), and drummer Lisa Cameron (ST 37, Suspirians) -- have played together as a unit. They exploded out of the gate with full-on fury, Horne switching between his Ventures model Mosrite and Fender Bass VI, Cameron shifting her patterns and driving the music, Thomson moving a big column air and drawing from a deep well of musical inspiration. They followed the music's flow through several dynamic shifts before concluding quietly. A second piece was shorter; overall, a highly satisfying set.

We'd seen Thomson play a guest slot with my favorite band of the moment, Trio Glossia, a couple of nights before. For this evening's opening set, they were joined by leader-vibraphonist-drummer Stefan Gonzalez's former Unconscious Collective bandmate, guitarist Gregg Prickett, and limited by the constraints of a 30-minute time slot. They condensed a lot of material from their recently released debut CD, with Gonzalez and tenor saxophonist-drummer Joshua Canate shifting positions midway, Prickett adding his voice to the heads and playing edgy improvs. He achieves the same tension with a clean tone and dissonance that others use volume and distortion to attain.

Watt, who'd just come from Oklahoma, said he heard some Charlie Christian in there, and compared bassist Matthew Frerck to Ronnie Boykins in Sun Ra's Arkestra. High praise from San Pedro, California's finest. They closed with a quick version of Frerck's as-yet-unrecorded "To Walk the Night," with Prickett playing the part usually played by the composer. Next week, Gonzalez heads to Europe with his bass playing sibling Aaron Gonzalez for a 16-day tour with Humanization 4tet. After that, Stefan says Trio Glossia will devote some time to writing new material. We look forward to hearing it.