Review & Photos | Hard Working Americans | Santa Cruz

Words by: Dennis Cook | Images by: James Martin

Hard Working Americans with The Congress :: 11.15.14 :: Cocoanut Grove :: Santa Cruz, CA

Read Dennis’ review of the show after the gallery.

Intangibles cause some folks discomfort. The English language and the world of commerce thrive on specificity, clarity, conciseness, but it’s in the weeds and brambles where the best berries reside. Hold on, I’m heading off on a tangent but that happens when one talks about Hard Working Americans, who on the surface might pass for a fine newfangled boogie machine but listen to the words, let the full vibe of it sink into you, and one discerns quickly there’s more going on here that surface things. The music and the men making it are utterly sensational -visceral, Chakra stimulating, rib-sticking, and utterly American to its roots – but this is more medicine show and tent revival (in the best nourishing sense), a circus that welcomes strangers as kin and strives to make us more compassionate, life-seizing, loose-limbed citizens of this still relatively free country. And what makes this more than the sum of its parts are the intangibles, potent and nostril flaring, snaking away from words and insisting on feeling first. But as spiritual forebears Funkadelic noted long ago, once one frees their mind their ass follows, and Hard Working Americans laid out their top to toes approach to mind-body connection in a ballroom in Santa Cruz with jubilant, infectious authority.

The Cocoanut Grove is tucked into the end of the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk, an old school shoreline amusement park with a huge wooden coaster and walkways that exude fresh popcorn and laughter even when the place is closed. It’s a small ballroom more suited to big bands and weddings, which made the appearance of this gang of ragged rock ‘n’ rollers all the more pleasant – nothing like a quality juxtaposition of incongruous elements to instantly shift folks’ perceptions. The crowd -a mix of curious locals, Widespread Panic and Todd Snider fans, and a small but growing contingent forming the foundation of HWA’s fan-base – milled about, chatting music over drinks, but snapping to attention when Denver-based The Congress fired up. In very basic but true terms, this quartet is all the good stuff about rock without any of the bullshit. They write great songs that hook one right away and they play them with beefy chops and obvious passion. With a very strong debut album (Whatever You Want) and two great EPs (The Loft Tapes and The Congress EP) (listen here), Jonathan Meadows (lead vocals, bass), Scott Lane (guitar, vocals), Mark Levy (drums, vocals) and Chris “Bernie” Speasmaker (keyboards) showed no weak spots in Santa Cruz, drawing people closer to the stage as they rolled along, ears pulled over by a sound descended from Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers, Wilco, and bedrock quality ’70s singer-songwriter radio fare. This last part is crucial because there’s plenty of strong rock outfits with solos and flash to spare but it’s the quality of the songs The Congress is working with that elevates them above pack. It don’t hurt that they inject a fair amount of earthy swing and that Meadows has a powerhouse classic rock voice hiding in a real sweetheart of a dude. Great impression made on first timers and everyone who’d seen them before was already wondering when they’d make it back to California to headline.

With a hard midnight curfew, Hard Working Americans got rolling around 9:30 pm and wasted no time in conjuring something more than the average rock show. It’s a ballsy move to open a gig with Gillian Welch’s “Wrecking Ball” but in these capable hands it proved hypnotic, almost ritualistic in setting the table for what followed, a deep breath and turning inward that busts out into open, shared space by the end. Following it with The Bottle Rockets’ “Welfare Music” announced it was time to “watch the babies dance” while the groove reminded our feet that we were all once babies. Action and engagement are part of the HWA covenant with the audience, though that descriptor seems to miss the underlying message of “we’re all in this together” unity running through the band’s artwork, attitude, lyrics and general energy.

When Todd Snider (lead singer, group rapscallion), Dave Schools (bass, vocals), Neal Casal (guitar, vocals), Chad Staehly (keys, vocals), Duane Trucks (drums) and Jesse Aycock (guitar, lap steel) plug in, smiling at one another before a note rings out, the natural gravity is to move in, snuggle up, and let them have their way with one. It feels good – that’s not in question – but it’s a deeper boon than straight entertainment. There are truths aplenty in these songs, and while most of the catalog is covers with a few inspired reworkings of Todd originals thrown in, that only highlights how successful these messengers are at getting across the nitty-gritty wisdom inside these tunes. New insights emerge with each show, new greased up gears locking in as the sextet increasingly finds their collective stride. And trust me, kids, they’re growing more dexterous, more quicksilver intuitive with every step. Having seen them burn down The Fillmore and a late night tent at High Sierra Music Festival, I can attest that this was the best outing I’ve witnessed.

Something about Hard Working Americans makes me want to testify, to close my eyes and reach for heaven while music grips and spins me, and then later to shout to anyone who’ll listen that this right here is what the striving, working man and woman needs in their earholes and in their lives. When Snider cracked himself open – along with any tender heart really tuning in – during the consistently shattering reading of Kevn Kinney’s “Straight To Hell,” it was apparent if you looked around that what they do speaks to more than mere musical tastes. Softly falling, healing tears aren’t typical with most bands but the visceral veracity of what Snider and his empathetic comrades do makes a good cry unsurprising.

More than a typical side project, HWA feels like a mission that’s called these men together. After the concert, Snider told me, “I’ve been looking for my musical family my whole life. I think I might have found them.” It feels that way to me, too, and this from a 14-year Snider fanatic and close friend. For the rest of us, this is a band to make one feel good about America in a time where that’s not always easy. The Congress has a bit of this same vibe, too, and as Todd offered on-stage earlier, “Isn’t it something to see The Congress supporting Hard Working Americans!” Now, that line might be a throwaway in another setting but in Santa Cruz it was an outstretched invisible hand pointing us towards the intangible and all the cool connections and reverberations that happen in that open, undefined space where one can ponder what it means to be American and what one might do, not just in the abstract but in real world terms, in order to promote a more perfect union drained of violence, stress and ugly judgment. It’s a nice thought isn’t it?

Hard Working Americans Setlist

Set: Wrecking Ball, Welfare Music, Mission Accomplished, Blackland Farmer, Play A Train Song, I Don’t Have A Gun, Come From The Heart, Mountain Song, Run A Mile, Ascending Into Madness, Shake, Guaranteed, Straight To Hell, Stomp and Holler

Encore: Down To The Well, Another Train > Is This Thing Working > Train

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