DETAILS

Doc Chad meets the Agnostic Mountain Gospel Choir
Ironwood Stage & Grill
Ironwood Stage & Grill
Thursday, August 20 - Thursday, August 20 Friday, August 21 - Friday, August 21

More in: Folk / Country

When you decide to check out one of Eugene Chadbourne's gigs with the Agnostic Mountain Gospel Choir this week, it could be for one of many reasons. Perhaps you know him as the inventor of the electric rake, a cacophonous mash-up of guitar pick-ups and garden tools. Or maybe you stumbled upon one of his dozens of albums, which are hard to miss with titles like 69th Sinfunny and Jesse Helms Busted for Pornography. And if you're into local trivia, you may recall that he spent part of his life living in this very city as a Vietnam-era draft dodger and that he rose like a shot through the ranks of the Calgary Herald.

“I was the youngest reporter in the history of the Herald and also the youngest editor,” he says with a whimsical laugh. “I was chosen for an award one year from the Chamber of Commerce I think, but the guy presenting them didn’t really read the information and he just figured if it was someone that young, I must be a paper boy... I got up there and turned bright red and said ‘I’m a reporter, not a paper boy!’”

While he was busy paying the bills with these journalistic exploits, he was also gearing up for a full-on assault on the avant-garde music community south of the border. By the time he returned home in the late ’70s, he had founded the Parachute record label and produced several records that mixed country twang with free jazz and improvisation. When he began to make the rounds in New York, the crowds of that fertile scene were utterly horrified with his motley style — in other words, it was a huge success.

“Getting a reaction out of people in avant-garde music can be difficult because the audience has heard everything by this point, but they hadn’t at that point heard anyone do avant-garde country, so this was a place where I could kind of put my foot in,” he explains. “I was there during the height of the indie rock era with Sonic Youth and The Minutemen and Black Flag and that, so the stuff I was doing kind of got swept in there. I was certainly not as well-known as some of those people, but the audience that was around at the time, they all remember me.”

From that point onward, it was full steam ahead for the man who became known as Doc Chad and gradually established himself as a titan of the underground experimental music world. Even though many (if not all) of his hundreds of recordings are decidedly rough-hewn, his skills as an improviser are unparalleled, as evidenced a long list of collaborators that includes names like Toshinori Kondo and John Zorn. Besides, musicians who indulge in do-overs are missing the point.

“A lot of people lose track of that when they start trying to make a really perfect-sounding record in the studio,” he says. “The drummer’s playing with a click track and they’re recording the rhythm section and putting a solo on top of that. They’re doing all these things that make it hard to have a really cooking performance, which I think in the end is what a record should really be.”

Considering the loose, organic style the good doctor strives towards, he could not have picked a better group of performers to join him on stage in his former home town. His attention was drawn to the Agnostics when they covered one of his songs on their 2003 album Saint Hubert. Since then, the Calgary-based quartet has continued to develop as one of the city's premier blues and roots outfits, so there is little doubt that this week's two-night stand at the Ironwood will be a unique and electrifying experience.

“I’m really known for just pushing people off the deep edge,” says an enthusiastic Chadbourne. “There’s not a lot of rehearsal; we try to cover a lot of ground. I’m very loose about what happens and I like to see different directions that people will go in. For people that like to see an interaction between musicians creating stuff together, they’re going to really enjoy it. If somebody wants to see a really smooth, slick, wimpy presentation of folk music, where there is not a single weird-sounding note, it’s probably not going to be a show for them.”