Josh Clayton-Felt

The Troubadour
July 27
by Scott Lenz

Josh Clayton-Felt took a deep breath and walk from the shadows onto the dimly lit Troubadour stage. Standing alone among the empty mike stands and drum kit, he was a symbol of vulnerability and abandonment. The time when his first band, School Of Fish, dominated the alternative airwaves must have seemed a million years ago.

"I'd like to do some stand-up (comedy) first," he announced nervously, adding, "this is the first time i'm doing these songs acoustically, so here goes." A nine-song set followed that, despite it's brevity in length and incubation, was nonetheless fraught with passion, lyrical depth, and a raw, tense energy. The opening lines to "Inarticulate Nature Boy," the title cut from his latest CD, only enhanced the mood: "You are free/I am chained." He spent the evening getting loose.

"I feel like Elvis Presley," he said, guitar slung low across his hip. "It's a good feeling." There was that sense of innocence and beginning on both "Helpless" and "Waiting" - Josh cracked that he'd always wanted to play the latter, but "never had a long enough set." The two deeply introspective numbers crackled with natural vocal pathos, and were better suited to the quaint acoustic context, than to the CD's heavily produced, keyboard-laden structure.

Clayton-Felt then went electric on "Dead American," without drowning himself out a la Liz Phair at the Wiltern last year. The sound was clean and clear; the tune was pointed, funky, and catchy - my wife said to me, "This is the best one yet." Josh's confidence was rising, but hadn't peaked - after alerting the crowd to an upcoming show of his at a different venue, he said, "Come if you can, although there'll probably be something with with more musicians here."

Remaining plugged, he offered "Paint The Tree Green" - a cryptic number about the inability to see things for what they are - in the stark, thoughtful style of early David Bowie, capping it with a meaty, fuzzy, grinding solo. Is it still considered a solo if there's only one musician?

"Meet Me In The Morning," a sprightly, acoustic blues in A followed (not the Bob Dylan tune), during which Josh hollered, "Take it - somebody" before the solo. With his rich, high, unpolished vocals soaring, he appeared most in his element on this soulful number. On "Soon Enough," the CD's first single, he returned to the contemplative tone, but maintained the vocal heights - utterly testifying in spots.

As an encore, Josh made a daring statement with Prince's racy "Erotic City." With purple lights flooding the stage, he even replicated Sheila E's falsetto, and even left in the profanity - although he did take the edge off the f's in "fuck" by song's end. A psychedelic rendering of "Window" closed the show. I couldn't help but notice the diversity of the sparse crowd as they filed out. Clayton-Felt's music obviously appeals to a varied audience - so where were they?

"I purposely didn't tell people about this show," he said to me afterwards. "I wanted to work some things out up there for myself." Whatever those things were, he worked them out just fine.