Yesterday in Chicago, singer/songwriter/musician/producer John Vanderslice launched his extensive “Living Room Show” tour. The name of the tour is fairly literal — Vanderslice is performing small, fan-hosted shows across the country over the next several months, all in intimate settings (not necessarily living rooms — they could be held in a dining room, basement, garage or any other suitable living/working space).
“House concerts” have become increasingly popular over the past decade or so amongst certain independent musicians, who can largely cut out the “promoter” middleman, travel more lightly and casually and intermingle with fans directly, while also providing them with a special live music experience. Vanderslice calls them his “favorite shows” and his fans seem to be digging the concept too — several of the dates on his current tour are sold out, and many others only have a handful of the 40-60 tickets remaining.
For most of the shows on the tour, fans buy tickets on a website and then are told where the concert will be held (likely to cut down on spam and weirdos), but for his visit to Cincinnati next week, the place is publicly known. Vanderslice is playing Northside’s Urban Artifact on Wednesday, Aug. 29, one of the few stops at a “normal venue.”
The show will still be a great opportunity to see Vanderslice in a unique, up-close setting — only 60 tickets are being sold and it’s being handled as a private event in the former church’s upstairs sanctuary space.
“The upstairs is reserved for special events and receptions,” Urban Artifact wrote on the show’s Facebook event page. “We’ll be planning on a maximum of 60 folks to crowd around for an intimate acoustic show sitting close on the stage — let the room add some reverb, and watch the sun set through the arches.”
Tickets are $20 and available here. If you are eager to attend, hop to it — as of this posting, less than 30 tickets remain.
A Florida native, Vanderslice ended up in San Francisco in the early ’90s to attend college; after his local band MK Ultra began playing more frequently, his focus shifted. He opened a small studio in the Mission District in the late ’90s called Tiny Telephone, which outlived MK Ultra (the group broke up before the end of the decade). Stocked with vintage and analog equipment, Tiny Telephone and Vanderslice would become recording favorites of Indie musicians of all sorts, playing host to Death Cab for Cutie, Beulah, Jolie Holland, Kronos Quaret, Bob Mould, Magnetic Fields, Nada Surf, Sleater-Kinney, The Mountain Goats, Deerhoof, Spoon, tUnE-yArDs, Explosions in the Sky and many others over the years. The studio has grown and is still very much open for business; Vanderslice even opened an Oakland satellite site a few years ago (L.A. may be the next to get a Tiny Telephone outlet).
Besides the groovy gear collection and direct-to-tape recording mindset, Vanderslice’s imaginative perspective and intuitive grasp on music’s in and outs is what makes him a go-to producer for many. It’s evident in his work with others, but even more deeply so in his own songwriting and recordings, which define “deceptively simple” in their thought-out arrangements and intensely catchy effectiveness.
His solo career officially began in 2000 with his first album under his own name on a label, Mass Suicide Occult Figurines. Even before the album was issued, Vanderslice received some unusual early publicity. While recording, he began spinning a conspiracy theory that Microsoft was secretly attempting to bring down his efforts to release the album. In an SF Gate story (one of many that helped push the tale into national headlines) that called him a “conspiracy theorist and noted prankster,” Vanderslice said his server was crashing and he was getting hang-up calls from the area code where Microsoft is headquartered before receiving a cease-and-desist fax from the company, which was roused by the album track “Bill Gates Must Die” and the album’s art design, which mimicked an old Windows installation CD.
That playful eccentricity is a trademark characteristic of Vanderslice, who would go on to release nearly a dozen more albums, most critically acclaimed and all cultishly beloved by his loyal fan base. His most recent efforts came in 2013 — Dagger Beach and an unusual reimagining of David Bowie’s 1974 album Diamond Dogs.
The touring behind those albums played a big part in Vanderslice’s decision to do his current “Living Room Tour.” While traveling through Ohio, the van in which Vanderslice was riding narrowly avoided hitting a car that had stopped in the middle of the highway.
“After that happened, maybe a second later, I was like, I’m done. I don’t want to die in a van,” he told The New Yorker in 2014 when explaining why he had decided to cut back on touring.
Vanderslice’s decision to play smaller venues on the “living room” circuit seems to have re-invigorated his desire to tour.
“I would definitely not go back to touring the way I was, with a band in a van and a trailer,” he told Bay Area PBS station KQED recently. “I just knew when I booked my house tour that this is the only way I want to do it.”
Vanderslice is testing out new songs on his current road trip; he’s reportedly finishing up a new album, which is due next year.
This article appears in Aug 15-22, 2018.
