OPINION NEWS FEATURE SOUND CHOW SCREEN OUTSIDE CULTURE sound
Saturday night) are still talking about the performance, and with good reason—the guy commands the attention of his fans, not just by his persona, but by the super-sized bucket of emotion he pours into his songs. White Buffalo fans in Central Oregon
THE WHITE BUFFALO IS NOT HERE FOR THE BEARD CONTEST.
MUSIC
songwriting genius BY MIKE BOOKEY
He’s a big dude. He’s massively bearded.
And when he sings, he sings about drink- ing and fighting and losing his mind and everyone in the joint listens because it’s impossible not to. Add the fact that he goes by the name The White Buffalo and you’ve got a recipe for an imposing, if not slightly terrifying, figure. But if you call The White Buffalo on his
cell phone, he’ll respond to his given name, Jake Smith, and he’ll probably be driv- ing through Los Angeles traffic near his home, where he lives with his family. Smith doesn’t look much like a stereotypical dad, but more like someone who, if 25 years older, could have battled Jeff Bridges for the lead in Crazy Heart. Smith is, indeed, a dad, but that hasn’t stopped the song- writing powerhouse from continuing to pen powerfully dark, boozy tunes that he’s been booming through bars and clubs over the past few years. Smith recently wrapped up the record-
ing of his next EP—which didn’t have a title when we spoke– and he says his fans shouldn’t expect suddenly brighter music, even if he is a family man now. “It’s dark as ever. It’s all booze-induced
stories, so that hasn’t really changed. I try to let a little sunshine leak in there,
but it’s pretty rare,” says Smith, letting out a surprising string of laughs—laughs you wouldn’t think the narrator in his songs would be capable of. Although he sometimes tours with a
band, the current White Buffalo tour is just Smith and his guitar, a format in which he thrives. Those who made it to his last show at the Silver Moon (where he’s returning on
Mystic The White Buffalo isn’t scary. He’s just a dark, boozy
Into the
are lucky. Smith’s parents live in Sisters (where Smith once stayed for a few months after college), giving him plenty of rea- sons to keep coming back. He’s made sev- eral appearances in the Western themed small town in the past two years. Smith didn’t grow up in Oregon (although he was born here). Rather he spent his formative years in sun-soaked Huntington Beach, California, one of the last places you’d ex- pect someone to be from who makes such deep and dusty country-tinged folk music. His parents, however, were both raised in rural areas and fed him a steady diet of old country music that Smith still says inspires him. “I like stuff that’s not bullshit or lame or
whatever and it seems like older music is where I find that. It’s really timeless,” says Smith. While we know a few things about his
background and his family, there’s still an air of mystery surrounding The White Buffalo. Obviously the name has something to do with it, as do the folk-hero-inspired songs he purveys. And don’t think for a second that Smith isn’t fully aware of what he’s doing. “I think people think that I’m going to
be a lot stranger or whatever because of the songs that I write. Part of the idea of taking on the name of some mystical animal was to keep a little mystery about it rather than
JUNE 3, 2010 / THE SOURCE WEEKLY / 29
SOUND CHECK
Sasquatch! Band of Horses! Exclamation Marks!
having everything exposed,” says Smith. The songs, however, aren’t contrived—
they’re actually quite real. Some are even a bit autobiographical, even the drinking and down-on-your-luck stuff, which is how we realize that The White Buffalo isn’t a myth. He’s actually a real guy with a real life who just happens to write wildly explosive songs. “I enjoy drinking and it seems like trou-
ble ensues a lot of the times (when I have) a few in me,” says Smith, “Maybe it’s a real life thing.”
The White Buffalo, Lewi Longmire, Anastacia 9pm Saturday, June 5. Silver Moon
Brewing Co. 24 NW Greenwood Ave. $7. Advance tickets at
bendticket.com.
Sound Check decided to change it up last weekend and rather than roll super deep (which we always do, oftentimes laden with silver medallions), we split up – one faction stayed in Bend to monitor the Les Schwab Amphitheater activities while the other headed northward to the Sasquatch! Festival. So here’s how things went at Sasquatch! We arrived on Saturday morning to find the campgrounds were full of crazy Canadians on crazy juice, but we managed to settle down on a quaint piece of grass and then make our way down in time to see Mumford and Sons, then the delightfully incredible Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros. Then it was Broken Social Scene and Miike Snow, the Hold Steady, topped off by dancing with Vampire Weekend and general mayhem provided by My Morning Jacket. And that was just Saturday. Plenty of things happened Sunday that brought a smile to the neon-painted faces of Sasquatch’s mostly young fans, but one bears mentioning: LCD Soundsytem. James Murphy and crew somehow got 20,000 individuals moving in tandem during their hour-long, still-daylight set. We saw Public Enemy and an apparently drunken Pavement and The Tallest Man on Earth and Avi Buffalo and even Massive Attack, but it was LCD Soundsytem that took the cake – and then ate it. On Memorial Day, we souled out with The Heavy and Mayer Hawthorne, and rocked with Dr. Dog and Drive-By Truckers before settling in for– She & Him at which point we transition to Sound Check’s team B, who were here in Bend at the LSA and hardly as pumped about She & Him as their Sasquatch! counterparts. On Sunday, it rained, as is weather’s wont here on Memorial Day weekend, and that didn’t go well with She & Him’s sunshine-friendly numbers, but they obliged a fawning crowd of hipsters with a steady set of warm rain- soaked pop. But right on cue, the rain relented for Band of Horses, who took the stage for what has to go down as one of the most memorable sets in Les Schwab history that opened with the band’s guitar-drenched “First Song” from their breakout album Everything All The Time and culminated with front man Ben Bridwell crooning the chorus to the aching ballad “Monsters” as an impromptu and somewhat mysterious fireworks display lit up the eastern night sky. But the highlight may just have been a defiant, and fabulously bearded, Bridwell insisting on a final song after the 10 p.m curfew, even as the amphitheater staff tried to coax the band offstage—again. Instead they ripped through a face- melting cover of Yo La Tengo’s “Sugarcube” that culminated in a 30-second sonic explosion that is still reverberating somewhere up the Deschutes river canyon.
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