Serendipity. February 2022 Clem Snide was slated to play in New Haven. The show was cancelled for a Covid issue, rescheduled for August, cancelled again, money refunded. I was annoyed. Clem Snide is a band that’s the brainchild of Eef Barzelay. So serendipity reared its head and had Eef playing at the historic Bluebird while we were in town. Tickets for this venue are difficult to come by, sales open a week prior to the show and sell out within hours. A perfect place to view this quirky singer songwriter. He has a nasal voice and plays a righty acoustic left handed ( a la Hendrix). On this evening, Eef also leaned on this odd vocal technique, he made this high pitched hum and shook his head near the microphone which shaded songs with a Bernoulli effect. The best part of this venue is that you are feet from the artist, he said that he can look into “all of our eyes”. The inter song stories were abundant and hysterical. One story had Eef smoking a fatty in an alley with a fan named Tugboat. Apparently, Tugboat was pinched with a quantity of weed which required him to pee in a cup to show remorse for his “crime”. Pot smokers, a wiley cadre, know work arounds. Tugboat purchased a whizzinator, a limp strap-on that allowed him to “pee” with some clean urine in tow. It would have worked, but Tugboats choices for clean urine were limited and he failed his exam with someone else’s pee. Another intro to the song Jews for Jesus Blues had Eef relating the start of Christianity. Turns out that the apostle Paul was not too keen on dining with men who weren’t circumcised which was impetus to start his own religion, go figure. Part of the CS oeuvre is absurd folkie covers. For this show, Eef played a screwed down version of Stayin’ Alive. The setlist of originals had some gems, Noone’s Happier Than You, Some Ghost, Grace, Don’t Bring No Ladder, Something Beautiful and many more. It’s not often that I can recommend a song that encapsulates the vibe I felt at a certain show. While he didn’t play this song, I urge all readers of this blog who are over 50, locate Clem Snide’s rendition of Faithfully by Journey. You’ll feel what I felt, at the Bluebird, witnessing an under the radar artist who deserves radar status.
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