Live From Cincinnati: Wussy

A guest post from RJ Smith on Wussy's November 15th show at the Woodward Theater in Cincinnati.

Below, a dispatch by RJ Smith from Wussy’s album release show last week:

Everybody’s incredibly exhausted right now. Many still stunned by an election that turned power over to an autocrat, waiting for unknowable things that could be coming. Many are still recovering from the pandemic, or burying friends and parents. Like Wussy, those of us who came to the music years ago contemplate communing with dead heroes as much as live ones going forward.

Wussy are tired, too. At their first show in four years (other than acoustic shows that Chuck Cleaver and Lisa Walker have done together as Wussy Duo) they owned their fatigue, sharing their feelings with friends and family and fans who had come from various parts of the Midwest and beyond to see a great band play in their hometown, Cincinnati.  Their eighth album and first in six years, Cincinnati Ohio is soaked in their midwestern gothic manner—earthbound and smoldering, a gloom that is born in leaky basements and collapsed garages, expressed by hometown monster movie hosts and bar tales. The scary things are real and multiplying. It is exhausting.

I lived in Cincinnati for half a decade and this may be the best show I’ve seen them play. The Woodward Theater audience was full of local heroes: I spotted the record store owner who puts out their records and heard him say how surprised and happy he was when Cleaver said they had made a new one. Squeezing to the front with his wife and daughter was the law school professor and community radio DJ who has championed the band since they began, and in the back was the librarian who had commemorated the band in public art displayed in the building. Nobody was bigger in Cincinnati that night; when they tore into opener “Airborne,” the response could not have been bigger for anyone playing in the entire state. And everybody seemed to know the fan who wore a sports jersey with the name Erhardt in block letters across his shoulders. That was a reference to the band’s late pedal steel guitar John Erhardt, who died at the beginning of the pandemic.

Wussy was also surprised when Wussy decided to put out a new album because it had seemed unthinkable to go on without Erhardt. The new album features a few older songs that Erhardt plays on, which is oddly fitting for an album that is so much about the space between human beings who try to love each other. That and death, the hole death leaves in those who live.

A few songs in, they got to the heart of the new album, with “The Great Divide,” a tune brined in feelings of social disconnection, phone messages unreceived and lost notes found after the sender has left the planet. Cleaver was playing a ton of guitar, frequently reinventing melodies on the fly. New pedal steel player Travis Talbert has a knack for crafting keyboard sounds. He may twang less than Erhardt, but he weaves himself into the squall seamlessly. Soon after came “Inhaler” and “Sure as the Sun,” more new songs built on grief. The band on record has regularly featured a throbbing crust of guitars and feedback, and if characteristically the vocals of Lisa Walker rise above and Chuck Cleaver’s poke holes through the haze, here they both melted into it—a unity in hopelessness.

But a real unity. Wussy brought out the intense, measured guitarist Chris Brokaw (whose band opened the show) on several songs. Feelies bassist Brenda Sauter joined on two more – everybody surrounded by friends in a Porkopolis stomp. 

Somewhere in the middle, Walker and Cleaver traded verses on one of the best new songs, “Sure as the Sun” which stares at time as time stares at the band: “try to face it screaming and beating on your chest/so when it drags you to wherever you know you did your best,” Cleaver moaned. Bassist Mark Messerly landed an enlarged prostate joke and soon they ramped up to three great songs of dark hope – “To the Lightning,” “Teenage Wasteland,” and “Beautiful.”

Self-care is the new prescription. Spend time with friends and music. Dark hope = hope. 

RJ Smith survived Cincinnati and is living in Nashville, where he is a writer/editor for the Country Music Hall of Fame. He is the author of ‘Chuck Berry: An American Life’ and ‘The One: The Life and Music of James Brown.’