Live
El McMeen
Piney Ridge Music
2000
12 tracks
Sometimes just being really good at something is not enough. In the performing arts, this is especially true. A performing artist has to have respect for both his audience and his material.
Based on what I've observed in El McMeen's Live release, I suspect he's too centred on the wonderfulness of himself to respect either his audience or the material that is a large part of what makes his work so wonderful. You may have guessed by now that I am nowhere near as impressed by El Mc Meen as apparently he is by himself. It's true.
El McMeen is a highly respected guitarist and arranger. His playing has been featured on more than twenty releases, including six solo albums. McMeen is an acknowleged and widely published expert in guitar technique. He is a pioneer in a variation on DADGAD tuning in a low-C mode, which becomes CGDDAD. To quote his own promotional material, "his artistry has been praised" by numerous high profile and very prestigious publications. And he's been at this for almost forty years. So what does all this mean?
It means that El McMeen should know better.
Now, if this all seems unfair, it may be. If this seems like a personal attack, it is not. There are far too many artists out there who are just too full of themselves, and this is directed at all of them, not just El McMeen.
For those who may not know, I never read the promo stuff before I hear the music. Based just on the music, I would have thought McMeen to be some academic with no real idea of the inter-relatedness of the music and its audience. McMeen's playing is indeed very good, one might even be moved to say it is excellent. His playing is sound and technically correct. But it's cold and clinical. There is no warmth, no emotion expressed. There is an arrogance to his playing that comes through in the music.
McMeen, in his liner notes, says this:
I have always enjoyed listening to a live recording. The performance is energized by the interaction of performer and audience. The music has urgency. We can hear breathing, humming, and coughing! We sense the presence of life, and not "sound production". In the comfort of our own listening environment, we are there at the show!
To achieve this effect seems clearly to have been McMeen's intent. He fails. It is clear from the outset that he is playing in a music school where the audience comprises his friends and students and no matter what he does they applaud and no matter how unfunny he is they laugh. One is drawn to wonder how he would do in a real club where the audience quickly forgets a boring performer and devolves back into its own conversations.
The best example is McMeen's treatment of The Eagles classic [later covered by Linda Ronstadt and several others], "Desperado." There can be no doubt that the song is played with mechanical precision. But it has no blood, no life. McMeen sounds like he is uncomfortable playing the song, like he is working at it, perhaps too hard. A number of songs here sound like that.
Worse, what makes this performance deadly boring is not the stilted guitar work but the fact that McMeen seems to fancy himself a raconteur. Even before McMeen speaks, the recording begins with a long (one minute, fifteen seconds) introduction by the owner of the music school, which has all the appearance of a one-minute commercial for El McMeen. The initial impact of this speech is compounded by the seven, mostly boring, introductory speeches McMeen makes between the tracks.
Especially boring is his revelation of home life in the McMeen household vis à vis the song "Camptown Races" by Stephen Foster. This rambling monologue takes up eight and three quarter minutes, most of the gist of which is how boring McMeen's wife finds it. This should have been a clue to McMeen. If even his intimate family finds it boring, should he take it to the public?
[Later, upon reading the promo stuff, I discover that McMeen is not a cloistered academic after all, but a lawyer. Hearing the material on this release, one wonders how he keeps a jury awake.]
Worst of all, based on things he himself says and no matter how much he couches it in failed attempts at humour, McMeen seems so wrapped up in himself he has no respect for others. In the context of his "intro" material, he manages to dis accordion players, Tito Fuentes, José Feliciano [toward whom he is very condescending, then proceeds to play the song Guantanamera nowhere near as well as Feliciano had done when (his own words) thirty years his junior], and [depending on how one reads his doo dah story] his own wife. He fails as well, on the liner notes or anywhere else, to give credit to the Cuban composer, Compay Segundo, and poet, José Marti, who wrote Guantanamera. One begins to wish that, instead of a lawyer, McMeen were an academic after all.
Is there a lesson to be learned here?
Perhaps the lesson is this. There is a substantial difference between an expert and a virtuoso. There is an equally substantial difference between an academic and a performer. One may develop all the new chording methodology possible and write books 'til the ink runs out, but to reach a living audience requires not wires and ink but flesh and blood.
If you want to learn more about El McMeen, you can visit www.elmcmeen.com.
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