Live at the Belly Up: The White Buffalo (KPBS-TV, 2015)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night I watched a KPBS showing of the local music show Live at the Belly Up – an episode from 2015 featuring a band called The White Buffalo, a name that’s also the nom de musique of Jacob “Jake” Smith, who was born in Oregon in 1974 or 1975 (his Wikipedia page isn’t any more specific than that) and has been active in music since 2001. He says he didn’t get his first guitar until he was 20, though before that his parents had continually listened to country music almost exclusively and that became the formative influence of his career. He originally began as a singer-songwriter, performing solo and backing himself on acoustic guitar, but he took the name “The White Buffalo” because he thought “Jacob Smith” had no mystery or romance to it. So he started out as one of those people – like St. Vincent, The Weeknd, Fall-Out Boy and Bon Iver – who assumes a name that sounds like that of a band even though he’s only one person. Soon, however, he assembled a band – and a quite good one, too, featuring a drummer he calls “The Machine” – and it was that incarnation of The White Buffalo that was featured on this show.

Smith performed 15 songs (quite a large number for a Live at the Belly Up program; I’ve often gauged these shows by how many songs the bands or artists perform: bands into long-form jams can only crowd seven songs, or sometimes even fewer, into the 55-minute time slot; Smith’s 15 indicates he’s a highly disciplined musician and song constructionist whose tunes leave little or no room for long or semi-long improvisations). Smith has a haunting but sometimes annoying voice, a foghorn baritone that reminded me at first of the 1960’s Black folksinger Richie Havens (who opened the Woodstock festival in 1969 simply because he was the first musician to make it through the insane traffic jams and arrive at the venue). As the show progressed I found myself hearing him as a cross-breed between Richie Havens and Johnny Cash – though Smith’s songs seem trapped in an in-between world in which he indulges in the fancy language of a lot of singer-songwriters but the sentiments are pure country – particularly all the songs he writes about drinking to forget a lost love and the trouble he gets into therefrom.

He did two songs just by himself, voice and guitar like in his older days – “Wish It Was True” and “The Highwayman” – and they were the best songs on the show, particularly “Wish It Was True,” in which he assumed the pose of someone who’s become disillusioned about everything, from love to war. The final verse casts him as a returning veteran, disgusted at the lies he was told to get him to fight in the first place – a very 1960’s-ish mix of sentiments! I also quite liked a couple of songs which he began acoustic and then brought the band in after the first chorus, “Darkside of Town” (that’s how the Live at the Belly Up chyron spelled it) and “Into the Sun,” and I also enjoyed “This Year” (a song about New Year’s Day and how the optimistic projections of what’s going to happen in the New Year will or won’t be fulfilled) and “Love Song No. 1” (which he said he wrote for his current partner just two weeks after they met – he compares himself to a piece of paper that blew towards her, one of the odder metaphors I’ve heard for romantic attraction, but the song works and apparently the relationship did, too, since they’re now married and have kids).

Smith called up a couple of friends to join in on a song called “Bar and the Beer” – with a title like that you could practically write it yourself – and he closed with “The Highwayman” (a song I suspect is a cover rather than a Smith original) and a scorcher called “The Pilot.” Overall I quite liked the show but I’m not sure how much I could take of that sometimes overbearing voice – though he’s mostly a baritone he started one song, “Good Old Day to Die,” in so deep a bass range at first I wondered if someone else in his band was singing, and when I realized it was indeed Smith it reminded me of Elvis Presley’s bass extension. (Elvis’s voice was naturally tenor but he could drop it, and like a lot of untrained voices it deepened and lost its top over time, so in his later years he was decidedly a baritone.) Overall I like Jacob Smith, both with and without his fellow White Buffaloes, but I was starting to get a bit worn down as the show rolled on at the sheer relentlessness of his singing; he said in one of the interstitial interview segments that he wants his show to be liked equally by the hippie, the Marine and the woman who’s out with both of them, but he comes across to me (especially in the haunting “Wish It Was True”) like a Marine who got disillusioned enough that after he was discharged he became a hippie.