Buck Meek at Sid the Cat 3/12
Image description: Germaine Dunes sings into the mic with her eyes closed and hands raised.
Buck Meek’s concert opens with Kisser, his new rock band based in Los Angeles. Germaine Dunes, the lead singer and Buck Meek’s wife, is who I imagine Junie B. Jones to be as an adult. It’s partially the outfit, a striped yellow sweater tied around her waist against a lime green plaid dress that glows in the blue light. But mostly, it’s her sense of self, the essence of free-spiritedness. Her lyrics are all exclamations instead of statements (they pop with a !), and she stomps along to the beats with her full weight, the way you do when you first get a pair of rain boots and are ecstatic at the heaviness of it all, the sureness that they’re on your feet. One of the first songs Kisser plays goes, “Boom baby, BOOM!” again and again, against the yells and the strums and the thumps.
The most electric moment begins a few songs in, with everyone strumming their guitars slowly and turning to look at each other. Knowing glances are shared among warm tones. Everyone takes slow steps closer to each other. A deep love is in the air. A minute in, and the guitars cease for the drummer, Jesse Quebbeman-Turley, to unleash a torrent of cymbal clashes — it’s the feeling of being in your room when hail starts to fall, and the sound fills everything with a prescient sense of urgency, an urgency that reminds you that you’re safe at home.
And then the song begins. Lyrics emerge after a bit, the most prominent one being “I DON’T WANNA DIE.” It’s a statement of such surety, such lack of cynicism. Nobody wants to die, but who feels compelled enough to say it?
Image description: Buck Meek strums his guitar and hums softly as he gazes at the audience.
A few minutes after they wrap up, the band members of Kisser trickle back in and sit on the very ends of the stage in anticipation for Buck Meek’s solo show to begin. Buck Meek comes back on stage, clad in a full suit and tie instead of the shirt and sweats he wore earlier, and it feels like he has grown up in the span of twenty minutes. In the midst of most of his songs he finds the focus to look his audience in the eyes. Even when he’s not looking directly at me, his songs transmute into a confessional. When he moves into the stage light at a certain angle, the sweat that falls past his cheek becomes a tear.
Buck Meek’s voice is a quality of light, too. It’s something I only fully notice when he performs Halo Light, with no other sounds except the strums of synthed-out guitar. There is a clarity that resides behind the sound, that expands and crystallizes as he sings. I wish I could move through the world seeing everything with this clarity.
