This limited (to about 900) DVD set was conceived and produced through this website in the Spring and Summer of 2004. A VHS collection of videos including the Triage short film (credit to DBIS poster Jeff DeWester for the copy) happened in 2001. This 2004 upgrade to DVD also included live show footage from DB's run in Austin at the time. Thankfully, Jeff Wells lent his talents in creating the packaging. He took it from being two discs slapped into a cardboard case to the wonder that it turned into.
Disc one of this very limited double DVD set features a full length live show performed by David Baerwald and the NFU. The show was professionally shot at the Steamboat in Austin, TX in May of 2002 with a running time of about an hour. The band performs a nice mix of songs from Here Comes The NFU as well as songs from Triage and Boomtown. The disc also includes a glimpse into what the traveling NFU looked and sounded like in a few other locations around the US.
Disc two of the set includes the ultra cool short film based on concepts and themes from David Baerwald's Triage. Included in the film are live performances of Born For Love and Bitter Tree. Rounding out this disc are the promotional videos for Welcome to the Boomtown, All For You, and Dance as well as a live performance of Dance from the Arsenio Hall Show. There are also a few other bonus items sprinkled here and there on both of these DVDs.
David graciously crafted the liner notes -
The NFU was about a lot of things, but mostly it was about reaching out for
a community in the face of tragedy. The original music, from the "A Fine
Mess" sessions was brought about in reaction to the sudden, senseless death
of a friend's child, and the tour was brought about by my own violent
reaction to the attacks of 9/11. Both events made me want to reach out to
people I loved, and to try to create some... I don't know, immediate feeling
of family and solidarity and outreach that I couldnt accomplish at home in
Los Angeles.
So that September of 2001 I convinced Sarah, my son's mother, to move with
me to Austin, to see if we could make a go at being a family, and also to
see if I could try my hand at a kind of homespun music that I've always
loved, but that I've also always been too much of a self-conscious
sophisticate to actually live, which is the only way to really make that
music.
That music is patently not about the sort of slick musicianship and
production values that I often feel pressured to create--it's about
something simpler, and older, and harder to achieve. It's actually a form
of music where musicianship is almost a liability. It's like a scream. Or a
cry. You can't fake it.
Though I dont think I wholly succeeded at either ambition, I don't think I
entirely failed, either. It's all a matter of degree, I guess.
I had, and have, a fantastic, resourceful and soulful ally in Will Sexton,
who I truly believe to be among the finest songwriters in America today, and
who helped me put together a sort of revolving group of great spirits,
travellers, dreamers, poets, and musicians and ne'er do wells to hit the
road in a rodeo rider's diesel-powered rolling bachelor pad--there was
Darwin Smith, and JJ Johnston, and Bukka Allen, and Kevin Lovejoy, and Bill
Leffler, and Hunt Sales, and Redd Volkaert, and Charlie Sexton, and Steven
Barber... I'm sure I'm forgetting people, as the cast was ever-changing.
But the spirit was always the same. Selfless, loving, supportive, and
dripping with soul.
Some nights we were fucking horrible, but some nights there was a strange
charge, like some kind of death-empowered lightning bolt that filled
whatever room we were playing in. There's a kind of stark and fierce
emotionalism in some of these songs that has the capacity to both fill me up
and drain me dry at the same time. I cried a lot of times on stage.
Sometimes I was filled with a kind of Biblical rage. It was cathartic.
Most striking were the audiences. Usually quite sparse, but almost always
with at least one or two people who somehow had the capacity to affect me in
some deep and undeniable way. It seems mundane and trite and obvious to say
it, but there's an intensity and a physicality about the shared experience
of live music that I've never quite understood or appreciated, before this
trip. When you look somebody in the eye while you're singing something, and
you know they understand what youre trying to say...
I've always been pretty much the type of guy who shuns and fears crowds,
and etc, content to just kind of play my music to myself, or whoever happens
to be in the room... Or to do it as a job... A lot of times I'm just plain
uncomfortable with people. It kind of feels like my songs are nobody else's
business but my own. But this was different--it was less like a tour than
a travelling meeting-place, and a lot of times my favorite moments were the
ones before and after the shows, when I could just sit around and have a
whiskey with someone who seemed like they sort of felt like me.
I'm still not sure if it was such a wise idea, but I wouldnt trade the
experience for the world.
yrs,
David Baerwald
