It hardly seems possible, but it’s been 16 years now since Rhett and I recorded A Concert for No-one, one of my all-time favorite Lavone albums.

We had originally been a duo and were joined by Mike Thomas in 1988 to become a trio during the recording of We Don’t Exist. In a mind-bogglingly productive 3-year run, we finished that album, plus l a v o n e, Nukenlodgetisenberry, Earth Mother, Angel of Purpose, Psychotic Requiem, A Spectacle for Compassionate Minds, and Escapyst Flowers with Mike but things went bad in the end with Rhett threatening to quit the band if Mike stayed. A Concert for No-one was our return to being a duo and we had more fun recording it than anything else we ever did (even our final album 9 years later, Isotope, which was a lot of fun too). I think Rhett and I were the closest to each other at this point in our lives that we ever were. We went to school together, had the same friends, and reveled in the joy of working together.

Because of that, the album is fairly silly in places. The album starts with “Gregorian Scat” (which combines supposedly Gregorian “ooooooommmmmmmmsssssss” with “scoobee de bobba deeba doo bop” singing), moves into “The Sun” (a song about staring at the sun until your eyes burn out), and regularly revisits silliness along the rest of it’s way. There is the doo-wop “I Love You Forever, Amen”, the unclassifiable “I Just Bought a Bottle of Nexus”, the ridiculously ornate “The True Story of Billy Acme John Miggles”, and the titles of the musical pieces “…And You Wake Up to Find You’re Tony Bennett” and “Kurt Has Hiccups Today”. Despite all this, there are serious pieces as well. “Sketch 110″, “Gypsy”, “Lady”, “Hi, My Name is Rhett Sutter”, “Six” and other songs are all pretty sombre. That is, I think, why I like the album so much. Here are two teenage kids on the verge of adulthood (Rhett turned 19 during our work on this album, I turned 18) who see no limits, no need to stick to conventions, just a golden opportunity to do the thing they love most together, mixing childish silliness and adult seriousness without any care what people will think.

A Concert for No-one was followed up by Some Enchanted Evening (1993), The Hiatus (1999) and Isotope (2000) but in many ways was, in my mind, the last complete Lavone album. Some Enchanted Evening was recorded in the middle of a complicated period in my life (I was a 19 year old newlywed) that was distracting and confusing and kept Rhett and I from really gelling as we did on Concert. Hiatus was cobbled together over the course of 6 years in fits and starts and often seemed as if it would never be completed. Isotope felt like a renaissance, but became a farewell, a lovely, complex, mature work to end the musical adventures of The Lavone. But, A Concert for No-one? That was us at our prime, at the zenith, the world ahead of us, the two of us inseparable, completely unaware that life was about to get a whole lot tougher. The Legendary Lavone.

You can listen to “A Concert for No-one” free, under Creative Commons license, at Archive.org.

More From Ryan Sutter

Recommend [RyanSutter]

Related posts