Sunday at the Casbah: Kid Congo Powers Brings a Half-Century of Cool to Kettner

Some résumés you just have to read out loud. Kid Congo Powers played guitar in The Gun Club. He played in The Cramps. He played in Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. That is not a career; that is a load-bearing wall of American underground music — and this Sunday, August 9, he brings his own band, Kid Congo & The Pink Monkey Birds, to the Casbah, with The Film Company opening.

For a room that has always prized punk lineage over polish, this is close to a perfect booking. The Casbah — 2501 Kettner, planes overhead, ceiling low enough to touch the myth — has spent nearly four decades treating exactly this kind of artist as royalty. Powers, for his part, has aged into something rare: an elder statesman who never lost the swamp in his tone or the sly menace in his delivery. His Pink Monkey Birds records swing between spaghetti-western twang, voodoo garage, and spoken-word cool, and live they cook.

Here's why it matters beyond the pedigree. San Diego's calendar is thick with buzz bands passing through on their first or second album — which is a joy, but it's a joy without ballast. A night like this supplies the ballast. It's a chance to stand ten feet from a person who was in the room when several genres got invented, and to watch him prove he's still inventing.

Sunday shows have a particular magic at the Casbah anyway — the weekend's exhale, the crowd that's there because it wants to be, not because it's Friday. Add a living legend to that equation and you've got the kind of night people describe years later with suspicious precision about where they were standing.

Doors are early-ish; this is a school night for the rest of your week. Go anyway. You can sleep when you're not watching Kid Congo Powers play guitar forty feet away.

Sources: The Casbah — Casbah Presents; Casbah — Songkick calendar