When Van Duren takes the stage at the Halloran Centre on Saturday, April 1st, he won’t be playing the fool or fooling around. Though the singer-songwriter is familiar as a solo performer on the local scene, this night will feature not only a full band, but a look back at what has been nearly 50 years of music from his pen. “If I’m going to do this,” he says, “I might as well do exactly what I want to do. And I’ve had this on my mind for quite some time. I want to address the breadth of the whole thing.”
That “thing” has been a roller-coaster career, careening through fat times and lean times, yet always centered on his carefully crafted songwriting. When Duren posted on social media about playing with his band Malarky at the original Lafayette’s Music Room in 1974, the set lists he included featured some stellar covers, heavy on The Beatles and Todd Rundgren, and he’s been aiming for that standard of quality ever since with his own songs. Not long after that, he was playing in the Baker Street Regulars with Jody Stephens and Chris Bell of Big Star.
“Musically, it was great, it was fantastic,” he says of those times. “I was playing bass and watching what Chris was doing on the guitar. It was a real education. But we never wrote anything together.” Rather, that’s when Duren leaned into forging his own path as a songwriter. “Jody and I worked on demos off and on, slipping into Ardent once in a while. Once or twice Chris came in with us and played some guitar on those tracks, but they were never released. Three or four of those were recut for my first album, but we never felt we were trying to emulate Big Star — we were just following our thing.”
That was a time when the power pop being invented by Big Star or Duren himself was commercial suicide. “I was thrilled just to be playing onstage with those guys. Though we only played six or eight gigs. We couldn’t get arrested. We couldn’t get any gigs. It was another square-peg situation. People just wanted to hear either Southern rock or disco. And we weren’t doing any of that stuff!”
Nonetheless, his demos got the attention of erstwhile Rolling Stones manager Andrew Loog Oldham, and ultimately were his ticket out of Memphis. “They ended up getting me a recording deal with the label in Connecticut,” he recalls with typical understatement. That story, of course, is well documented in the film Waiting: The Van Duren Story, which “unfolds like a taut suspense thriller,” according to Goldmine magazine, detailing his starving artist days in Memphis and New York City as he strove to bring his songs to life. The 2018 film, its soundtrack, and the re-release of two albums’ worth of material from those days are what first prompted Duren to revisit those earliest days comprehensively.
“That was really the catalyst,” Duren recalls, “the whole film thing, from 2016 through 2019, and all the film festivals. I was forced to focus on the extreme past, and that was the spark that led to this thing at the Halloran.” Promoting the film in Australia even led to shows there that focused on his early work. In contrast to his most recent duo with singer-songwriter Vicki Loveland, the Australian jaunt “was an all-Van Duren tour. Vicki was with us, though, and she shone, as always. She was our secret weapon. We did five shows in Australia, and they were really amazing. People were stealing the set lists off the stage.”
But Saturday’s show won’t only feature Duren’s ’70s material. He’ll be drawing from all of his chapters, including the successful run from 1982-1999 with his band Good Question. “We worked all the time,” he recalls before turning to his collaborative work. “Tommy Hoehn and I also put two albums out together, recorded at Ardent with the young Pete Matthews as engineer. I’m really proud of those. So there will be some of that stuff at the show. And of course some Loveland Duren stuff, stuff from other collaborations that I’ve done, and material from all four of the solo albums I’ve done.” He takes a breath, then adds with a grin, “It will be pretty broad and adventurous.”
Van Duren will perform at the Halloran Centre, Saturday, April 1st, 7:30 p.m. Tickets cost $37.50 and can be purchased here.
