Tuesday, July 13, 2004 ... 3:56 PM
Before They Took the Stage
So, being a total fucking dork, I wore my new concert t-shirt to work yesterday, the day after the show. It's black and it says in white letters across the chest:
People at the office -- the receptionist, the marketing director -- kept reading it with affable, puzzled faces. "It's a concert t-shirt," I explained.
"Oh," they said.
The back of the shirt completes the lyric:
which is the name of this year's tour and the name of the least interesting, sloppiest and most upbeat song on Cowboy Junkies' mediocre-to-pretty-good new record, One Soul Now, but ah well. They're still my favorite fucking rocknroll band, and Sunday night's show is why. In fact, let's say they're again my favorite fucking rocknroll band, and Sunday night's show is why. They'd been slipping in my (ever sought-for) esteem since the first time I saw them, in 2001, at the same venue: Wolf Trap, here in Virginia. That night, frontwoman Margo Timmins's voice -- the center of the band and the light that shines on the band, the tree and the ornaments, the cake or the icing, depending on the song, or sometimes the cake and the icing -- sounded raspy, blown out, used up -- so that her long notes wheezed away like a let-go balloon, her intonation meandered and her signature vibrato wobbled like an unbalanced car wheel. She drank cup after cup of tea, but you could hear: it was beyond tea. The rest of the band played well throughout, but a little shrug-shouldered, a little tense, as if not sure what to make of the great empty space around them. And there was a problem with organ player Simon Kendall (a temporary replacement for the sadly indisposed, born-to-play-with-Cowboy-Junkies sideman Linford Detweiler). On listening to recordings of the tour, you can hear that old Kendall is a fine keyboard player; he just didn't mesh. He didn't blend. The arrangements stumbled around him. You can't blame it entirely on him (well, I mean -- you could) but for whatever reasons, the evening's renditions of good songs -- anticipated songs, even -- songs you've hoped to hear, songs that while driving to the show you kept saying, "Holy fuck, I hope they play that song. I mean, there's no way they'll play that, I know, I know ... but God damn, wouldn't it be great if they played it?" -- songs such as the Ray Agee blues number "Hard to Explain" -- fell flat. Heartbreaking.
But heartbreaking in a slow way, a spreading windshield-crack kind of way. Because you can't admit it to yourself right away, that kind of disappointment. Your high hopes go a long way toward holding up a let-down. You want so fucking bad for your first outing with your favorite rocknroll band to be great memorable transcedent that it would almost be too much to stand for it to dawn on you instantaneously that you're disappointed. Your denial is protecting the music-lover in you. But yeah, over the next couple of years, it dawned on me all right, that that first Junkies show I went to, much anticipated, breathlessly waited-for:
Eh.
All right -- but they redeemed themselves on Sunday night, July 11, 2004. Wait, hang on. I've got a call.
O.K. Yeah, I'm writing this at work. I'm a customer service representative. Also, I might as well point out now, I'm reusing some material here I originally wrote in e-mails to friends or posted around a message board or two, such as the Cowboy Junkies message board. I hope that's all right with everyone reading this. By "everyone reading this" I mean my girlfriend Betsy and my buddy K.
All right -- so just before Junkies came out on stage, thunder started muttering out there in the backlit black-light glow of the midsummer gloaming, and the tall pines and hardwoods crowded around the venue started to whispering, and once in awhile you'd see through the tremendous gaps in the buttery-glowing colored hardwood walls of the venue these lightning flashes out there behind the rolling curtain of the clouds. It had been a miserable hot sweaty July afternoon waiting for them to come on, yawning through opening act Shawn Colvin's miserably boring hour-and-a-half set, a third of which consisting of her "Uh-oh"ing about how she didn't know what the fuck she'd done to her guitar-tuning or how to fix it and proceeding to fuck it up more while not really telling, more just stuttering and stammering and chuckling around, a boring condescending cynical and interminable anecdote about this quaint Missouri county fair she'd played at one time where there were cows in stalls (har! imagine! what century is this?) or somefuckingthing, the other two thirds of which consisting of her whimpering and picking around twenty songs that all sounded the same: Pretty and trickly and bittersweet and so unbelievably blah that I got up to pee even though I didn't have to, and then bought a bottle of water, and stood there and drank it so I would have to pee, and then waited to have to have, and then went and peed, and then went and sat back down in my seat and looked at my t-shirt and read the Wolf Trap program and half-listened to about 10 more pretty trickly bittersweet unbelievably blah female-independence-through-cute-fragility anthems. This was all before I realized she wasn't the opening act at all, but a co-headliner.
Now, see -- I've gone to a lot of shows. I don't think of myself as an amateur or naive show-goer. I know how to read a ticket. My ticket read -- my pretty expensive ticket, I might add, and I'm not rich. I'm not one of those independently wealthy customer service representatives -- my ticket read:
Shawn Colvin
See, to me, the name below another name implies something. There is a hierarchy involved in name placement on the ticket. I mean -- maybe I'm wrong about that. Well yeah, clearly I was wrong. Because sitting down in my box seat that evening -- the finest seat in the house, I have to tell you -- Box 101, dead center between the long hanging speaker stacks, looking right between the eyes of that huge stage (the girl at the Will Call window, seeing my seat number, said to me, "Wow! That's a great seat. Enjoy it!") -- sitting down in my Great Seat, I'm expecting that Shawn Colvin is just another boring singer-songwriter opening act, tracked onto their stage like something Cowboy Junkies stepped in at Lilith Fair* -- like Dar Williams, who opened their 2001 Wolf Trap outing.
Yeah, no. Shawn Colvin played an hour and a half. An hour and a halffffff.
She even came back for an encore. My chin in my hands, elbows on my knees. My sighing. Waiting. But she did finish -- for a minute, I wasn't sure she would, like ever -- but yeah, at last, she finished, and that's when that midsummer evening breeze started moving through the house, when that lightning started to blinking out beyond the lanky shivery pines. It was just as if the air, the sky, the clouds, could feel what was coming. I mean, that feeling -- the still calm and tingly tension at once of a summer evening storm threatening, or teasing -- it's the same feeling I get from listening Cowboy Junkies. It's why they have been my favorite rocknroll band for years now. And here was that feeling already, preceding them, their reputation on the breeze.
And then the house lights went down, and they took the stage below me in that stormy flicker, and saved my love for them.
Brendan
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Making Notes: Music of the Carolinas
(Novello Festival Press, April 2008)
includes my essay, "Link Wray"
MUSIC
Flop Eared Mule
The Celestial Monochord
HickoryWind.org
Modern Acoustic Magazine / Blog
Faking It
Honey, Where You Been So Long?
whiskey-girl
Porchlight
Charlotte-related
Emily A. Benton
Laurie Koster's Charlotte & Area Events
Evening Muse
Neighborhood Theatre
OTHER THAN MUSIC
Rusty Barnes
Mixed Animal
Cans and Jars
Night Train
Cat and Girl
Tom Drury
Ian Frazier
Film Freak Central
November 9, 2007
Eilen Jewell
The Evening Muse, Charlotte, NC
***review!***
June 16, 2007:
Carrie Rodriguez w/ Tim Easton
The Evening Muse, Charlotte, NC
***review!***
June 2, 2007:
Mt. Airy Fiddlers Convention
***review!***
July 10, 2005:
Chris Scruggs
The Evening Muse, Charlotte, NC
***review!***
July 8, 2005:
Tim Easton
The Evening Muse, Charlotte, NC
***review!***
February 19, 2005:
Neko Case and The Sadies w/ Visqueen
Variety Playhouse, Atlanta, GA
***review!***
September 17, 2004:
Gillian Welch & David Rawlings w/ Old Crow Medicine Show
Theater At Lime Kiln, Lexington, VA
***review!***
August 17, 2004:
Sweet Harmony Traveling Revue
Wolf Trap, Vienna, VA
***review!***
August 7 & 8, 2004:
Newport Folk Festival
Newport, R.I.
***review!***
July 11, 2004:
Cowboy Junkies
Wolf Trap, Vienna, VA
***review!***
Various Artists:
Friends of Old Time Music: the folks arrival 1961-1965 (at HickoryWind.org)
Neko Case:
Live From Austin TX DVD (at HickoryWing.org)
Old Crow Medicine Show:
Big Iron World
Sampson Pittman:
"Highway 61 Blues"
Baby Boy Warren:
"Stop Breakin Down"
Nina Nastasia:
The Blackened Air
Ryan Adams:
Jacksonville City Nights
Robert Wilkins:
"Rolling Stone"
Neko Case:
Furnace Room Lullaby
Etta Baker:
One Dime Blues
Steve Earle:
The Revolution Starts Now
Grey DeLisle:
The Graceful Ghost
