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Fruits
of Her Labor
By
Mike Hotter
Lucinda Williams
The
Egg, March 27
‘What’s
happened to country music nowadays?” Lucinda Williams asked
her amped-up Tuesday-night audience last week. “I think it’s
because these new singers are all from the suburbs
now. You know, the whole outlaw movement, guys like Waylon
Jennings—they actually were born and raised in the
country!”
It wasn’t lost on some that Williams might as well have been
referring to the pretenders who lay panting at the foot of
her rhinestone-studded throne (hello there, Sheryl Crow).
What has always separated Williams from the pack (besides
her nomadic, Southern bohemian upbringing) is her poet’s soul
and her love for the blues, both of which were showcased on
the evening’s best songs.
Looking fit and sexy in a tight T-shirt and jeans, Williams
killed as soon as she opened her mouth, her impassioned vocals
contradicting the ramshackle, laissez faire attitude she sometimes
displays between songs. On the new song “Rescue,” as guitarist
Doug Pettibone, bassist David Sutton and drummer Don Heffington
laid down a groove so sultry it practically generated steam,
Williams embodied the wizened warrior of the heart who has
seen it all, warning her sistren that you can never fully
rely on a man, be he a wastrel, a lover or a saint. After
note-perfect versions of “Ventura” and “Fruits of My Labor”
(two highlights of 2003’s underrated World Without Tears),
Williams decided to deviate from her set list to give the
yowlers in attendance some alt-country love, delivering a
sprightly “Car Wheels on a Gravel Road” and a deeply felt
“Drunken Angel” (which she dedicated to Blaze Foley, the Texan
singer-songwriter who was gunned down while helping a friend
in need).
From time to time, the stage manager (whom Williams called
Flappy) would wander onto the stage to help the singer find
the right page in a gigantic sheaf of lyrics. While this raised
eyebrows all around and was disappointing to some (“can’t
she memorize her own words?”), Williams noted that many bigger
names use hidden teleprompters to help keep them on track
lyrically. “Would you rather have me up here trying to remember
and messing up?” she asked. She and her band’s expert delivery
of the songs made this pretty much a non-issue for this listener.
Speaking of expert, special mention must be made of guitarist
Pettibone. Whether plucking out crystalline pedal-steel lines,
spicing things up with Kenny Burrell-like comping, or getting
positively Hendrixian on “Righteously,” the man is a force
of nature who helps immensely in Williams’ oft-stated mission
of bringing together the music she loves, be it country, folk,
rock or soul.
The crowd appeared to be made up of about one-quarter rowdy
Sweet Old World-ers and one-half reverent Car Wheel-ers;
the others seemed to be Egg subscribers who probably didn’t
expect Pettibone to play so damn loud, especially on a school
night. No one seemed to be in the mood for openers
the Heartless Bastards, a ballsy power trio who bring to mind
the three-chord rock thunder of underground heroes like the
MC5 and early Pentagram. They could have pared down their
set a bit, but you have to give them props for taking their
lumps with dignity and panache. All in all, everyone came
in a bit ornery and left mostly well-pleased.
Absolutely
Brilliant
Dafnis Prieto’s Absolute Quintet
Club
Helsinki, great barrington, mass., March 31
Some shows leave you holding your head because of the sheer
volume of stuff that was just packed into it. Not loudness
so much as information, often delivered in a manner that defies
the limits of human capability and comprehension. It’s just
all way too much.
This was one of those. The Absolute Quintet, led by young
Cuban drummer-composer Dafnis Prieto, stretched the boundaries
of what Latin jazz can be. Prieto is quickly becoming a jazz
superstar, running two bands of his own, playing in the Michael
Camillo Trio and the Cassandra Wilson Group, and scoring music
for dance and chamber ensembles.
The music was heavily orchestrated, and the other four musicians
sat behind music stands. Much of the material was dense, composed,
ensemble stuff; not that this affected the groove thing at
all. Riding on incredibly complex drumbeats, the group swung
like crazy, and despite the busy-ness, everyone had plenty
of stretching room. Many of the songs built and built, layer
upon layer of intense beat, with abrupt endings that literally
left one stunned and dazed.
It was an unusual layout: Prieto on drums, Jason Linder (a
prolific writer-bandleader in his own right) on keys, Yosvany
Terry on sax, Christian Howes on violin and Dana Leong on
cello and trombone. Linder dazzled as he took the lion’s share
of the solos, occasionally recalling his mentor Chick Corea
on synthesizer and piano. Leong, who made award-winning air-guitar
faces while playing the cello, also had a number of striking
solos, some played through a wah-wah pedal.
If you’re not a drummer, you can skip this paragraph. (Dudes,
dudes, dudes, this guy Prieto’s a monster. During one of several
never-boring solos, he had six things going on at once—the
four limbs were acting independently, hitting drums, cymbals,
claves, electric things, and he was blowing a whistle in time.
All the while, he held his left stick half-way down, and did
one thing with the business end of the stick on his snare,
and something else on the hat with the butt end of
the stick. I’m not kidding. It was freakin’ sick.)
On top of the absolute rigorousness of the music, there was
plenty of silliness to go around. Like when the band spoke-sang
(perfectly) a complex groove that Prieto was laying down,
or Prieto’s goofy broken-English between-song banter. The
joking allowed the listener’s brain to decompress just a little
before the next go-round.
—Paul
Rapp
Gimme
Indie Rock
Sebadoh
Pearl
Street Nightclub, Northampton, Mass., March 29
Unlike their aging indie-rock contemporaries the Pixies, whose
youth fan base somehow exploded in the past decade (while
the Pixies were broken up and inactive, no less), Sebadoh’s
fans aren’t getting any younger. At least judging by Sebadoh’s
recent “reunion” show in Northampton—the band’s hometown and
a place teeming with college students who didn’t appear in
large numbers, although plenty of 30-something indie-rock
fans were in the house.
In some ways, Sebadoh are a truer reflection of late-’80s
and early ’90s indie rock than the Pixies, and this may explain
in part their failure to be “inherited” by young music fans
in the same way that the Pixies were passed down to successive
generations. Experimentation and home-recording were holy
virtues of the cassette culture back then. As a result, musical
incoherence and low-fi production values have rendered many
early ’90s indie rock albums less-than-easy listening to today’s
ears. Sebadoh’s schizophrenic early four-track albums were
no exception; for every heart rending Lou Barlow-penned acoustic
love song was a slightly twisted Eric Gaffney track punctuated
by his unpredictable hardcore screaming.
Lou Barlow has always been far better known as a songwriter
than Gaffney, both for his late-’80s stint in Dinosaur Jr.
and for his songwriting in side projects such as Sentridoh
and Folk Implosion. But early Sebadoh were largely considered
to be Gaffney’s band, at least in Gaffney’s mind. (In fact,
in the liner notes to the reissue of the band’s seminal Sebadoh
III, Gaffney thanks Barlow and Jason Lowenstein, the trio’s
third songwriter, for “being in my band.”)
This may shed light on why Barlow seemed to bring a self-sabotaging
attitude to the Northampton show, which was billed as a Sebadoh
reunion (and documented by a film crew) because it represented
the first time Barlow and Gaffney have played together since
Gaffney left the band in 1994. The show had its rough edges,
and most of the fuck-ups were due to a scattered Barlow, who
even inexplicably forgot the words to his own songs. Watching
Barlow forget the words to his neurotic love anthem “Brand
New Love” is sort of like watching Stephen Malkmus of Pavement
forget the words to “Summer Babe.” It means indie rock as
my generation knew it is truly dead.
Basically, Barlow didn’t really seem to give a shit as the
band played songs primarily from the Gaffney years of Sebadoh
III and prior. Gaffney himself was charged, ripping through
songs like “Violet Execution” and “Scars, Four Eyes” (my friend
was pissed he didn’t do any of his little screaming parts
from the albums, though). Throughout, Barlow looked more amused
than anything, smirking as the voluble Gaffney dominated the
onstage patter with batty comments and bits of history from
the band’s early days. A bored-looking J. Mascis (Barlow’s
once-estranged Dinosaur Jr. bandmate) wandered from one side
of the floor to the other. And then a man ran from backstage
and took a flying leap into the crowd. The crowd parted and
the stage diver landed with a tremendous crash. “Is he OK?”
asked a worried Barlow. “I felt that up here.”
“It’s
not 1994 anymore,” my friend said as security carried the
crumpled man from the floor.
—Kirsten
Ferguson
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