Tom Who?

Karen Brown writes:

I'll admit it. Although I've certainly heard of Rage Against the Machine, I'd never heard of Tom Morello and never heard him play. When Lauren Onkey supplied this You Tube link of Tom Morello playing with Bruce Springsteen in Anaheim, I wasn't all that eager to watch it. Why? I didn't know who Tom Morello was and as I read comments from others who'd been sent the link and heard that it was about his guitar solo, I thought, "I'm not going to get this." I seldom "get" musical solos because I have no basic understanding of what a good technical performance means. I know about singing; instruments not so much. It's why I don't participate in discussions about musicians and their abilities. It's beyo nd my area of expertise, over my head, out of my league. It would be like me showing up at the Indy 500 in a Model T Ford. But, finally, curiosity got the best of me and I thought I'd just privately watch and listen and see if I could decipher any nuance of brilliance out of Morello's sharing the stage with Bruce.


At first, nothing. "Yup, as usual I don't get it," I thought with this sense of resignation. Then slowly, then quickly I started to get it. The hair on the back of my neck stood up. My heart seized up and filled up my chest. I drew in breath and didn't let it out again until I realized I was beginning to feel lightheaded. When Morello took the song away from Bruce, I felt whole. Completely whole. It was amazing. I still have no idea if what he did was technically brilliant but spiritually brilliant? Absolutely.

Ghosts In The Eyes . . .

Lorenzo Wolff writes:

So my old Buick Le Sabre broke down a bunch of times coming back from gigs or rehearsals in New York and I decided that it’s time to put the old girl to rest. Me and my Pops go down to the local used car dealership and after looking around for a minute we walk into the office and sit down in front of the salesman. He’s a shorter guy with a goatee that was probably hip five or ten years ago, smoking a chewed up cigar and staring at a computer screen, looking tired and a little unhappy that customers are coming in right when he’s trying to close up. He grudgingly starts to talk about what kind of car I want and I mention that I’m a bass player and I play a giant Hartke bass rig, so the car has got to be pretty big. His eyes light up as he puts down his cigar, smiles at me and asks me to follow him into the back room. Through the door and I see six or seven electric basses and a big electric upright on a stand. He tells me that he spent three years of his life as a session bass player, living on the Lower East Side and paying rent (barely) with money from music, and a day job at a guitar store. He never quite got that big break and had to quit for a job with a little more security. I talk to him for a minute about the things that musicians talk about, what kind of strings he uses and what bands he played with, more out of habit than interest. He tells me about the tour than he went on with his band where Blink 182 opened for him, and how he could have made it, if only the guitar player had been a little bit better. Eventually the talk comes back to cars so he shows me a few and I thank him and I leave.

The next day I go to see Bruce Springsteen play at Nassau Coliseum. The crowd files in and the place is packed, I mean more drunk white old people than I’ve ever seen in one place. I’d never been so conscious of being eighteen in my entire life. It’s the Magic tour, so he’s playing with the E Street Band and they sound great. One look at Bruce and you can tell that this is what he was born to do, and this night is special. Just like every night when you step on a stage is special. But for some reason I can’t seem to enjoy myself like I ought to be. There’s something unsettling about the look on Garry Tallent’s face. He looks like a Vietnam vet tonight. Not that fresh shell shocked look, but that look of someone who’s had to think about the war every night, for thirty years. Thinking about his experiences and the experiences of his friends who were chalked onto the MIA column. I try to shake it off as Thunder Road hits the first pre-chorus. “Woa, Come take my hand, riding out tonight to case the promise land…” but Garry still looks exhausted and haggard. When the second chorus dies down I finally know what I’m feeling. I’m not just seeing Garry up there, I’m seeing all of the other bass players who didn’t make it. The old guys in Asbury Park, working at garages, telling anyone who’ll listen that back in 1973 Bruce Springsteen opened for them. And then the third verse starts, and I can hear Bruce’s voice, explaining it to me:

“There were ghosts in the eyes of all the boys you sent away,
 They haunt this dusty beach road and the skeleton frames of burned out Chevrolets”

(Lorenzo Wolff can be reached at lorenzowolff@gmail.com)

The State of Live Performance

Mike Felten writes:

I started in 1965 singing House of the Rising Sun at a place called Snoopy’s Lounge. Since then I picked up and started several different careers. Cover bands, country bands, solo singer/songwriter gigs, blues bands, metal bands. The last time I did it steady was ten years ago with a blues band, but I put out one CD and then did another and wanted to go out and sell it. Times have changed

When I went back up to the UP last fall, I had hoped to look up some of the guys that I played in cover bands with. Always in the back of my mind, I figured that I could go up and play Proud Mary for a couple of weeks in hunting season and make a few bucks. We were the hot band in the mid 80's. We worked seven days a week, four hours a night and six on Sunday and got paid pretty well.

There used to be a "what to do" page in the local newspaper that was basically a listing of who was playing at what bar. That was gone. It seemed like a lot of the bars were gone too. In the few bars I stopped in there was karaoke and DJ's. From talking to the bartenders the attitude seemed to be why hire four guys to play CCR when one guy could play the real thing on his I-pod. The only thing wrong was that DJ was playing Nelson.

I wanted to get up to my favorite venue - the Amasa Hotel. We christened the place the Tiltin' Hilton because the floors sloped so badly we had to put blocks under our amps so they wouldn't roll out on the dance floor. When we plugged in - the lights of the town dimmed. The place was always packed with guys and girls from the sawmill. Al Kooper was trying to tell me about playing the Fillmore and I responded by telling him about playing the Amasa Hotel.
I remembered that the place was purchased by a couple who fixed the place up. They had adopted a couple of cute little Asian girls who I'm sure are college age by now. The future looked bright but the place was shuttered now.
I didn't know if the lumberjacks in Hardwood were out dancing to club DJ's playing Tupac. It would be so bizarre if that was the case and worth the trip to see.
The reservation bars were always steady work. Tough, chicken wire and fights but they needed a band on weekends and they paid. The Escanaba Hotel was shuttered too. We used to get the guys off the ore boats mixing it up with the Indians. Now there is a casino down the road in Hermansville. You drive out of the woods and it looks like five acres of Vegas. The first night that I played at the coffeehouse in Esky the owner said the turnout was light because ZZ Top was playing the casino. I didn't think our fan bases overlapped. I was more worried about conflicting with the high school football game or the stock car races or the county fair.
On the other hand, you used to have to drive to Green Bay or Marquette to see a ZZ Top before. Ted Nugent would come up hunting and do a show or two in Marquette. Kiss had a dedicated fan base and Seger used to come up and vacation. All the folks had was bands like us. They talked for months about Tammy Wynette's tour bus stopping for donuts. Somebody had written Neil Young’s name on a bathroom wall and people were convinced that it was him. Ruby Starr who sang the “go Jim Dandy” line with Black Oak Arkansas was a star. Maybe the people actually deserved something better than what we gave them.
Our annual gig up at Copper Harbor would draw people from about a hundred miles away. I remember one guy requesting "She Belongs To Me" and we did it for him. "Pretty good," he said, but Dylan does it in a different key." He was sitting somewhere in this remote end of the world and listening not only to Dylan, but figuring out the keys. There was a passion about the music then. I wonder if it is still there. Maybe that is the test. Are they still pulling the bounce in from Newfoundland to hear the BBC. Is the guy out there still downloading new stuff, like the guy who laid early Lucinda Williams tapes on me. Or did he give up?
Are all the Sunday jam sessions gone? Was it all gone? It sure seemed to be

So it is 2008,Chicago and I mean the city proper, is one of the worst places to have a band. There are 10,000 kids in Iowa eager to come here and play for nothing so why should we pay you? The blues is by and large a tourist industry. When I had the blues band we had a regular Wednesday night gig. On weekends the place would employ a lot of the old Maxwell street guys. In what I thought was a humorous reverse racism, the club owners wanted Black faces on the stage for the weekend. We'd go and jam and sometimes play most of the night and that was OK as long as our white faces weren't on the window. We were playing Kingston Mines one afternoon when a nervous Japanese fellow asked us if the evening band was going to be Black American soul men. He was relieved when we assured him it was. You had to play ‘Sweet Home Chicago” and look the part.
Then we'd get the hot shot suburban guitarist who would sit there and say Johnny Dollar or Johnny B. Moore sucked because they were out of tune. Well, dickwad, this is the blues. It’s not any good if it is in tune.
Looking at the nurturing scenes in Austin or Detroit, I know it is not the same way everywhere. In Ferndale I had a guy pointed out to me who was Lenny from Lenny and the Thundertones. I guess Bob Seger used to hang around their garage. That doesn't happen in Chicago.
I wandered into a guy who used to play with Ral Donner and went on to play bass with everybody from John Lee Hooker to Bozo's Circus. Nobody gives a shit in Chicago, he’d be signing autographs in Detroit. Hayden Thompson, the rockabilly guy drives a limo in Chicago, in Europe he is driven in a limo.
You can make money in the burbs with tribute bands and blues bands that tend to the Stevie Ray type of blues. You can be the Blues Brothers. I hosted a jam session one night for a friend of mine and a lady came up and thanked me for playing authentic blues. I wanted to ask her if she was crazy.
I had a buddy who booked corporate events. They did their Elvis shows and disco bands and a lot of the putrid stuff you hear at the street fairs ( a guy singing "Like A Virgin") It is lucrative to a point, but he gave it up after twenty something years and bought a GOT-JUNK franchise in Phoenix.
Chicago used to be a folk mecca. Now there is only a few places that book it. They actually made a commercial about one of them with a depressed looking blond getting ready to strum, "another song about my ex-husband". Irish bands do better. The Old Town School has kids strumming Beatle tunes en masse and then doing a recital. They hit the world music pretty hard.
One of the saddest chapters was Fred Holstein. Aside from Bob Gibson and Hamilton Camp, he was THE Chicago folksinger. He couldn't make a living at it anymore. He tended bar down the street from my store and couldn't earn enough to get his teeth fixed.
The last time that I saw Jimmie Lee Robinson, one of the fixtures on Maxwell Street, he was playing a Borders and half of the people had their backs to him.
Thinking of Fred and Jimmie Lee, I can't be in my right mind to want to go out and play for people. The biggest apprehension that I had about resuming performance was my age. Just who is this old bastard standing her instead of an angst ridden teenager?
And then some kid in Tulsa asks me what I'm doing with that metal thing on my finger and what kind of music that is I’m playing and did I really talk to Willie Dixon and then climbing these mountains seem to be worth while.

A Kinks Kristmas

Bill Glahn writes:

A case could probably be made that Ray Davies is the Charles Dickens of rock 'n roll. They're both British. Both tell stories entrenched in the landscape of the British working class. Both are great writers who draw their audience in with the richness of their characters. Both celebrate the spirit of humans and the working class in particular.

"Yes, and both have surnames that start with D," some stuffy Dickens scholar might scoff. But put academic prejudice aside, and the case could be made – with some notable differences.

Dickens' influence on Davies shouldn't come as any great surprise considering Dickens' status in the world of British literature (second only to Shakespeare). Any British author who chooses to address the issues of class would almost have to be influenced by him to some degree. Davies body of work bears more than a casual resemblance.

But to say that Davies is simply putting a new tread on an old tire, would be a huge misconception. The reasons are no more apparent than two short stories based in the Christmas season - A Christmas Carol and the Kinks "Father Christmas." In the Dickens story, Scrooge is redeemed. In the Kinks holiday single, the antagonist is not.

The philosophy in Dickens' Christmas Carol is more black & white – the ruling class is redeemed when confronted by an outside manager or controlling force – a holy trinity of ghosts. In the Kinks' song, there is no outside manager and the antagonist is motivated by real life events – his father is out of work. In Dickens' moralistic world, Davies would be a schoolboy in disgrace. In Davies' pragmatic one, Dickens would be a used car spiv.

I've always found Davies' body of work to be the more complicated to decipher – more shades of gray. More unanswered questions. At first glance, it's a darker world where it seems everybody has an agenda. And that agenda usually involves control of the working class.

Unionists tell you when to strike.
Generals tell you when to fight.
Preachers teach you wrong from right.
They feed you when you're born.
And use you all your life.
(Uncle Son)

The workers told the unions who blamed it on the government
The politicians blamed it on the strikers and the militants
And everybody's guilty and everybody's innocent
Nobody gives because nobody gives a damn anymore
(Nobody Gives)

That's some pretty cynical stuff.

Or is it? There's just too much in the Davies canon to suggest otherwise.

Dickens' work is rooted in moral failures that transcend class boundaries. Davies work targets systemic problems in our society.

To be fair, A Christmas Carol was written very early by Dickens (1843), while Father Christmas was written by Davies several years (1976) after his most notable commentary on class issues – The Kinks Are The Village Green Preservation Society (1968) through Preservation (1973). Father Christmas is more like a coda where Christmas Carol is far less mature in nature. By the time Dickens gets around to writing Hard Times (1854), much of his criticisms fall in line with Davies'. A school system that stifles creativity in the name of economic progress. (Dickens gets the nod for creative names with Mr. McChoakumchild). An uncaring upper class who justify their importance with myths (industrialist and banker Josiah Bounderby). A perverse thought process that makes pollution a healthy commodity. But in the end, as with all of Dickens work, he hangs on doggedly to morality as if were synonymous with salvation. Bounderby dies of a fit. His cohort, Mr. Thomas Gradgrind is saved by renouncing his "just the facts" obsession and replacing it with a code of faith, hope, and charity. All's well that ends well.

In 1856, British novelist George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans) wrote… "The thing for mankind to know is not what are the motives and influences which the moralist thinks ought to act on the labourer or the artisan, but what are the motives and influences which do act on him." She goes on to criticize Dickens, ""if he could give us their psychological character . . . with the same truth as their idiom and manners, his books would be the greatest contribution Art has ever made to the awakening of social sympathies."

Father Christmas is not the first time Davies utilizes dark humor to illustrate a truth. In Muswell Hillbillies' "Complicated Life" - he hits a bulls-eye with the story of an ill worker who is told by his doctor that he needs to slow down or face death. "Cut out the struggle and strife." So the guy quits the rat race and finds…

Like old Mother Hubbard
I got nothing in my cupboard
I got no dinner and I got no supper
I got holes in my shoes
I got holes in my socks
I can't go to work cause I can't get a job

When it comes to quality of life for the working class, capitalism is a deadly calamity. As for psychological evaluation – on Muswell Hillbillies Davies introduces the idea of mental illness as purposefully inflicted on workers by the ruling class (Acute Schizophrenia Blues). It's a reoccurring theme in Davies' writing, including his "autobiography," X-Ray – a book written in 1994 but culminating in his personal history at Preservation.

On Preservation, Davies restrains from preaching (the domain of moralists). He, instead, looks both backwards and forwards in a pragmatic way and correctly predicts a more totalitarian existence should social change be directed by ideologues and moralists.

At the beginning of X-Ray, Davies proclaims "I was born a king." His most affecting song opens with the words "Everybody's a dreamer and everybody's a star" Despite its title (Celluloid Heroes) and story line, it is not simply a song about Hollywood stars and starlets. It is a song about struggle. And it recognizes that, while struggle is not always successful, neither is it futile. We are not born cogs in a corporate reality. That is learned behavior. That is mental disease.

Not too many people would call Dickens' feel-good endings to Christmas Carol and Hard Times cynical. But which is cynical? The idea that we are forever bound by a class system not of our making or that we are all born kings?

Unlike Dickens' morality, Davies work offers no cure-alls for society. In fact, he often sounds as confused as the rest of us. But he does offer a starting point. Here's to the birth of kings.

On Lessing and Lawrence

Barbara Hall writes:

I dug up my copy of Lady Chatterly's Lover with the Doris Lessing introduction (not preface, as I originally said . . . I think I also said reissue instead of reprinting . . . too much record talk, I guess . . . btw, scholars, what's the difference between a preface and an introduction? I'm sure I used to know when I was an English major instead of an unemployed writer . . .) and I have to stump again for people to check it out.

All I can say about Lessing is that I still want to be her when I grow up. Anyone who reads her autobiography has to agree that as regards her own life, she can be more than marginally full of shit--maybe some of the most eloquent writing she's ever done is in her justification of leaving her children behind with her marriage — eloquent yes, convincing, no — but I sincerely hope I still have her clear-eyed, unsentimental point of view when I'm her age . . . which is about 88? I have always felt that she was weirdly disconnected from any point in time--The Golden Notebook transcends all those constraints, even as she writes so particularly about a specific period in history. I suppose her science fiction work illustrates her inability to be bound by the time-space continuum. She seems to me somewhat supernatural. And it's very well illustrated in the following excerpt about education:

"The other thing taught from the start is to distrust one's own judgment. Children are taught submission to authority, how to search for other people's opinions and decisions, and how to quote and comply....It may be that there is no other way of educating people. Possibly, but I don't believe it. In the meantime it would be a help at least to describe things properly, to call things by their right names. Ideally, what should be said to every child, repeatedly, throughout his or her school life is something like this:

'You are in the process of being indoctrinated. We have not yet evolved a system of education that is not a system of indoctrination. We are sorry, but it is the best we can do. What you are being taught here is an amalgam of current prejudice and the choices of the particular culture. The slightest look at history will show how impermanent these must be. You are being taught by people who have been able to accommodate themselves to a regime of thought laid down by their predecessors. It is a self-perpetuating system. Those of you who are more robust and individual than others, will be encouraged to leave and find ways of educating yourself--educating your own judgement. Those that stay must remember, always and all the time, that they are being moulded and patterned to fit into the narrow and particular needs of this particular society.'"

She just never bought in. Probably because she was the product of so many different cultures, she avoided assiduously connecting with one. She just saw stuff. And had the great ability to tell about it. She reminds me of Chrissie Hynde, who just never got the memo that women couldn't play the electric guitar and lead a band. Well, not just a band, but a great band.

Anyway, the cover art of the Penguin Classic reprint is a series of comic strips by Chester Brown which are worth the price of admission all by themselves. All these things threaten to eclipse the importance of the book itself but re-reading Lady Chatterly's Lover is another interesting experience. Some of the writing is fit-like, but much of it is still so pertinent and certainly as dirty as it ever promised to be. Love among the class structure is a subject I never tire of. My first novel (and one could argue all the subsequent ones) was about a poor person growing up in a rich place. My story, too, and I forget who said we just keep telling the same story over and over, hoping it will end differently. Anyway, the last name of my first protagonist was Collier. I didn't even know at the time that that was the what coal workers were called. Or maybe I did in that Jungian collective unconscious kind of way.

The great quote that Lessing pulled from the text to illustrate Lawrence's sense of humor, or at least irony, was this: "Ours is essentially is a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically." Does that somehow relate to the discussion of Bruce's nostalgia in "Long Walk Home"?

Lessing maintains that Lawrence still provides one of the greatest texts ever written on sexual politics, the push-pull of the male-female dynamic. As the song goes, who am I to disagree?

Long Walk Home

John Floyd writes:

Bruce Springsteen's "Long Walk Home" is the song I can't stay away from at the moment. My dad was in a hospital on the edge of the part of Memphis where I grew up, a part of town I haven't seen in a long time and that has changed in every way imaginable. I drove there during a work break on Saturday, mostly to see my mom but to also get the lowdown from the doctor. After seeing my dad more or less dead and driving back through town, "Long Walk Home" came up on a comp of stuff I burned just to have in the car (where Beny Moré and Gang of Four are always close friends). I listened to that song all the way back to work, over and over, crying for the first time, losing it completely when the line comes about the town wrapping its arms around you. Jesus, I'm losing it now, just thinking about that line, and the one after it -- nobody goes it alone. Not among the folks here, that's for damn sure. I've been leaning a lot on "Girls in Their Summer Clothes" of late, I guess cos I feel like an insecure and unattractive and unworthy forty-something, but this last week or so, "Long Walk Home" has just obliterated everything else I've wanted to hear, give or take Mable John's "Take Me." Go figure.

Anyway, one more thing, then I'm done: I had to go to the funeral home today to take care of the cremation paperwork. Turns out the funeral home is located in the building that once was my father's favorite restaurant, Monte's, an Italian joint that's been closed for 20-plus years. I'm driving down Summer Avenue, address in hand looking for the home, knowing the neighborhood but none of what's around me, if that makes sense, and when I figure out where I'm at, I think to myself, you've got to be fucking kidding me. The women at the home must've thought I was crazy, looking for the spot where my dad's favorite table used to be.

Found it.

Terry's Song

Dave Marsh writes:
(This is a story I originally told on my Sirius Radio show, Kick Out the Jams, and then wrote down at the request of Danny Alexander. It isn’t exactly what I said, but pretty close.)

At the last E Street Band rehearsal show, at the Meadowlands, I was standing behind a barricade to the left of the pit (Clarence’s side of the stage) about 30 or 40 feet out. There were a bunch of ALS patients there, all in wheelchairs.

If you don’t know that disease, it’s the worst one I’ve ever run across; if there’s worse to run across, I don’t want to know about it, ever. What happens, essentially, is that slowly, bit by bite, day by day, but really sloooowly, your nervous system shuts down. Maybe first you lose a little of your motor control or the tips of your fingers are numb or something. Eventually, it’s all gone. The trajectory is 18 months to maybe eight years. Most of the victims--and they are victims, there is no greater betrayal of life by the body—are women, although the most famous ALS victim was a man, Lou Gehrig.

I know a reasonable amount for a lay person about the contours of ALS, because when Terry Magovern’s fiancé, Joan Dancy, was diagnosed, I did an intensive five hours of research. Did it the way I usually do medical stuff, get up early and keep at it from four to nine AM. When I was done that day, I went out to the kitchen, where Barbara was having her cup of tea. She said, “Did you find much?” I said, “I printed out 75 pages.” Then I turned and dumped it all in the trash. “There’s not a word here that Joan or Terry needs to hear. Compared to ALS, there’s as much research going on for sarcoma as there is for curing AIDS.” There was nothing. The whole NIH clinical trials database (http://clinicaltrials.gov) had three studies, all being done by the same person, who I believe was Joan’s doctor at Columbia. The rest was all coping strategies, and none of them were something a newly diagnosed patient needed to know about yet.

I had to say all this to Terry at the time, and he took it like the hero he was, and Joan did, too. At her funeral, there was a lot of talk about how smoothly everything had gone, how buoyant Joan’s spirits had been (and they were), how she held everyone together (and she did). Terry asked me to stand up and talk about the horrors they had confronted. I don’t know exactly how I did it, except I’d rather have died myself than let Terry down. (As I said on the show, we were perfect for one another: I never shut up; he never talked.) I never get very nervous before I speak but being called to rain upon the parade was nerve-wracking. But it needed to be said because it was not just Joan’s beautiful life but also her horrible death that was going to move people to get something started for other ALS patients.

And so they now have the Joan Dancy and People with ALS Support Group. Terry put it together, and but he died this summer, which nobody who knew him to get over (listen to Magic track 12, believe it all and know that that’s just the outline). Sean, Terry’s wonderful son, carries on the project. He says he’d do it anyway but knows without question that Terry would haunt him if he didn’t do it and do it right. Sean brought the ALS patients I saw to the E Street rehearsal show.

All the patients I saw that night were women, adult females in, I’d guess, their late 30s to early 60s. Each of them was accompanied by a caregiver. One of them, one of the younger ones, had an oxygen tube on which she repeatedly sucked desperately.

The woman I talked about on the show was almost prone in her wheelchair, her head on a head rest, which means she had lost control of the muscles in her back and couldn’t sit up. Like an infant, right? And she had her hands crossed in her lap, perfectly straight.

Beautiful hands, long long fingers, flawless. But she could no longer move them. Lovely face, with the common elongation of features that comes as the muscle tension in the face disintegrates. When her friends talked to her, she lit up the place with her smile.

I happened to look over at her during Born to Run when the house lights were full up. She was singing along. I don’t mean just mouthing the words. She was singing. And her eyes flashed and her beautiful face smiled. And I thought, “The meaning of it all is right here. A woman who can’t walk, or even move her hands, or hold herself upright, is singing that she was born to run.”

She was my hero that night, and afterward, I went over and told her so, though she didn’t seem to know what to do with the information. I said “thanks, and she beamed that smile again, so it felt like I got two rewards--the song and that smile--and maybe she at least got one.

I don’t remember how I got out of this story on the show, because writing it down makes you think a more about what you’re saying. What I think now is that I don’t think I’ll ever get out of it, altogether.

Don’t want to either.

(Contact the Joan Dancy and People with ALS Support Group at Riverview Medical Center, Riverview Terrace Bulding, 2nd Floor, Front Street,Red Bank, New Jersey 07701 or phone 732.450.2677)

Iris Dement in Columbus

A couple of weeks ago, in the midst of a conversation on Strat, I asked if anyone knew what Iris DeMent was up to. Daniel forwarded Iris' touring schedule, and lo and behold, she had an upcoming date in Columbus. So last night I was fortunate to see Iris perform (unlike the last time she came to Columbus, when I found out about it so late that the show was sold out). The venue was the auditorium of the Fawcett Center here at OSU, which held perhaps 400 people, and it was packed full. My friend, Lynn, and I were able to sit in the front row, which was quite nice.

The last time I saw Iris (which was an unbelievable 9 fucking years ago!), she was touring solo. This time around, she had John Prine's bass player, Dave Jacques, with her. While he was clearly a very competent bass player I can't honestly say he added much to the show, however.

Iris' "The Way I Should" was a very significant song in my life. As I wrestled years ago with coming out of the closet, I kept coming back to Bruce's "Darkness on the Edge of Town" (and its lyrics about secrets you can't face that weigh you down) and this song of Iris', with the lyrics "if each life is but a grain of sand, I'm tellin' you man, this grain of sand is *mine*... I live just the way I want to, and that's the way I should." It just made so much sense.

And so I was so happy when she opened the show with it.

It was a wonderful show, and she actually played some new songs (well, new since the last time I saw her 9 yrs ago, maybe she wrote them 8 yrs ago... or maybe this past year). Each of them was moving. One she wrote about her mother (who she said was 89 today), and how her mother always spoke the truth. Another had me nearly in tears, about a brother she lost when she was about 4, and how that was the night "I learned not to pray / because God's gonna do what he wants anyway" (or something close to that). There was another new one that she said was about an anniversary (perhaps a 3-yr anniversary), that focused on images of her man doing different things, ending with the line, "I think this love's going to last".

Two things I didn't quite like about the show: many (most) of the songs, esp. the ones she played on guitar, were slowed down considerably. Secondly, she 'dylanized' most of her old songs, singing around the melody, changing the phrasing, singing lower instead of higher, etc. so at times, the songs were barely recognizable. I don't know if she did this because she can't hit some of the high notes anymore, and this is her way of covering for that, or if it's because she's sung these so many times, she needed (for herself) to find some way of making them different or fresh. At times it was very disappointing, as on "Sweet Is the Melody" -- one of the most beautiful songs about songwriting ever written -- where the sweet melody was largely demolished.

She didn't play any of her songs that were politically or socially oriented, (apart from the original gospel song, "He Reached Down" she wrote for her last album Lifeline, the one about the good Samaritan, which was gratifying to hear). I found it a bit odd she shied away from the social commentary, because in the current climate, those songs probably would've gone over very well.
Instead, many of the songs seem to focus on her mother, and on loss. All in all, as I think about it, it was a pretty bleak show... "Easy's getting harder every day" (certainly one of the highlights as performed last night) has never sounded so depressing.

"When My Morning Comes Around" (perhaps my favorite Iris song) opened the 2-song encore, and was majestic as always, injecting a bit of optimism into the show. And she ended the night with a beautiful rendition of "Our Town".

I hope she's finally past her writer's block and is able to put out a new album sometime soon.