Lucinda Williams, an icon of the alt.country and blues-rock scenes, performed with her band on September 23, 2022 at the Paramount Theater in Austin, Minnesota. The show was remarkable in several respects. First, the mere fact that this performance occurred in our small city (pop. 23,000), a hundred miles from the Twin Cities, is a matter for astonishment and celebration. (As it happens, Williams is married to a Minnesota-born record producer who now lives in Nashville; her husband, Tom Overby, is a native of Austin and, indeed, part of a large family with many branches that still live in town. It's my impression that Mr. Overby was in Austin for a high school class reunion, Class of '77, and that Williams accompanied him on this occasion.) Williams is the real thing, deservedly famous for her songwriting and concert performances -- her 2020 album Good Souls Better Angels was nominated for two Grammy awards and her jazz singing with Charles Lloyd and the Marvels on the 2018 Vanished Gardens album is a noteworthy element on one of the very best records that I have ever heard. Of course, she's all over You-Tube performing in places like Boulder and Memphis and collaborating with other artists such as Neil Young, Emmy Lou Harris, and, of course, Tom Petty who covered one of her songs, the scorching "I changed the Locks" to good effect. Williams is probably best known for her 1998 alt.country record, Car Wheels on a Gravel Road. Her father, Miller Williams was a renowned poet who taught at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville and recited his work at the second Clinton inauguration in 1997 -- he died in 2015. I recommend that you watch Lucinda Williams in a video produced by a Seattle radio station, KEXP about three years ago -- Williams performs with the core of her touring band, Stuart Mathis (lead guitar), David Sutton (bass) and Butch Norton (drums); this ensemble known as Buick 6, augmented with a steel guitar and dobro player, played with her at the Paramount gig. It's a superb, hard-rocking band and Williams has always been generous about sharing the stage and encouraging her musicians to take the limelight in some feral, slashing solos influenced, it seems, by Neil Young and his band Crazy Horse.
At the Paramount, Williams played for about 100 minutes and performed an encore consisting of two politically inflected songs. The theater was, more or less, sold-out to an enthusiastic audience. Williams was voluble during the first half of the show, speaking in self-deprecating terms -- she accused herself of rambling and, indeed, got lost in her remarks a couple of times, noting that she was referring to herself in the "third person" meaning that she had a "split personality". In fact, her verbal asides were fascinating and, when she got down to business in the second half of the performance, I regretted that she wasn't as loquacious as at the beginning of the concert. Williams provided "back stories" on several of her famous songs from Car Wheels on a Gravel Road, at least, three times referring to her lyrics as "Southern Gothic" and invoking Flannery O'Connor and Eudora Welty as inspirations. She explained that "Drunken Angel" and "Lake Charles" were about poets maudit who ended up taking their own lives. (This is apparent from the words to these songs, but, in concert, she names names and circumstances.) The play list included a spooky, savage version of "West Memphis" complete with rattlesnake rattles in the percussion and a half-dozen tunes from Car Wheels on a Gravel Road, "Joy", "Can't let go", and several others. She's an expert songwriter, probably best when focused on vengeance for sexual or political affronts. Like all great lyricists, she uses many slant rhymes -- for instance, 'labor" and "savior", recognizing the it's the vowels that rhyme and approximate is as good as perfect in a rock and roll or country song. The words, hard to hear in concert, are simple and unpretentious but piercing in their effect. Many of her songs have a novelistic character: she uses many place names to establish context and has a acute eye for the particularly ripe melancholy of southern decay and desuetude: her lyrics are full of broken bottles and smashed doors and yards full of rusting auto parts. She's shows an indignant but not downtrodden attitude, evidenced by the black tee-shirt that she wore that read (in white letters) "You can't rule me." (However, her jacket covered the apostrophe and "t" on the legend emblazoned on her chest and, probably, some people in the audience not familiar with Williams most recent album Good Souls better Angels on which that song appears, thought that Williams was strangely proclaiming "You can rule me".) Williams rendition of the bleak, almost imprecatory, song "Long Black Train" was one of the show's many highlights, a scary invocation of the onset of depression.
Williams had a stroke the day before Thanksgiving in 2021 and she is obviously partially paralyzed. The 68-year old singer has difficulty using her left hand which she mostly held clenched at her side. She walks with a shuffle and had to be helped across the stage to her position at the center of the band. (At the end of her set, when she moved forward toward the audience, a crew member squatting behind her sprayed the edge of the stage with rays from a flashlight, presumably to keep her from tripping over cords or falling from the platform.) She began the show in excellent voice, belting out her songs with brassy enthusiasm, but she weakened as the gig continued and, in some later songs, her intonation waivered. She's not mobile although she can shake her hips in time to the music. She wore dark jeans and tennis shoes and, of course, remains beautiful in a trashy, southern Gothic sort of way -- she surrounds her eyes with dark shadow and has frizzy bleached blonde hair, cut far shorter than her coiffure depicted in photographs in her last records. She no longer can play the guitar and has been diminished by her illness but soldiered through the show with palpable enthusiasm, standing for more than ninety minutes. I mention these points because the reason you attend a live concert is to see the performer, watch how she moves and interacts with the audience, and participate in her presence -- elements of the experience that you can't measure by simply listening to her studio album. Williams has always had an endearing, feisty persona and, if anything, the sequelae to her stroke merely enhance that aspect of her appeal. She's not someone to mess around with and seems wholly courageous and indomitable. (You can see her blithely answering 21 questions with Nic Harcourt on You-Tube -- this interview was around 2016 and Williams looks hungover with a spectacular black-eye. She doesn't seem abashed at all about her appearance; people who claim to know such things say that she got into a barfight the night before -- at that time, she would have been about 62 years old.)
The climax of the show was an incandescent encore in which Williams played "You can't rule me", a song she dedicated to the United Supreme Court. Most of the audience was standing. Williams finished with Neil Young's "Rocking in the Free World", a blazing performance with all band members singing in unison and guitar breaks that sounded more like John Coltrane or Charley Parker than Eric Clapton. It was a howling, thunderous performance and strangely reassuring, even, inspiring. "There's one more kid that will never go to school / Never fall in love, never got to be cool" and "We got a thousand points of light/ for the homeless man/ We gotta kinder, gentler machine gun hand" -- a sentiment punctuated by a rattle of rim shots on the drums accompanied by screaming guitars. Williams told the audience to continue resisting, that good will prevail in the end, that people need to keep pushing the rock up the hill. Out on the street, I ran into a young woman who I have known since she was a little girl -- I think of her as young but she's probably about 40 now. Her boyfriend was taking a picture of her from a low angle to show her face framed with the Paramount marquee advertising Lucinda Williams. She was flushed with excitement and pumped her fist in the air: "Rocking in fucking free world", she proclaimed. With my wife, I went down the street to the library parking lot where I had left my car. Williams' tour-bus, colored chartreuse was parked behind the Paramount Theater. A taco truck was operating. The air was cold, infused with the scents of autumn. I wanted to buy a taco made with lengua or tongue, but I had already eaten and it was time to go home.
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