Listen to the Lion

The tent gets bigger

I love people who think for themselves, especially after confronted with the facts. Read about Ted Hayes here.

AKUS in Columbus

I had the good fortune to see Alison Krauss and Union Station in concert Saturday night, and experienced everything I love and hate about going to concerts.

            The bad news first. My parents and my sister came over from Dayton to Columbus, where I live and work now, for the AKUS gig at the Schottenstein center, a relatively new venue on the Ohio State campus that was built primarily for hockey and basketball. The seats are all cushioned, but legroom is almost non-existent just like in old baseball stadiums built 80 years ago when people were shorter and thinner. Many new venues, like Great American Ballpark in Cincinnati, are much better in this regard and my wide, 6’3” tall frame isn’t so cramped there.

            For AKUS, an all-acoustic band that features a drummer/percussionist on only about half of its songs, the venue was partitioned with a curtain, making room for only about a third of its 21,000 capacity. I saw Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band there when it was brand new in 1999 and all seats were open and the place was about 90 percent full. The sound that night was loud and grand and fine, but for AKUS, it was weak, especially Ron Block’s banjo, which was hard to hear even on his featured instrumental breaks. (We were seated stage left in the crook of the horseshoe and about three-fourths of the way up.)

            A good soundman is worth ten times his weight in gold, but even a great one probably couldn’t make a bluegrass (or quasi-bluegrass, as AKUS is) band sound good at the Schott. The best places to see bluegrass, in ascending order, are: a) a small old theatre, b) a smaller old church and c) a tiny old bar (like Miller’s in Charlottesville with King Wilkie on the dime-sized “stage.”)

            Worst about the evening were the cackling hens and their slack-jawed boyfriends who sat behind us. Their pre-concert chatter (about Everybody Loves Raymond and Desperate Housewives) abated, not completely though, during the music and one of them managed to spill a little bit of her beer on my sister and me. Why people pay good money to come to a concert only to act like they are in their living room continually astounds. If my family hadn’t been there I would have said something. I should have anyway. When I’ve done it at the movies, or at other concerts, it usually shuts them up.

            Finally, anyone who tries to clap along to a bluegrass song should have his fingers broken by Jack Bauer. E-mail me if you want a further explanation, it’s actually a very serious musicological position I’m taking here.

            Now the good. It was a great concert. Alison, as always, was great and her voice cut through the sound muddle pretty well. The material was mostly newer stuff, which is good as well, since their latest, Lonely Runs Both Ways, is their best. Most of the songs she sings on there are gloriously and gorgeously depressing, and sound much better when you are a little bit downcast, which, close readers of this blog will note, I usually am these days.

            Union Station is an acoustic band with few peers (the Del McCoury Band, Blue Highway, Doyle Lawson & Quicksilver and the Chieftains are on that short list) and they lived up to that this show led by Ron Block’s incisive guitar and banjo and Barry Bales’s perfect timekeeping on bass. I also actually enjoyed Larry Atamanuik’s percussion, though the bass drum and the snare often produced a nasty snapback echo in the hall.

            Of course Dan Tyminski (guitar, mandolin and sometimes lead vocals) was great, he always is, especially singing harmony for Alison, which has to be at the same time the easiest and hardest job in music.

            And of course of course the great Jerry Douglas. I’m not a huge fan of the Dobro, especially in bluegrass music, but Flux, as we in the biz call him, is truly amazing, on a par with Jimi Hendrix, John Coltrane and Bela Fleck as one who has mastered and transcended his instrument. He gave the rest of the band a much-deserved 10-minute break during their two-plus-hour set with a solo Dobro medley that included Duane Allman’s “Little Martha” and managed to silence even the mopes and harridans sitting behind us.

            The encore was a perfect ending: Alison and Dan on an a cappella “You Will Be My Ain True Love” from the Cold Mountain soundtrack, Ron and Barry joining them for “Down in the River to Pray” from O Brother, also a cappella, then the whole band again for “A Living Prayer,” a song written by Ron for Lonely Runs Both Ways and, so far, the highlight of Alison’s vocal career, which is saying something.

Brother Ray

            On a few rare occasions, a new voice - new to me, at least - has instantly transfixed me. Each time that has happened, I knew that I had hit on something great, and that there was a lot of great music to be gotten as quickly as possible. It was that way with Hank Williams Sr. The first time I listened – not just heard – but listened to his music was when “Ramblin’ Man” came up on a greatest hits disc of his I had taken a chance on. The minor chords, the resignation in the lyric and the lonely scrape of his voice converted me, made me realize why he has influenced every good songwriter that’s come after him.

Several weeks ago I had a similar experience listening to Ray LaMontagne’s album Trouble, which isn’t to say that Ray is anywhere close to being as good as Hank. But it is to say that Trouble is a near-perfect masterpiece.

I bought Trouble in December in preparation for an article for NRO on the best CDs of 2004. From many fellow Van Morrison fans I had heard that LaMontagne’s sound owed a lot to early Van and that Trouble was among their favorite recent discoveries. I bought the disc just before commuting back to Dayton from Columbus and popped it in once I got on I-70 west driving into the setting sun on a cold evening.

The first track, also called “Trouble,” hit me hard and I listened to it over and over, looking straight into the deep orange horizon in the sky created by a thick bank of black clouds advancing West ahead of me. First a gently ascending bass line, reminiscent of Morrison’s “Sweet Thing,” over acoustic guitar and drums, then Ray’s vocal simmering with hurt, sounding like Otis Redding trapped in a lonely white man’s body: “Trouble, trouble, trouble, trouble, trouble/Trouble been doggin’ my soul since the day I was born.”

And this is the most optimistic song on the disc, only because LaMontagne juxtaposes the trouble and the worry of the verses with a chorus of redemption. “I’ve been saved by a woman,” he sings over and over, the simmer of his voice changed now to a soar, having finally grasped what everyone reaches for and what the best singers – Jerry Lee and Elvis, Van Morrison and, when he lets his guard down, even Bob Dylan - have always likened to finding God. Ray’s joy at having been found and claimed is not ecstatic; he’s still cautious, the disbelief that it’s finally happened, that the pain of searching and being searched for is finally over, unmistakably quavers in his voice.

The other songs on Trouble reach into that pain, resonating like a mirror image of Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks. There Dylan spewed mostly anger and cynicism back at whoever had caused him pain. Here LaMontagne just confronts his female tormentors with their actions, doing so almost apologetically and holding out hope for a second chance.

In “Shelter,” even after she, whoever she is, has walked out on him, LaMontagne sings: “All of this around us'll fall over / I tell you what we're gonna do / You will shelter me my love / And I will shelter you.” This wishful thinking gives way to pure hurt and hate in “Burn,” which opens with “Oh mama don't walk away / I'm a g--dam sore loser / I ain't too proud to stay.” But by this time, the singer knows where he stands, so he does just that: standing by watching in rebuke as his old lover kisses another to try and drive him away.

In “Jolene” and “Hannah,” LaMontagne plumbs the same emotional depths with narrative imagery. Either of these songs would sound just right on The Band’s Music from Big Pink or Morrison’s Astral Weeks.

I saw LaMontagne in concert in January in Philadelphia, and, incredibly, his performance exceeded what’s on Trouble. The concert was part of a trip to see a woman from New Jersey whom I had met online several weeks before. I had been to visit her before and I had high hopes for this visit, but things didn’t quite work out. The first night, we went to dinner and a movie, but she was running a bit of a fever, which put a damper on things. She called from work the next day to say she was still running a high fever, but wanted to try to do dinner and the concert anyway, despite my assurances that she didn’t have to. Long story short, she came to dinner but was feeling worse, so I went to the concert, as I have dozens of other concerts before, sad and alone.

Walking around the corner to the club on the coldest night of the year, my heart told me that this thing with the Jersey girl was never going to fly (I was proved right a few weeks later) so by the time I made my way through the standing crowd to a spot near the right side of the stage, I was thoroughly depressed and lonely.

My face must have shown it, because after the opening act a woman standing near me struck up a conversation. She was in her mid-30’s and quite beautiful, and for a moment as I told her, in my characteristically inappropriately frank manner, what was going on, I thought this might be just like the movies and we’d fall in love right there. But she told me that she went through a similar lonely period before finding her husband (of course) online.

LaMontagne - tall, skinny, scraggy and “feeling a little disheveled” he told us later – came on accompanied only by his guitar and an upright bass player, opening with a song not on Trouble called “You Should Belong to Me.” My new companion leaned up to my ear and said, “You should sing that song to your girl.” “What girl?” I thought, and she saw that cheering me up wasn’t going to happen.

And, of course, neither was Brother Ray. Each song he sang made me feel sadder and more alone, all the more so because of the incandescent power of his voice. He stood there straight as a fencepost, only his head and hands moving, giving the most open and real performance I’ve ever seen.

It wasn’t cathartic, like a good Van Morrison show, because, with LaMomtagne’s material and arrangements, there’s no release, no attempt to escape the emotion.

Except on “Trouble,” which he did late in the show. On another day, the “saved by a woman” chorus might have done it for me like it did the rest of the crowd. Seeing that it didn’t, my friend, whose name I never asked, leaned up again, hugged me and said, “Someday you’ll be saved by a woman too.”