Lucinda Williams: The Forum, Melbourne, 7 December 2015 (Letters We Get)

We received this letter from Max Vizard after he attended the show in Melbourne. We felt it was an amazing interpretation of Lucinda’s song “Ghosts of Highway 20” from the upcoming album of the same name. – Lucinda mgmt.

You never know what you will get at live music which is the essence of its enduring beauty as well as part of the mystery. The format is one we all understand where we fork out our money, get the best seats we can or stand as close to the stage as possible bobbing around for an unobstructed view.  In my experience a standing audience is a living thing and plays a part in magical performances from the stage. This night at the Forum is no exception.

We sit in the back  through the entrée provided by Dan Sultan and then when Lucinda Williams arrives  off we go to the front to stand with all the others so that we can see and hear what is going on up on the stage, where the sound is more muscular. Down here the audience talks more, drinks more and moves more and is here for a night out, to hear their favourite songs and have a good time. Two hours and twenty minutes later we are still here and there is no doubt that this was a concert full of surprises.

The first hour or so everything goes to script: songs from throughout her recorded work sung with spirit and a four piece band that has oomph. We are not disappointed and on stage Lucinda is a little like she sounds in interview, reticent, not evasive – just reticent – and perhaps the fact that like Hank Williams, and also her father, she suffers from Spina Bifida shapes her stage presence. Her accent is strongly southern and one of her well known songs ‘Lake Charles’ is about her home town in Louisiana, down in the bayou not far from the Texas border.

Sometime into the second hour something happened, something changed. I have seen it before, we have all seen it before when the light in the room, the vibe from the audience, the feelings on stage all merge and mesh and we are in a sports car not a sedan, and we are cruising, we are out on the highway and our everyday lives are far away. For me it was when Lucinda sang a new, unrecorded song called ‘The Ghosts of Highway 20.’ The band took a back seat and we were on a journey through the heartland of the south, but in introducing the song she said little more than the highway runs through Vicksburg.

Highway 20 runs East West through the states of South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana and Texas and towns on the route include Atlanta, Birmingham, Jackson, Vicksburg, Shreveport, Dallas, Abilene, Odessa and further west into the borderlands near El Paso. Lucinda leaves the ghosts unnamed and there are many because this is the route through the deep south, the battleground of the civil rights movement of the 1960s. Even us, Australians of my vintage know about the ghosts littered along the highway and all over the south, about the lynchings, the segregation, the unsolved crimes and the justice system that was a perversion of justice. To name a few, to remember the many, is to hear the song:

Birmingham. Infamous in the years of the civil rights movement, where in 1963,  Martin Luther King was imprisoned and wrote ‘Letter from Birmingham.’

Jackson. The capital of Mississippi, notorious during the civil rights years for the attacks and the beatings handed out to the Freedom Riders and it was here in 1963 where Medgar Evers, the local civil rights leader, was murdered.

Dallas. It was here in 1963 that President John Fitzgerald Kennedy was assassinated.

Shreveport.  Hank Williams lived here and was a star on the Louisiana Hayride which rivalled the ‘Grand Old Opry’ as the pre-eminent country radio show.

Vicksburg. A day after the defeat of General Robert E Lee at Gettysberg, the confederacy surrendered on 4 July 1863, to the Union army after a 47 day siege and marked the turning point in the civil war in the Unions favour.

Atlanta. Auburn Street, named Sweet Auburn Street because African Americans could not only prosper but actually own their own businesses and the street was sweet because they could be themselves. The birth home of Martin Luther King is here.

And so all along the way are the ghosts, both the remembered and the forgotten, reminders of the dispossessed, of the lost, of the dreams and the nightmares. It seems like a counterpoint to the journey of Bob Dylan down Highway 61, down the Mississippi through Memphis, the Delta and then on to New Orleans, his journey into the roots of American popular music, from Blues and Jazz and Rock n Roll and whatever came after. It is the same story from a different angle.

With Lucinda, there will always be the personal ghosts and of course in her song ‘Jackson’ she sings the lines:
‘All the way to Jackson
I don’t think I’ll miss you much’
And she sings this song with a pain in her voice that tells you it is a lie. And in this new song, the unrecorded ‘The Ghosts of Highway 20’ she sings the lines:
‘Who I was then
Is who I am now’

There is more, much more to come and I can’t recall the details or all of the songs or what order they are in but I do know that she takes her song ‘Foolishness’ and turns it in to a pledge, a pledge to stand against all the wrongs, and the first wrong she calls out is the Presidential Candidacy of Donald Trump, and everything he represents, she sings from the stage against sexism, racism, against the politics of greed, against poverty and she sings for marriage equality, and compassion. This audience, the people of inner city Melbourne are with her all the way, all the way. Her performance is visceral, the band is brutal and at the end she stands and says ‘Sometimes you have to Testify, you are blessed to be here.’ She means Australia.

Lucinda is now a different person on stage, funny, relaxed, sociable. The transformation is complete, for her and us.

Finally, there is the end. She has been here for two hours and it is time to say goodbye.  For the encore she sings the Neil Young anthem ‘Rockin in the Free World’, originally written in 1989 to remind President Bush Senior, that it is poverty that is the issue of the day. And that mongrel, my words not hers, that mongrel Trump had used this song in his election campaign earlier this year. Its use was not authorised. Tonight Lucinda re-claimed it and delivered it back, all gift wrapped, to where it belonged, as an anthem for justice.

It seemed the night was over but there was one more encore, a real encore, not the rehearsed one we had all just sung along with and for this final encore she sang the song by Australian band ACDC ‘It’s a long way to the top ( if you want to Rock n Roll). She performed this song on her last tour of Australia, but tonight it seemed unplanned, and of course the latest incarnation of ACDC are here in Melbourne and played last night and again tonight.

Gael and I have some stories to tell about some of the towns along Highway 20, but that is another story.

When I go to see live music I am optimistic and before the show I purchased the souvenir T-Shirt. On the front is a yellow camino and on the back the words from her song ‘Lake Charles’, the song about her hometown:

We used to drive
Thru Lafayette and Baton Rouge
In a yellow camino
Listening to Howling Wolf

And underneath is her signature

Posted with permission.