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Grammy-Award Winner Lucinda Williams to Play Unprecedented 5-Night Stand in Los Angeles and New York Featuring One Entire Album Each Night
‘LUCINDA WILLIAMS’ (1988)
‘SWEET OLD WORLD’ (1990)
‘CAR WHEELS ON A GRAVEL ROAD’ (1998)
‘ESSENCE’ (2001) & ‘WORLD WITHOUT TEARS’ (2003)to be Played Followed by Second Set
NASHVILLE, Tenn., July 20 /PRNewswire/ — Lost Highway recording artist, and three-time Grammy Award-winner, Lucinda Williams has announced an unprecedented five-night run of small venues shows in New York City and Los Angeles in September and early October. Williams will perform five of her eight critically-acclaimed albums [LUCINDA WILLIAMS (1988), SWEET OLD WORLD (1990), CAR WHEELS ON A GRAVEL ROAD (1998), ESSENCE (2001) and WORLD WITHOUT TEARS (2003)] in their entirety, one album per night.
Following each album performance, Williams and her band (guitarist Doug Pettibone, bassist David Sutton and drummer Butch Norton) will play a second set of material from her 2007 heavily-praised album WEST along with songs from throughout her career, plus some special surprises.
Williams will be performing at the El Rey Theater in Los Angeles on September 5, 6, 8, 9 & 10.
After selling out New York’s Radio City Music Hall in March, Williams will return to the Big Apple to play the first two shows at Irving Plaza on September 29 & 30, followed by three shows at Manhattan’s Town Hall on October 2, 3 & 4.
Williams will be performing the albums in reverse chronological order, beginning with 2003’s WORLD WITHOUT TEARS on the first night and ending with 1988’s LUCINDA WILLIAMS on the final evening on each coast.
WEST, Williams’ current album, was released in February on Lost Highway, and garnered some of the highest praise of her career. People
called it ” … the first great CD of 2007″ and gave it “four stars” out of four. Rolling Stone gave it “four stars” and Entertainment Weekly gave it
an “A”.Tickets for all Los Angeles shows at the El Rey are $35 and will go on sale on Saturday, July 21 at 10am PST. Tickets for the New York City shows on September 29 & 30 at Irving Plaza are $50. Tickets for the October 2, 3 & 4 shows at Town Hall are $65 and $45. NYC tickets will go one sale on July 21 at 1pm EDT. All tickets will be available through Ticketmaster and tickermaster.com.
So, there is a 5 day pass for the LA shows for 140 which is not bad. I want to go to the NY shows but money restraints mean I could probably only afford to go to the last 3 shows (Car Wheels, SOW, and LW.)
I wonder what the seating arrangements will be. Here’s hoping for GA.
What a wonderful idea. I’ll be seeing her at Bushkill but wow its so tempting to up to NYC to see a couple of those shows. Wish I had the time and money to see them all. I wish she could do a few shows like that in Philly.
according to ticketmaster the last three NY shows are seated. Fuck. I won’t have money to buy tix for a couple weeks. Thats why I was counting on GA.
Can we confirm the show on the 4th will be the self title show? I’m probably only going to that show.
http://www.rollingstone.com/rockdaily/index.php/2007/07/27/lucinda-williams-talks-about-her-upcoming-special-gigs-a-smoking-section-report/
7/27/07, 1:14 pm EST
Lucinda Williams Talks About Her Upcoming Special Gigs: A “Smoking Section” Report
The Smoking Section has checked in with Lucinda Williams on multiple occasions over the years, but we’ve never heard her so happy. She’s downright ebullient. How has Lucinda reclaimed her joy? For starters, she’s engaged to a swell guy named Tom Overby, who just took over as her manager. She’s been tearing up the road with a brand new rhythm section, with drummer Butch Norton and bassist David Sutton joining her longtime guitarist Doug Pettibone. Sales of her latest masterpiece, the album West, are up 20% this week. And she’s over the moon about the performing five of her stellar records – World Without Tears (from 2003), Essence (’01), Car Wheels on a Gravel Road (’98), Sweet Old World (’90) and Lucinda Williams (’88) — in their entirety at some upcoming shows. She’ll perform the discs in that order, one per night, over five nights in Los Angeles (Sept. 5th through 10th), at the El Rey Theater, and five in New York (Sept. 29th through Oct. 4th), at gigs at Irving Plaza and Town Hall. Each night, a second set will feature a medley of favorites. “It was Tom’s idea,” Lu tells the Smoking Section. “And it’s a real honor for me to celebrate the history of my music a little bit, and have fun doing it at the same time.”
Currently on the road “in the hinterlands” of the Northeast — playing out-of-the-way gigs to extremely appreciative audiences – Williams and her backing trio have been prepping for the special shows, busting out rare cuts, some of which Williams hasn’t performed in over a decade. “The guys are rehearsing them at sound check and we’re tryin’ them out,” she says. “Last night we played “Big Red Sun Blues” and “The Night’s Too Long” [both from Lucinda Williams] and they sounded great.” She says she has a tendency to compare her earliest songs to her most recent. She says, “I’m thinking, ‘Boy, I’ve come a long way as a songwriter.’ But at the same time, there’s a certain kind of innocence and sweetness about those early songs that I appreciate. Other people do, too.” Lu says she’s excited to revisit gems like “Pearl” – “that’s really obscure,” she says – as well as “Which Will” (her Nick Drake cover) and “I Asked For Water (He Gave Me Gasoline)”. She’s excited to hear her new band’s take on the classics, and promises to “take the songs and flesh them out a bit and bring them up to date.” She promises not to “do like Bob Dylan does, and make up new melodies so you don’t understand the song.” And though Lu told us who she’s invited to join her onstage as special guests, we’re sworn to secrecy. It is tastefully star-studded, we can report, ranging from British powerhouses, country royalty and N.Y.C. punks.
As her current tour zooms westward, Lucinda and Tom will make an important pit stop in Omaha,Nebraska. “I’m planning on getting my ring there, at a special family jewelry store called Borshein’s,” says Williams. “We don’t actually have a date yet – but we’re already married in spirit.” Love has also inspired Williams’ songwriting. For someone who took eight years to crank out Car Wheels (well worth the wait, we say), she’s churning out albums these days. “We’re going back into the studio in January,” she says. “I’ve got even more songs.”
Just picked up tix for the Car Wheels set at the El Rey (you can preorder with an AmEx card). I am seriously amped for this show. Shame I can’t go to all the shows, but this is gonna be great. I haven’t seen Lucinda Williams since a SXSW set back in 1999 (I think) where she also did a duet with David Byrne.
Hope y’all get the tix you want and enjoy the show!
http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/la-ca-albums5aug05,1,6338896.story?coll=la-headlines-entnews
The new live album
Many beloved full-lengths are getting played start to finish onstage. Quite a throwback idea, in this era of iPod shuffling.
By Steve Hochman
Special to The L.A. Times
August 5, 2007The album is dead. Long live the album?
“People more and more are just downloading singles and individual songs, putting their iPods on shuffle,” says music impresario Barry Hogan. “The whole idea of the album as an art form is kind of forgotten.”
But not in concert. In the last few weeks alone, Los Angeles has seen a rash of acts performing complete albums: Sonic Youth doing its 1988 noise-rock breakthrough “Daydream Nation” start to finish at the Greek Theatre (and opening act Redd Kross presenting its 1981 teen release “Born Innocent”), D.C. rockers Girls Against Boys doing 1994’s “Venus Luxure No. 1 Baby” at El Rey Theatre and Louisville, Ky.’s Slint offering its influential 1991 indie opus “Spiderland” at the Henry Fonda Theatre.
In early September, Lucinda Williams goes for the concept crown by performing five shows at the El Rey, a different one of her albums performed each night — topping a three-night version of the same idea Sept. 5, 6 and 7 at the Echo by singer-songwriter Ben Kweller — and on Sept. 15, a Fonda show will feature Seattle grunge pioneers the Melvins and Mudhoney doing their ’80s groundbreakers “Houdini” and the “Superfuzz BigMuff” EP, respectively. In Las Vegas, Iggy Pop & the Stooges will reprise the 1969 proto-punk big bang “Funhouse” at the Vegoose Festival in late October.
And this Friday and Saturday, the work that 40 years ago arguably galvanized the notion of an album as an artistic statement, the Beatles’ “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” will get a Hollywood Bowl performance by Cheap Trick, accompanied by the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra and an Indian-music ensemble. (A first-act segment features Beatles songs sung by Aimee Mann, Joan Osborne and others.)
“We want to present amazing records, as we see them, saying people should go back and listen to them as whole albums as intended, rather than just hearing a couple of songs,” says Hogan. The English promoter put together the Sonic Youth/Redd Kross, Girls Against Boys, Slint and Melvins/Mudhoney nights as part of the Don’t Look Back series, which he started in London as a spinoff from his annual All Tomorrow’s Parties festivals.
Reformatting the rock concert
HOGAN readily admits that this wasn’t a new idea when he first had the Stooges do “Funhouse” to start Don’t Look Back in 2005. Cheap Trick, in fact, had done a short tour in 1998 performing its first three albums in three nights at each stop. In the early ’90s, Roger Waters oversaw an all-star version of his Pink Floyd set “The Wall” at the former site of the fallen Berlin Wall. In recent years, Brian Wilson has led concerts of his 1966 Beach Boys landmark “Pet Sounds” and the reconstructed “lost” album “Smile.” Phish used to hold annual Halloween shows performing other artists’ classic albums. A regular series of club shows in New York, billed as the Loser’s Lounge, has featured revolving lineups doing the same thing, as have Susan Cowsill’s monthly Covered in Vinyl shows in New Orleans.And the phenomenon isn’t only about old music. Melissa Etheridge is planning a Sept. 25 New York concert of her new album, “The Awakening,” in its entirety and will likely do an online performance as well, and Sum 41 has a complete performance of its new “Underclass Hero” streaming on its website.
“There seem to be a lot more opportunities for fans to hear the classic albums, in many cases by the artists who originated them,” says Arvind Manocha, chief operating officer of the Los Angeles Philharmonic Assn., who is behind the “Sgt. Pepper’s” event. “As bands started doing it and fans responded, the artists could break free of the standard concert format of playing their greatest hits and a few new songs.”
Hogan stresses that in the case of the old albums, this is music that changed a lot of lives, including his — a notion that causes Mudhoney singer Mark Arm to cringe a bit, given the historic association of grunge with slackerdom.
“Yeah, which is a horrifying thought,” Arm says. “I would hope it’s for the better, but you never know: ‘After listening to you guys, I thought I’d quit my job and smoke a lot of pot and drink a lot.’ Great. I’m sorry.”
Jokes aside, the musicians involved also relate to the fans’ attachment to full albums. Cheap Trick drummer Bun E. Carlos remembers that as a teen he and some friends in a basement band tried to play the Who’s whole rock opera “Tommy” themselves.
“When I was going to concerts when I was young, it would have been the coolest thing in the world to see a whole album from start to finish,” he says.
“When we did the Cheap Trick albums, it was just trying to put a new spin on something vintage,” he says, recalling the tour on which the Illinois band tried out the album-per-night format. “Great way to keep the fan base energized.”
But it’s also a way to keep the artists energized. Williams is excited about having an excuse to play songs she’s neglected over the years. She’s eager to see how the old material transforms through the lens of her own growth and changes, as well as in the playing of her current band, musicians who were not involved in the recordings. But mostly she sees this exercise, which she’ll repeat in New York late September through early October, as a chance to reexamine an arc of her life, with the albums running from 1988’s “Lucinda Williams” through 2003’s “World Without Tears.”
“When I look at my albums, I can see for myself a progression in terms of being an artist and a singer,” she says. “For one thing, it will be interesting to do these songs with a more mature voice.”
She almost thinks the series presents more of a challenge for the fans.
“If it was someone I was a fan of, I would want to go every night, like if Bob Dylan was doing this,” she says. “You don’t want to miss a chapter. But there’s the money part. People can’t afford to go to all the shows, so for some it will be frustrating to decide.”
Reinventing the classics
WHETHER it’s the artists’ own work or an icon’s classic, none of the people involved with these shows seems interested in merely re-creating the recorded versions. Manocha says he could easily have recruited a Beatles tribute band to do “Sgt. Pepper’s.”“We didn’t want it to be a Beatles impersonation,” he says. “But I remembered that Cheap Trick and [Beatles producer] George Martin had worked together in the past and thought maybe they’d be interested.”
Ironically, Carlos notes that he rarely listened to “Sgt. Pepper’s” as a whole album and that preparing for the concert has given him new appreciation.
“There are songs I’d skip over as a kid, ‘For the Benefit of Mr. Kite’ or ‘When I’m Sixty-Four,’ ” he says. “And now as an adult, I think they’re great. ‘She’s Leaving Home’ had no band on it, and it was a McCartney song. So I’d flip the album over right there. And now, suddenly, I’m going to be performing it!”
Of course, with the crush of such events, something like this can turn from cool trend to stale cliché pretty quickly. Arm isn’t too worried, though.
“It could very well,” he says. “But I guess the ‘classic albums’ are classic for a reason.”
“Valuable” information for those of you heading to NYC in October…
August 5, 2007
For Beer Tastes, on Beer Budgets
By SETH KUGEL (NY TIMES)Visiting the big city can leave you parched, especially in summer. It’s easy to develop a more-than-one-beer thirst as you gamely tramp from museum to museum, from landmark to landmark.
But hunting cheap beer on the New York City bar scene is a bit like trying to find a cheetah on the African savanna. Sure, $7 pints dot the landscape like plump antelope, but the rare sub-$3 brew lurks in the underbrush like the fleetest footed of the big cats, hard to bring down without the help of a skilled guide savvy in sniffing out tell-tale footprints or happy-hour specials.
But unlike cheetahs, cheap beer won’t dash off at 70 miles an hour when you find it. For example, you have two hours to enjoy 50-cent Bud and Bud Light drafts at Bourbon Street on the Upper West Side on Fridays from 9 p.m. to 11 p.m.
Bourbon Street is hardly genteel: bras hang from above the bar and snapshots of women who had apparently until recently been wearing those bras are posted on the wall, a nod to the Girls Gone Wild traditions of the real Bourbon Street. Hey, at two 10-ounce brews for a buck, beggars can’t be choosers. (Apparently, a significant number of beggars do like this kind of thing. The place gets crowded, but not so much so that it’s hard to place your order.)
The fratty Upper West Side bar scene is not for everyone, and although a dive bar is a dive bar, at least the surroundings in the East Village are more eclectic. Maybe the best deal — with no happy hour restrictions — is the $7 pitcher of McSorley’s at Cheap Shots, a narrow, raucous bar on First Avenue. Unlike most of what you’ll find at less than $2 a pint, the amber brew, with origins at its namesake pub a few blocks away, is never compared to bodily fluids.
At McSorley’s itself, a mug of about 8.5 ounces goes for $2.25 and is also available in a darker version. That’s a decent price, especially considering the old-school saloon atmosphere that includes sawdust on the floor.
Anyone planning to assault the overpriced, overhyped meatpacking district later in the evening might consider fueling up at McKenna’s a few blocks east of there with a few cheap ones. P.B.R. goes for $2 a can, even as its price elsewhere in Manhattan seems to be edging toward $3.
Near the South Street Seaport, the $5.75 quarts of Bud Light or Coors Light at Jeremy’s Ale House are a surprising value for a tourist spot. A quart, for the lactose-intolerant or metric-loving among you, is 32 ounces, equivalent to two pints or nearly three cans of beer. As at McSorley’s, you have to tolerate a beer stench. When the brew is this cheap, spilling a bit doesn’t bother anybody, and the bar’s slim profit margin doesn’t leave a big budget for mops.
Most of these spots are bargain islands in a sea of exorbitant brews. But the capital of cheap beer in New York City is the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, a one-stop hop on the L train from Manhattan. You almost don’t need guidance, as the bustling blocks around the Bedford Avenue station are crowded with bars where both prices and atmosphere are surprisingly pleasant.
Even so, a couple of deals stand out: From 5 p.m. to 8 p.m., seven nights a week, Levee offers dollar cans of Carling Black Label, the result of its dollar-off-all-drinks happy hour. Black Label distinguishes itself from P.B.R. and other bottom-of-the-barrel brands by actually having some taste. But if it’s not enough for you, the dollar-off deal knocks down already reasonable prices on pints of Brooklyn Pennant Ale (to $3) and Yuengling ($2).
And making Jeremy’s Ale House seem both pricey and smelly by comparison is the Greenpoint Tavern, a beer joint from Williamsburg’s working-class days that has made a seemingly happy transition to modern life while keeping a handful of its blue-collar clientele — apparently they all find common ground in their love of hanging pots with plastic flowers. The standard, always-available bargain is a quart of Bud or Bud Light for $3.50 and, in a nod to people who think they’re being chic, quarts of Becks for $4.50.
But cheap beer in Brooklyn is more than Williamsburg. The call-a-spade-a-spade experts at Floyd N.Y. on Atlantic Avenue in Cobble Hill have comfy seats with a view of the boccie court, the perfect place to enjoy a “Crap-o-copia,” a bucket of ice jammed with six cans of whatever the beer-loving cat dragged in for $12. On a recent visit, that included American classics like Stroh’s, Schmidt’s, Genesee Cream Ale and Miller High Life. It’s easy walking distance from the downtown Brooklyn subway stops and is even on the route of the Brooklyn Loop of the Gray Line sightseeing bus.
VISITOR INFORMATION:
Bourbon Street, 407 Amsterdam Avenue, between 79th and 80th Streets, (212) 721-1332.Cheap Shots, 140 First Avenue, between Ninth Street and St. Marks Place, (212) 254-6631.
Jeremy’s Ale House, 228 Front Street, between Beekman Street and Peck Slip, (212) 964-3537.
McSorley’s Old Ale House, 15 East Seventh Street, between Second and Third Avenues, (212) 473-9148.
McKenna’s Pub, 245 West 14th Street, between Seventh and Eighth Avenues, (212) 620-8124.
Levee, 212 Berry Street, at North Third Street, Williamsburg, Brooklyn, (718) 218-8787.
Greenpoint Tavern, 188 Bedford Avenue, between North Sixth and North Seventh Streets, Williamsburg, Brooklyn, (718) 384-9539.
Floyd N.Y., 131 Atlantic Avenue, between Henry and Clinton Streets, Cobble Hill, Brooklyn, (718) 858-5810.
I heartily recommend McSorley’s…a true dive! 🙂
Lefty, I got spoiled with $1 drafts of Utica Club at a joint down the street from her brewery show upstate (and the barmaid bought us a round!)… but a legendary dive like McSorley’s is worth $2.25 a beer.
Agreed, Ray. McSorley’s Light or McSorley’s Dark. Back in the day, if you wanted food, you could have a platter of cheese & crackers, with raw onion on the side…yum! Haven’t been back in ages; the menu may be the same! As for the lavatory, there was one – – ladies used the stalls; guys used the “trough.” 🙂
Ahhh, the trough — the rare mark of excellence in finer drinking establishments! Never been in a dive bar, with a trough, that I didn’t like. As for the ale: I’d start with the dark, then “lighten up”!
There’s no smooth segue from this back to the topic, but for those NYC shows I hope Lu and the powers-that-be will give some serious thought (in advance) to how they’ll handle the so-called curfew. (Pay overtime / start early?) It’s bound to come up, and it’d be nice to have her loving fans not commenting on how the “curfew” left a little sour taste after the shows. (Cheap beer don’t wash away the curfew blues….)
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