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Lucinda’s Turner Hall show was outstanding. I had been fearful that the previous three nights in Minneapolis would wear her out, but there was no sign of that. It was like Thursday was the first night of the tour. It was ironic, however, that she thanked the audience for “digging deep in your pockets to pay for tickets during these tough times” when she later spoke glowingly about the Madison government protesters. The college professors, schoolteachers, and Department of Natural Resources workers have been completely immune from these tough times. They have their employer paid defined benefit benefit pension with cost of living increases that make it possible for them to retire at age 55 and soon have more money coming in than they did while working. They have employer paid health care insurance for life. They have every holiday imaginable off and when they don’t use sick days, those days accumulate to be paid out as a bonus upon retirement. These lavish benefits are a result of past collective “bargaining”. It was bargaining in name only. The politicians who were supposed to be representing the interests of the taxpayers were actually bought and paid for by the same unions that they were bargaining with. The result is two Wisconsins. The Wisconsin of the government workers and the Wisconsin of the other workers who have no pensions, only employee paid 401Ks. The Wisconsin of the government workers and the Wisconsin of the other workers who pay for their own health care insurance. The Wisconsin of the government workers and the Wisconsin workers who end up working to age 70 and beyond to pay for the benefits of those “in public service.” There was a reason that the great liberal FDR didn’t believe in unions for government employees. The “bargaining” is tainted and the result will be to bankrupt the cities, states, and federal govenment unless that cycle is ended.
It is fashionable for artists to champion the causes of the downtrodden. In this instance, however, Lucinda doesn’t understand who the real downtrodden are. I love her music but the political rhetoric is simplistic and misinformed.A really great show by, (as we all know) a really great artist. Thanks Lucinda!
We were too busy enjoying it to log an accurate set list, but highlights for us were
Well, Well, Well, Blessed, Hard Time Killing Floor Blues, Born To Be loved, Bus To Baton Rouge, Ugly Truth, Honeybee, Jackson, Pineola….I should just say the entire show. Great music, great artist. Great crowd. (Milwaukee at it’s best) and of course, PBR.By the way, whenever Lucinda spoke of the current political climate and protests, the audience response was deafening favorable and she stated she was proud of us and glad to be here in Wisconsin. We’re proud of her too.
While Scottdol is certainly entitled to his or her own opinions, perhaps we should all stand up for one another and support everyone’s right to bargain. The current protests are long overdue and we thank the people who are trying to make our voices heard by a deaf government and corporations.
PS–Lucinda’s Milwaukee show was our Valentine gift to each other this year. (# 35!) 8)
I attended the show and talked with stoger, and I had expected to read stoger’s eloquent commentary this morning. However, I need to prepare for checkout from my hotel. If stoger doesn’t post the setlist during the day, I’ll post it from Los Angeles tonight. 23 songs…
A great show musically; a bit strange physically: originally ticketed as seated cabaret style with candles; then, they decided to leave a big standing/dancing area in front of the stage, and in front of the seated tables. Then, they let people carry chairs to sit in the standing area in front of the people who had stood in line early to get “good” seats. Fortunately, they let us stand in line inside the building, rather than outside in 27 degree warmth.
@tonyg wrote:
Did she play any music?
Tony, allow me to take this comment literally.
1 Side of the Road
2 Jackson [Madison political talk prefaces this]
3 Lake Charles [much much Clyde info prior, adding to the legend]
4 Pineola
5 Crescent City
6 Bus to Baton Rouge
7 Everything Has Changed [West tour debut?]
8 Born to be Loved [“a love song to the world, not just one person”]
9 Ugly Truth [my first hearing of it]
10 Well Well Well
11 Concrete & Barbed Wire
12 I Lost It
13 Buttercup
14 World Without Tears
15 Fruits of My Labor
16 Real Live Bleeding Fingers & Broken Guitar Strings
17 [PAUL, HELP ME OUT: NEW ONE HERE PERHAPS?]
18 Honeybee
_______________________________
19 Hard Time Killing Floor Blues [Depression-era, updated in LUspeak]
20 Changed the Locks [which Lu insists she now sees in a political, as well as personal, light]
21 Joy
_______________________________
22 Kiss Like Your Kiss
23 BlessedWell, perhaps I too went a bit much for the “enjoyment” angle, as I expected Paul to beat me to this list and that I could mop up, rather than vice versa. Pardon the blank above and the slight uncertainties. As for the Madison protest topic, I have little to add to the fray here. I did meet a fella at restaurant next door who compared the current teacher/govt. protestors unfavorably with the blue-collar laborers of yore, yet this guy (Jack I think, who drove from Mad. without a ticket but nabbed one at face) had some sympathy for the protestors. It’s correct that the crowd was overwhelmingly pro-collective b.
A newylwed couple shouted out “Knowing” early in the game, there was talk of looking for Book pages for it, but Lu ultimately forgot to do it. She did reference them in second encore, dedicating “Kiss” their way.
Kevin is back as front house sound. Nick, in cut-offs and a tank top,* is guitar tech. Skeletal crew. That lax devil Eric F as tour manager. Local DJ working the merch booth, no Susannah in sight. Canada?
I must say I’ll have to work up to Dylan L as opener. Turner was the largest hall he’d played (and it’s not that large), but the crowd up front tried to give him some energy. In this case, it’s the audience which needs THE LYRIC BOOK, not the performer.
* full dress suit as usual, actually.
Good job also by the Gatekeeper Of Turner Hall.
“When did you buy your ticket?”
“January 7”
“Line to the right”
A bit of local flavor.Great reports Paul and Stoger, and thx for the excellent setlist Stoger! Maybe next we can get a report from the union busting billionaire Koch brothers, after they give Governor Walker his marching orders for the day. Maybe they didn’t make the show. 🙄
Stoger– The second to last song was Buttercup. Also she really wanted to do Knowing but as I mentioned in the other thread, in addition to the lyrics, the book pages contain all of the guitar keys etc. and because she has never played on it live the guitar key was not on the page. And because it hadn’t ever been played that much no one could remember the key. They actually ran upstairs to find me to see if I knew the key, but no such luck. That’s the story behind that -but that was also why she played Kiss Like Your Kiss which was pretty majestic last night so it all worked out.
Thanks, stoger, for the setlist. Mr. Overby is correct (as always) that the second song from the end of the main set, #17, was Buttercup. Where you have Buttercup as #13 was actually “I Don’t Know How You’re Living”.
Thanks to you two soberer boys (in pre-red wine, pre-aftershow mode at least) for correcting me on the order of two new songs. By midday today I had figured out that “. . . Livin'” had been done, and that “Buttercup” made more sense near end of setlist, surrounded by relative rockers. You could tell that Lu wanted to do “Knowing,” so thanks for the explanation. I’d say it more than worked out.
http://www.jsonline.com/entertainment/musicandnightlife/116815943.html
Lucinda Williams keeps it raw in solo acoustic show at Turner Hall
By Erik Ernst, Special to the Journal Sentinel
Feb. 24, 2011 9:10 a.m.Remove the support of backing musicians, and you’ll often discover the true essence of an artist.
Lucinda Williams, however, has brought her raw emotions to the forefront of her heartbreaking and unflinchingly honest songs for decades.
When she took the stage Wednesday night at the sold-out Turner Hall Ballroom with just an acoustic guitar to accompany her, Williams took fans even deeper inside a body of work that melodically spans country, blues and folk traditions and emotionally explores heartbreak, nostalgia and love.
Through her 105-minute set, the songwriter was talkative, gracious and expressive. Swaying back and forth as she strummed the chords of the opening, “Side of the Road,” Williams’ voice carried the introspectively inquisitive lyrics. Despite an occasional cough between songs, her vocals were in fine form, resonating richly as she denied the hurt of lost love in “Jackson.”
Williams was not an infallible performer. But the vulnerabilities she displayed – restarting a couple of songs because of a missed line from her onstage lyric book or a missing capo on the neck of her guitar – actually endeared her more to the crowd as they shouted and clapped in support.
Throughout the concert, Williams shared stories behind many of the songs. Some of the anecdotes added light touches, like her memories of eating the Cajun delicacy boudin while driving from Texas to her native Louisiana with the friend who inspired “Lake Charles,” or that she altered the religion of a late friend’s family to Pentecostal in “Pineola” simply because she said it seemed to fit the song better.
Others were more poignant, including a reflection on the memories – good and bad – of her grandmother’s house, conjured up in “Bus to Baton Rouge.”
Williams also included six songs from “Blessed,” the new album she is releasing next week. “I Don’t Know How You’re Livin’ ” was a slow ode of reassurance, concern and support. The optimistic lyrics of “Born to be Loved” were juxtaposed poignantly with a soulful blues melody.
For her first of two encores, Williams addressed current events in the world economy and Wisconsin. In the lowest register of her voice, she sang the Skip James Depression-era Delta blues tune “Hard Time Killing Floor Blues.” She noted that she heard from a fan that her song, “Joy,” had inspired some of the protesters in Madison.
“I’m really proud of the state of Wisconsin,” Williams said, before belting out the song’s defiant lyrics.
Dylan LeBlanc opened the show with a 30-minute set of thoughtful country songs. The 20-year-old Shreveport, La., native has a distinctive vocal tone – ranging from a smooth tenor to a mournful wail – that carried the melancholy lyrics of “Changing of the Seasons” from his 2010 debut “Paupers Field.” But it was his impressive, finger-picked guitar work that gave melodic character to the Western ballad “Death of Outlaw Billy John” and the slow Southern soul of “Emma Hartley.”
23 songs on the awesome set list for Milwaukee.
Well,well,well.
Check out rockinmilwaukee’s You Tube Channel and you will find 11 Lu videos and 1 by Dylan.
http://www.youtube.com/user/rockininmilwaukee#p/u/7/ugxpBN-k8SYSome nice dialogue too especially Lake Charles and Pineola.
Others were Bus to Baton Rouge, WWT, Joy.
The above 5 are listed by the song title.Others listed as DSCN 5799-Buttercup, DSCN 5798-Real Live Bleeding Fingers, DSCN 5798-I Lost It, DSCN 5795-Concrete and Barbed Wire, DSCN 5789-Jackson, DSCN 5810-Hard Times and finally DSCN 5776 by Dylan.
Enjoy the tunes.
lwj
They put up some pics on the Turner/Pabst website.
http://www.pabsttheater.org/galleries/253
Great show!!!
http://www.uwmpost.com/2011/02/28/raw-exposed/
Raw & exposed
Posted on 28 February 2011. Tags: Lucinda Williams, Music, Turner Hall BallroomBy Timothy Sienko
Lucinda Williams packed the Turner Hall Ballroom with the promise of an intimate, acoustic solo performance. Given that MTV has made music audiences assume that “unplugging” means a performer sits down, Wednesday night’s show was a refreshing return to the bread and butter of American music: a weathered voice and a maple box.
With her tenth studio album due out this week, Williams has long been revered as a songwriter and a torch-bearer, leading country traditions into rock & roll territory. Though her skill as a band leader is often taken for granted, it is hard to imagine “Real Live Bleeding Fingers & Broken Guitar Strings” without its roadhouse electric guitar or “Pineola” without drums to comment on the personal narrative.
And yet, there she stood, dressed conservatively in black, at 58 years old with more than 20 years of music and the entire Americana catalog behind her. A few of the up-tempo rock tunes were rearranged to let simple guitar rhythms support the vocal melodies, though most were just minimalist retellings of the original records. But this is a return, she explained midway through the show, to “the way [the songs] were written” – on an acoustic guitar, alone.
Williams’s voice is as iconic as her songwriting. Though she has never had a remarkable range, the gravel and rust that limits her upper register only increases the emotion at stake in her performances and lends her an authenticity that makes Tom Waits sound like a vaudeville actor. When performing with a band, she growls her way through concerts, as documented on Live @ The Fillmore (2005). On Wednesday, however, she sang with a vibrato and sensitive touch that hearkened back to her breakout Car Wheels on a Gravel Road; her phrasing had the swing and urgency of Bob Dylan’s best live recordings, which rolled over the heavy strumming of her guitar.
After Car Wheels was released in 1998, Williams’s recording mode switched from perfection to immediate. Some of the most powerful moments on her recent albums come from the first-take anomalies: a scratched string, a crack in the voice between notes, a drum fill that might otherwise be taken out.
And it was this immediacy that made Wednesday evening memorable. When an audience member requested a song, she had a stagehand fetch the chords. A flubbed line prompted her to laugh before she started over. On the moody new track “Ugly Truth,” Williams paused briefly when she realized that she had forgotten the capo for her guitar and, after fixing the problem, picked right up with the bridge of the song. These moments could have been awkward but never were. Williams handled each pause on stage, each mistake with a chatty grace and humility.
Her presence was so relaxed and natural that the conversational tone of the evening almost threatened to overshadow her songwriting. It is a testament to her talent as a writer that, even when estranged from instrumentation, the songs continued to speak for themselves, each an episode in her life. The evening played out like a tour of the South; from Baton Rouge, New Orleans, Lake Charles, and LaFayette, Williams guided the audience through the heartbreaks, suicides and redemptions inherent in American folk music yet specific to her.
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