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I had a lovely conversation with an employee of Streelight Records in Santa Cruz (the only ticket outlet for the Rio Theatre show besides Ticket Web) who suggested I’d be better off with a GA ticket for Lu’s show, in the sense of a usual standing/dancing area in front of stage. She said security is usually cool about people there, and the area is roughly equivalent to ten rows worth. Can any of you Golden State folk verify this? Apparently there are seats throughout for GA purchasers; it’s just that a “special, seated centered Gold Circle” exists too, for ten or twelve bucks more. Any wisdom from anybody as to which level to purchase?
@tonyg wrote:
No idea about the venue but I know Santa Cruz is a very cool college town.
Home of the Mighty Banana Slugs, if I am not mistaken… 😉
Tom
Was at the show last night in Santa Cruz. At the Rio Theater, it was great. Just Lucinda and Blake, very intimate show.
1 Car Wheels on a Gravel Road
2 The Night’s Too Long [with much talk after about Patty L, producer Tony Brown, Robbie Fulks, Nashville’s aversion to “body parts,” etc: the song title Lu can’t remember is “Pretty Little Poison,” by the way, recorded with Fulks]
3 Side of the Road
4 Memphis Pearl [with nods after to the Southern Lit. trinity, viz., O’Connor, Welty, McCullers]
5 Bus to Baton Rouge [Lu pauses to “get my bearings” prior to this one: reflects on her mother wanting to date a Catholic, eventually marrying Miller as her “ticket out”. After the song, she talks about family mental illness and Mary Karr’s book on the topic]
6 Greenville
7 Words Fell [worked up just a few hours earlier]
8 Knowing
9 Stowaway in Your Heart
10 Concrete & Barbed Wire
11 People Talkin’ [with an extended closing riff by Blake for second night running: sweet]
12 Well Well Well [after which Lu says to Blake “you want to tell the people what you’re playing on that one”–turns out to be a 10-string tipple not sure of spelling]
13 Can’t Let Go [Lu got an email from her uncle saying certain candidates were referenced in some article with regard to this song; thus, the words “Mitt” and “Newt” were featured in song last night, though not “Herm”]
14 Drunken Angel
15 Pineola
16 Don’t Let the Devil Ride
17 Changed the Locks
18 HoneybeeEncore I Ain’t Got No Home in this world
Blessed
Hard Time Killing Floor Blues
Get Right with GodSorry got cut off earlier.
Tonyg is right that it’s a long haul between San Juan C and Santa Cruz, especially on surface public transport. Thanks to grumpymama for a lift part of the way Tuesday night, but it was rugged and ragged on Amtrak train/bus combos from then on. Tour manager Eric assured me he slept like a baby on the crew’s overnight run, but I can’t say the same. Still, this is special.
I am afraid (see earlier in this stream) I was misinformed by the kindly record store employee (whose store I visited downtown yesterday, near The Catalyst). No standing area was possible, as temp. chairs had been placed right up against stage and were sold at a higher price. NObody moved, nobody rose the whole evening, except maybe to walk out to the lobby where coffee was the lone beverage for sale, it would seem. I mean, it was fine sitting in the back row across from the soundboard, but not what I expected. I’ve never seen Lu at Catalyst but apparently that was where the mayor declared “Lucinda Williams Day” that time. Two different venues. This was fine, appropriate I guess for a duo stripped down show. Lu seemed not unhappy.
She called attention to her own impending birthday which will be the Belly Up show, causing some guy standing in the back to blurt out “Oh, I’ve played there.” BFD, buddy. She also noted Woody Guthrie’s impending 100th when starting the encore.
She called the sound “airy” at one point and “boomy” at another, then admitted she doesn’t understand the vocabulary.
Blake was fine again, though with virtually no audience energy, causing him to say “somebody’s got to do it” (the opening act). But he played the same six–3 covers 3 originals– in great form, was pleased to be doing it despite the crowd. “Half this shit is for sale” was his sardonic nod to commercialism.
Ah Napa: cheer me up!
Dang! Again I missed “I ain’t got no home” live… Thanks for the shout out stoger; it was fun driving via the 5 through my old stomping grounds. Safe travels north and catch ya in Ventura.
Great review of the Santa Cruz show. 🙂
http://cactuseaters.blogspot.com/2012/01/her-best-show-ever-lucinda-williams.html
Best Lucinda Williams concert? Rio Theatre, Santa Cruz, 1/18/12
(sorry, I keep updating this danged thing. Little details keep incorporating themselves into the story. Scroll to the bottom for complete set list if you’re into that sort of thing.)
Nothing against the Catalyst Club in downtown Santa Cruz but every time I go there’s some 250-pound, 7-foot tall drunk guy standing right in front of me, swaying to the music and stepping on my feet, while blocking my views of whatever band is playing that night.
That’s why it was a special treat to see Lucinda Williams”in full soaring voice” (my sister’s description) at the historic Rio Theatre on Soquel Avenue in Santa Cruz. Imagine — seeing Lucinda in a place with crisp, clean acoustics, and being able to sit down.
I’ve never seen Lucinda sound this good or this candid, and I’ve been going to her concerts since the days of Car Wheels On A Gravel Road (she started off Wednesday night’s concert with the title song from that breakthrough LP before launching straight into “The Night’s Too Long” from the Lucinda Williams album. The night was full of meditations about her literary influences, from Carson McCullers to Mary Karr, along with a lot of juicy deep cuts, a nice, swampy version of “Concrete and Barbed Wire,” “Side of the Road” and “Greenville.” A chilling solo version of Woody Guthrie’s “I Aint Got No Home” was part of her hard-times/recession theme, along with Skip James’ “Hard Time Killing Floor Blues” and her own “Memphis Pearl,” inspired by a woman she saw rifling through a trash can in Los Angeles many years ago.
Let’s give some credit to the talented Blake Mills (not to be confused with Lake Mills, a city in Wisconsin), who played beside her, and was much too good — too precise — for me to call him a mere “accompanist.” Mills, a Venice, California-based singer/songwriter, was bold enough to include a cover of a Lucinda song — “I Just Wanted To See You So Bad” — in his solo opening set, along with some of his own standouts like “Hey, Lover.” Mills is a thoughtful, flexible interpreter of Lucinda’s songs. All the arrangements were faithful to the material but he never overpowered it, like some of Lucinda’s overenthusiastic pickers from the distant past. His playing and singing always heightened the emotional impact of her voice and lyrics without ever gumming up the works, whether he was charging through . “Honey Bee” and “Change The Locks,” or plucking a 10-string tiple for songs like “Well, Well, Well.”
Lucinda responded with a combination of tact and mischief to shouted-out audience requests. When someone bellowed for “Lake Charles,” she smiled, raised her eyebrows, and said, “Another song about a beautiful loser. Here’s another one.” Then she launched into “Pineola,” her tribute to the Frank Sanford, “a brilliant young poet” who committed suicide in 1978. Once, during his rave-up at the end of “Pineola,” I heard someone in the audience grumble that Blake Mills was “too blaring and loud” toward the end of that song– but if you know “Pineola,” you know that it has to be there; some painful truths require a lot of feedback and amplification. (At the end of Mills’ solo, Lucinda laughed and said, “You’re trying to blow me off the stage with that thing!”
Besides, in past Lucinda concerts, the band, if anything, was too faithful to the records. Sometimes they sounded like a note-for-note mock-up of the records, only breaking out of their little boxes during the long, overly noisy solos. I think the ‘duo’ format gave Mills and Williams a lot more leeway. Last night they could get a little loosey-goosey with the arrangements in a way that made the songs surprising and more powerful than the full-on rock-band treatment ever could.
The stripped-down arrangements brought out song shadings I’d never noticed before. The drawn-out, repeated vocal at the end of Randy Weeks’ “Can’t Let Go” seemed desperate and pathetic and funny at the same time, with Lucinda playing the role of a jilted lover who couldn’t acknowledge defeat. She ramped up the laughs by turning the song into a commentary on GOP candidates squaring off against one another, falling and rising with Whack-A-Mole regularity: “Come on, Newt! It’s over but I can’t let go. Mitt, Mitt, Mitt, it’s over but I can’t let go.” The arrangements also let you focus on the sorrowful objects that make up “Bus To Baton Rouge” — a song about a pilgrimage to a strange old family house with a “piano nobody played,” and a locked room where no kids could set foot. The song made her so emotional that she had to pause and catch herself before she could launch into it. Afterward, she cryptically explained that the song came from “the side of the family where the mental illness came from. Look for them in my memoirs. I’ll have to wait until everyone’s dead so it doesn’t hurt everybody’s feelings.”
There was only one drag about the concert, and that was the almost total lack of young-ish folks. At one point in the lobby just before the set, someone shouted out, “Is there anybody here who is under 45.’ “I am!” I replied, but I noticed only two 20-somethings anywhere in the crowd. Young folks, you’re missing out.
Finally, it bears mentioning that Lucinda could seem distant and grumpy in those old late 1990s shows. Here it was like hanging out in her living room. Why the change? Who knows. I think she must be living right and drinking a lot of tangerine juice.
“Thanks for digging into your pockets and buying a ticket to see me during these tough economic times,” she said. “I really appreciate it. I hope I gave you a little something to take home with you.”
Set list at the Rio:
Car Wheels On A Gravel Road
The Night’s Too Long
Side of the Road
Memphis Pearl
Bus to Baton Rouge
Greenville
Words Fell
I Didn’t Know
Stowaway in your heart
Concrete and Barbed Wire
People Talking
Well well well
Can’t Let Go
Drunken Angel
Don’t Let the Devil Ride
Pineola
Changed the Locks
My Little Honeybee
I Aint Got No Home
Blessed
Hard Time Killing Floor Blues
Get Right With God
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