East of LA

OK, first I enjoyed reading all the posts, hearing different takes on last night’s CWGR show. Some great insights!

So here’s my opinion on Town Hall’s Car Wheels night.

The whole vibe of this show was so totally different from last week’s gig at the Keswick in Philly, where the audience was enthusiastic, supportive and totally into the show. Yeah in Philly Lou stopped one of the songs, abandoned it, and then reworked the whole first set, telling the audience, “You all are listening so intently, that I can’t afford to make another mistake!” Later she did the did the song solo acoustic during one of two encores. She was lovely, kind to all, and emerged from her tour bus after the show to sign autographs and talk to a small group of fans. The show was professional and the artist was in control.

At Town Hall Tuesday, Lou started out great, but had a bad attitude going in, as she later admitted; that soon got in the way, and things went from bad to worse. It was awkward at times. Lou was moody, she overreacted to the Time Out review, the songs, and the audience, which was disrespectful and at times out of control, and to the band, but then, she didn’t like Doug showing up late for the second set, and who knows what else went on that we didn’t see or hear.

Lu used the second set to unfurl the story of Car Wheels. We saw the nature of her relationship with Earle and how they play off each other. Some guests worked and others did not. In the end we got a great Car Wheels set and a whole lesson about what it means to be Lucinda: perfectionist, egotist, uncompromising, emotional, vulnerable, combative, and experimental; we had the Lu who wrote all those damn songs by living a life in which she took a lot of grief and probably gave back measure for measure.

No matter who you are or how many songs are in your catalog, it takes guts to take the whole thing out on tour and real vision to record ten of the shows.