mrm717

It’s on Susan Marshall’s Little Red record.

Detroit Loves Lu

http://metrotimes.com/music/lucinda-williams-i-blessed-i-1.1125255

Lucinda Williams – Blessed

Beauty and sadness from a romantically content songwriter

By Bill Holdship

Published: March 30, 2011

Lucinda Williams – Blessed
Lost Highway/Mercury

A shame the mainstream mostly knows Lucinda Williams via 1998’s Grammy-winning Car Wheels on a Gravel Road, if they know her at all, because her tenth studio release, co-produced by Don Was, is yet another in a decade-plus chain of equally great Americana albums.

Kicking off with the pop-bluesy ‘n’ boozy “Buttercup,” a classic Williams kiss-off, this one to a junkie ex-lover (“You’ve already sucked me dry,” she slurs in her trademarked Olive-Oyl-as-sex-kitten voice), the LP then changes musical direction to a more downbeat, folksier mode.

Only “Seeing Black” — about her friend Vic Chesnutt’s tragic Christmas Day suicide (“Was it too much good you felt you lacked?/ Was it too much weight riding on your back?/ When did you start seeing black?”) and featuring a devastating Neil Young-like guitar solo from Elvis Costello — reaches the level of raucousness. But downbeat doesn’t mean without hooks, as the lovely Appalachian-esque “Ugly Truth” shows.

As a songwriter, Williams is romantically content these days — so her material now focuses on sources outside herself, including the death of longtime manager (“Copenhagen,” eerily reminiscent of Bowie’s “Sweet Thing”), families split by war (“Soldiers Song”), or simply offering up a spiritual salve for the frequent misery of existence (“You weren’t born to suffer/ You were born to be loved”). Beautiful stuff.

Why I feel Blessed:

Surviving hurricane no vacation for tourist

Of The Oakland Press
Clarkston resident Michael McCarthy assumed his trip with 11 friends to New Orleans in late August would be like so many of their outings in the past – plenty of fun, a little gambling and good eating.
On Aug. 26, McCarthy, 52, a single, retired GM quality engineer, met his friends – a plumbing shop owner, several engineers, retirees and an employee with a utilities company – at Detroit Metro Airport, and they fl ew down together.

When the group arrived, broadcasters were talking about Hurricane Katrina heading toward Florida. On Saturday, Aug. 27, forecasters reported the hurricane heading toward Louisiana.

“The locals told us that it happens three times a year,” he said. ” ‘Don’t worry about it.’ “

Then word came Sunday to evacuate.

“There were no flights available,” he said. “We still thought we would stick together and get through this.”

Before the storm hit, it was “business as usual” in the French Quarter. “People were walking around, going to restaurants, enjoying themselves,” he recalled.

That night, McCarthy, who had been at a Holiday Inn, moved into the Hotel Monteleone with one of his friends.

The group went to the lobby to watch the storm. McCarthy stayed up all night as it raged for four hours.

“I never heard such a piercing sound from wind,” he said.

The next morning, the street had twigs and palm fronds and sewage, but no signifi cant fl ooding. The hotel had about 500 living there, said McCarthy. Kids tracked sewage in, making it “grungy,” he said, but people were surviving. Then the power went out. The group spent a fi tful night in stifl ing heat.

On Aug. 30, the group tried to rent a bus, but the plan fi zzled.

“We heard FEMA confi scated the buses for their own use,” he said.

The streets were becoming more dangerous, with looters roaming around. “We could hear gunshots in the distance,” McCarthy noted.

While other parts of the city were flooded from broken levees, McCarthy’s group was not affected.

Nonetheless, on Thursday, Sept. 1, the hotel closed.

“The staff gave us a bottle of water, encouraged us to go to the convention center, and wished us luck” he said.

About 50 hotel guests, including the 12 from Michigan, left together “for safety reasons,” McCarthy said.

As they were walking, a police officer advised them not to go to the convention center. Then another offi cer steered them toward a ferryboat loading dock, across from a police command building.

Hearing hot meals were being served over a bridge, the group was headed that way when they spotted thugs wielding golf clubs.

“The locals said, ‘They’re letting the white people out,’ ” McCarthy recalled. “I felt very, very bad.”

The group wasn’t all white, he reports. “We had people from Holland, Brazil, Turkey, Chile and Australia, and several African-Americans.”

As McCarthy’s group crossed the bridge, a police offi cer fired a shot over their heads. The group turned back and stayed overnight on the loading dock. McCarthy stuffed his credit cards in his sock. He learned later there had been a riot of some kind near the bridge.

The situation felt “very primal,” he said. If they had to go to the bathroom, the people did so outdoors, he said.

On Friday, the group was taken by bus to a staging area in Jefferson Parish, about 30 miles outside of New Orleans. From the bus, McCarthy saw “all these poor, desperate people trying to get out of the city,” he said.

At the staging area, the group found itself part of a crowd of 15,000.

“I never have seen such filth in my life,” McCarthy said of the debris. He avoided the two portable toilets.

But McCarthy noticed a flurry of activity at this location.

“Helicopters were landing every 10 to 20 seconds, taking people out and bringing supplies in,” he said.

The bedraggled group was given military meals and water, and at nightfall two buses came to give them rides.

“One of the parishes had heard about our plight and had donated the buses,” he said. “People thought we were getting preferential treatment and we may have been.”

McCarthy could hear shots being fired as the buses pulled away. “People in the camp had weapons,” he said. “We all ducked down, but nobody was hurt.”

The group – referred to in the local press as the “stranded tourists” – was taken to Alexandria, La., where they found a hotel around noon on Saturday.

On Sunday at 6 a.m., the group flew out of the state, landing in Detroit around 8:30 a.m.

Looking back, McCarthy stresses the tourists had it “a lot better” than the locals did.

“Those poor people sat in deplorable conditions surrounded by rotting corpses and violent looters.”

Since he’s been home, he’s been watching TV coverage to “fill in the blanks” and listening to the blaming going on.

“FEMA, New Orleans and the state are all partially to blame. There is enough blame to go around.”

In the end, McCarthy said, he’s grateful to be home.

“We should try to find solutions and figure out how prevent this from ever happening again.”

Addendum:

Even though I was unable to secure tickets for Lucinda, I remember coming home for NOLA and being able to catch the White Stripes final show at the Masonic Auditorium in Detroit and the next night seeing Lucinda at the Michigan Theater in Ann Arbor. Lucinda had two Louisiana musicians opening the show for her that night and I remember the tears starting to flow when she did Lake Charles as on encore. The tears where from the residual sadness of knowing so many people perished in this man-made disaster of a poor evacuation plan. I never thought I would be “looting” local stores for food and water to survive, but survive we did.
In the winter of 2008, I went into respiratory failure and thought it was a pretty screwed up life event until it was discovered I had Stage I lung cancer that was operable and treatable surgically and didn’t require radiation or chemo. My doctor who knows about my Katrina experience keeps telling me I’m good at dodging bullets. My partner went to the doctor when I was stranded in NOLA over “nerves” and it was discovered they had coronary artery blockage. They had no other symptoms. I know that I’m blessed.

Mike

I don’t think stoger’s anxieties will materialize at the Ark. I’ve never seem so much as a cross word there and ticket scalpers know that scalping is illegal in Michigan. I wish the forum would take my posts as a dialectic and not be so defensive, but possibly learn from this episode. Most artist sites that I’m familar with (and I travel from coast to coast seeing some artists that don’t hit the Detroit area on a regualr basis) have a link next to the Shows or Events section that will take you directly to the webpage (not just the general website) where tickets can be purchased and also have passwords appearing there.

“I walked over there Friday to purchase tickets for a different show, they told me that the password presale on ticketmaster was allocated 200 for Lucinda including ALL of the reserved seats, and those went quick.”

Like I said, the ticket distribution process favored A2 “townies.” Ann Arbor isn’t known as the “attitude capital of the world” for nothing (why, I’ll never know). Also, those who are on the Ark’s mailing list were mailed faulty information prior to ticket sales claiming sales were going to begin on 1-8-11 instead of 1-15-11. Nothing was ever re-emailed to clarify that this was not true.

The Ark handled “distribution” of tickets in a very haphazzard manner. First, they said tickets were on sale of Saturday Jan. 8th. Then, without notice they changed the sale date to Jan. 15. I’ve seen Lucinda everytime she’s played the Detroit area since the early 1990s and have never had this kind of trouble. I suggest she deal with people more reliable with the Ark and the favoratism they show to Ann Arbor “townies.” I doubt they are serious fans. It’s really a black mark agianst Lucinda and her management to be dealing with these A2 yuppies.