Image by Kirstie Shanley
Lucinda Williams in Chicago, April 13, 2007
Real Life Broken Angels
By Sheba White
Published: April 24th, 2007 | 11:05pm
Flanked by Kyle Kegerreis on upright bass, Hans Holzen on guitar, and Sam Baker on drums, the relative newcomer, Carrie Rodriguez, opened the long-awaited Lucinda Williams’ show with a veteran’s sassy challenge to the audience, singing, “What cha looking at? / What cha looking at? / Ain’t you seen this before?”
Her chocolate-velvet voice ranged over the early-show crowd of Chicago’s Vic Theatre — past the guys with beer bellies, the middle-aged women sporting conservative leather jackets, and the folks with bad knees, all too busy vying for a spot on one of the few coveted vinyl booths on the main floor. But Rodriguez held her own, gathering a sizeable crowd around the stage when she pulled out the electric fiddle that first garnered the Austin native the attention of legendary singer-songwriter Chip Taylor.
A friendly tourist sitting next to me shared a story about how someone took her to a show with Rodriguez, Taylor, and John Prine long ago, and how she had no idea who any of them were. So it peeved her when Taylor said, “I’m going to play the most famous song I’ve written, and as soon as you hear the first note, you’ll know it.”
She guffawed at his arrogance at the time, but of course, “he played the first few notes, and I knew it. ‘Wild Thing,’ he wrote that! And you know,” she said incredulous, “he’s Jon Voight’s brother! And I really liked Carrie Rodriguez!” She’s been a fan of Taylor and his frequent collaborator, Rodriguez, ever since, but shyly asked, “I haven’t heard this Lucinda Williams lady. She any good?”
Like Chip Taylor, Lucinda Williams is one of those legends that most non-Americana fans have stored in their musical memory long before they recognize the name or the face. It’s the voice that does it, a natural troubadour’s lilt that can’t be mistaken for anyone else, a voice that’s as deep and gritty and full of mystery as her native Louisianan soil.
An hour after Rodriguez’s set and long after the excited tourist was absorbed into the younger hipster crowd infiltrating the early crowd, Williams hit the stage with drummer Don Heffington, bassist David Sutton, and longtime collaborator, guitarist Doug Pettibone. The veteran singer-songwriter looked every bit as nervous as Rodriguez, if not as hip herself in her converse high tops, black bellbottoms, and ironic T-shirt that proclaimed in red script, “I’m with the Band,” and appropriately opened with “Rescue,” a track from her 2007 release, West.
From there she moved on to audience favorites like “Ventura” and “Drunken Angel.” But it wasn’t until the title track from Cartwheels on a Gravel Road a snappier, somewhat incongruous beat accompanying the somber lyrics about a dysfunctional family, that Williams seemed to relax into the evening.
Flipping through a bible-thick lyric book that sat on a music stand to her left, Williams addressed the audience as though in mid-argument with the somewhat snotty critics’ reviews she’s received so far on this tour, “See, I cover all kinds of music,” and paused hesitantly before adding, “These songs are like my diary pages. Thank you for listening to them. Thank you for reading my journal.”
With that, Williams launched into the most heartrending version of “Fancy Funeral,” which Williams said was an ode to her mother, but could just as easily be a lament against temporary balms to solve deep spiritual hurts, or a call to recognizing the real from the artificial.
The packed audience was so quiet during the song that every word was painfully clear, as if someone was whispering family secrets in their ears. Tears rolled down cheeks and couples ecstatically embraced. “I know a lot of ya’ll can relate to that,” Williams nodded after the foot-stomping applause died down, perhaps sensing the gospel-strength quality of the moment.
Over the course of the night, Williams played close to two dozen songs, ending with what she called an ode to great guitarist-singer-songwriters, “like Paul Westerberg,” with her hard-rocking “Real Life Bleeding Fingers and Broken Guitar Strings.” And though a smattering of folks had already trickled out by the last song, the majority of the audience was still in place some four hours past arrival, including the gray-haired men flanking the stage up front — an entire line of them with their hats removed and eyes glued to the stage. They knew who Lucinda Williams was, and bad knees or no, they were not moving.
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