Walking the Berkshires

To Forgive and Remember

Some people have relative pitch.  I have relative memory.   It is not photographic, with perfect recall of every detail, but it is extremely good at retaining and relating experience to time and place and memories to each other.  I offer this blog as 'exhibit A". 

I do retain a great many details, but this is an active, rather than passive skill.  You can't play Mozart to me when I sleep to make me smarter.  My brain is a great deal like my attic - full of life's unsorted accumulations to which I have random access.  This means that I can find my way to the same, out-of-the-way place years after my first and only visit without the need for a map.  It also means I hold memories from long ago that are as fresh in specific detail, and emotion, as they would be today.

My earliest memories are vignettes, snapshots in time for which there never was a photograph, and they happened in the Spring of my second year, around my second birthday.  We lived in Danbury, Connecticut at the Wooster School until June of 1970 when we moved to Worcester, Massachusetts.  My parents used to tell stories of my first words and my experience of becoming a big brother that May, but the memories I have from that time are not these second hand impressions. 

I remember watching my father coach baseball, something he never did after we moved.  I remember a little pond behind the house where we lived.  And I remember my grandfather pushing me in a stroller on a hill lined with weeping willows.  Years later, on a visit to Wooster when I was looking at boarding schools, I recognized the exact spot where this happened, right in front of the gymnasium.

I remember a trauma that happened when I was three.  If you look at pictures of me at that age, I am missing my upper two front teeth and have a fat lower lip.  I remember many, many details of how that came to be. 

• I remember kneeling on a chair, holding on to the back and rocking back and forth while listing to a record of Winnie-the-Pooh.

• I remember falling forward and catching my lip between my teeth and the edge of another chair, leaving dents in the woodwork along with my teeth.

• I remember spitting blood from the ruin of my mouth into the bathtub, and arriving at the hospital.

• I remember being held by my father and crying, and a nurse I have never forgiven saying "Don't cry, you''ll wake the babies."  My sense of outrage overwhelmed the pain as I thought; "But I am a baby!"

• I remember coming out of anesthesia and seeing my dentist in the operating room.  I remember how the stitches felt on the inside of my lip where the scar remains today behind a hard lump in my more generous mouth with my perfect teeth.

I remember other old injuries of the spirit.  I do not have the temperament to nurse old grievances, and have developed the skill of cooling down and owning up after an argument.  I forgive others far easier, and more willingly, than I forgive myself.  But this also means I carry the uncomfortable memory, and set it aside in a cluttered corner of my mind rather than taking it out and turning it over, and puzzling out its hold on me, and what it means going forward. 

There is, for instance, the incident with the lilac flower.

I was four years old.  My father taught at a transitional program for high school students and young adults who were not yet college bound.  In 1972 they held an outdoor graduation ceremony at a site bounded by a hedge of purple lilacs.  I remember that they played Cat Stevens "Peace Train".  And I remember our arrival with my mother and little sister, and seeing my father already there greeting the graduates and their guests.  He had a lilac blossom in the buttonhole of his blazer.

I was excited to see my father, and ran to jump into his arms.  As I did so, I knocked the flower from his jacket, breaking the stem.  I remember sharp words instead of welcome.  I remember his reproach over the broken flower that would never fit back into the hole.  I remember thinking; "But there are hundreds of other flowers, right there, that could be a replacement."

It was a small thing, soon forgotten.  But not by me.  For years afterward, when lilacs were in bloom, I picked bunches of them for my Dad to make up for disappointing him, to be sure of his love.  I didn't tell him until much later my motivation.  It didn't seem fair, really, as I alone retained memory of the incident.  Nor do I associate lilacs with shame or emotional distance.  I love their heady scent.  But I only like the purple flowered varieties, which also grew outside our Worcester apartment and at Windrock where my grandparents lived.  I'm traditional, that way.

When I snap at my children, when I reproach them for their carelessness, I go right back to that place. Such a little thing, like a pebble tossed into still water.  This is a pattern I need to examine, to bring out of the shadows and into the light of day.  I forgave my father long ago, but I have to forgive myself as well, to give new meaning to experience.  This, too, is an active skill, and one I am trying to learn, to get my heart and my head together.  To forgive and remember.

"One Sun Sets and Another Sun She Rises."

This has never been a confessional blog.   It can verge on poetry, turning with sharp eye and quick witted tongue to the forgotten sides of a story, but it is not a place where I have chosen to share the things that unsettle me and keep me off balance.  I am one who turns the inward focus outward, recasts the personal as universal.  I go into my head, away from my heart.  I show what I want you to see. 

Ah, but that is really an untenable position for a writer (and one who writes in a public forum, no less).  And though I have been resisting it for a number of months now, I find there is more to share.  Though it frightens me to go to this place with you, on this Good Friday with every bud bursting with new life I find that I can.

My marriage of 14+ years (and a relationship since 1991) has sadly, inescapably, run its course.  It is coming down around me like hard rain outside my window.  Much still remains between us - affection and care and fierce loyalty to our children - but there is no getting around the fact that our love is gone and she no longer wishes to be my wife.  How empty that feels, not to be able to set things right as is my natural inclination.  To have to be my own redeemer. 

And yet the longer I live with it (and I have been living with this knowledge for many months now), the more I come to feel that it is the right choice, even if one I never would have had the courage to initiate.  My default has been to settle for less out of fear of losing more, and fear of middle age (for I turn 42 in a week's time), of admitting that what began with such hope and expectation has been a mistake, and of being isolated and alone.

This is no Gordian knot that a sharp legal ax can sever - we are going slowly, slowly, toward a time when we can afford to have separate places to live and continue to share parenting.  It will not happen this year, but it will happen the next. 

Our home life proceeds much as before - the children mercifully unaware as yet of what we are planning - and working together with counselors has actually given us the skills to be together now, in this transition, that at an earlier time might have sustained our marriage.  But at night we go our separate ways (she to the bedroom we once shared on the floor above, me to a futon couch on the floor below).  We will do this for the foreseeable future while she seeks the additional training and paid work that will allow us to disentangle and move on to separate households and whatever our altered lives may bring.

Like Spring, I took my marriage on faith, but like a fool who plants the seed and neglects the garden it withered on the vine.  Did it slip like the ring from my finger, or did I withdraw my hand as from a dog that snapped,  singe my wings on a maddening flame?   I knew at some fundamental level where this was leading, years and years ago, and refused to accept it as possible.  

Mine will be the first divorce in my family, among my aunts and uncles and cousins of the first degree, though the pressure to stay came from me alone.  I bore up and took on greater burdens these many years, and added my own measure of salt to the soil, but I am still reckoning the cost in spirit.  And I am lonely, and my faith in myself - let alone a feeling as vital and frightening as love - is often hard to keep in view.

When she and I met in Africa, we discovered a shared love of birds, but my eagle eyes and open stride far out-ranged her own.  Then malaria  sapped her stamina,  her lungs filled with pollen, our first child was born still and she fell further behind.  She turned instead to the growing things that stayed in place, content to observe what lay by the path rather than seeking the next bend in the trail.  She taught me to see the quiet glory of the smallest flower, the riversmooth stones and the drones of bees.  She told me my head was in the treetops, while her eyes were on the simple things below that others overlooked.  I preferred to think of it as me giving our marriage high beams and she low, but they got sadly misaligned along the way.

We had other children who found a wilderness of discovery in our small backyard, who began by short rambles before scrambling up mountainsides.  They offered me fresh eyes, soaking up my woods lore and stories unfolding in every found moment.  They became my companions in the natural world, while my wife seemed content to stay inside.  Yet she yearned to be present for the firsts in their lives.  She could not bear to sit reading on the deck by the cove while we hiked to the cliffs on the far side of the island and so that place was lost to her.  Life pressed down, containing that sparkle that had captivated my heart.  I felt it, and recoiled, and the distance widened.

In the first months of this new transition, I wasn't sure that I would tap the backyard maple tree at all this year.  I didn't know if I would still be in this house, or whether I would be alone.  I am grateful for the meager output of sap I was able to reduce to syrup this disappointing year.  I expended more energy in boiling than the monetary value of the product of my labor, but that is not the right calculus.  Each ringing drop in a galvanized pail said to me " here we are...in this moment."  I was the only one outside to hear it, and I remembered that when my son Elias was learning to speak his first observations included; "Bucket, drip, drip, drip."

Now I am planning a garden and know that while my divorce is a certainty the timing is at least a year away.  So I imagine spading the earth, working in compost provided from a neighbor's dairy herd.  I think about the seeds my children and I will press into the soil, laying out hopeful rows for bright, growing things.  I think about where to transplant tomatoes in hope that the late blight doesn't return, and dream of salsa and gazpacho and heavy fruit on the vine.  Anything is possible before you begin.

That is all still weeks away, of course.  We can get killing frosts in late May.  But the propagative urge is strong in Spring, and it overrides the hard fact that harvests and marriages fail.   Life's slow accumulations will bend your back and overfill your cup.  What we prune away and what we carry forward can lighten a buried heart.  But still I miss the human touch, the mature feelings once had for each other alongside the fierce and sacrificial love of parent for child.

So much for me now is about letting things in.  I write with these highly sensory words - plangent, tactile, alliterative - turning them over on my tongue to taste the sour and sweet.  I do this, just now, because I am detached from sensory acts of touch and shared exploration in a sexual sense, but more specifically because in matters of the heart and spirit I go into my head.  I stand watch, and wary of what I feel, of what feelings are directed my way.  I do this while appearing outgoing, for I am not shy, but vulnerable.  I feel fiercely, but I do not trust the raw emotion in me or those I am close to.  Too volatile, too unpredictable.  Too much learned long ago.  This may explain why I write poetic prose - that, and a love of language and wordcraft.

Something is giving way, now, like pelvic bones parting in the passage of birth.  Like a clot of blood, root split rock, blue ice calving from the face of the glacier.  Will lungs clear, or will parts shear away that have withered from long neglect?  Will love be the ghost limb that aches at the stump? Will there be quietness with the cleaving, something new that remains?  Will I take her arm some day at other weddings, too well known to wonder whether the passing years have been kind to us, or cruel?

I don't know, and I won't know until I come to those places that cleanse or further clarify.  But I am aware, and present, and letting the wind blow through my open door.  I have all the big questions and all the doubts but I am here in the stream, head above water, not standing on the bank of that dark river.  Even though I tread water I do not stay in place.  Maybe my destination is the far side, or maybe I will fetch up at some landing downstream or even somewhere across the bar out in that bright salt water.  

Anything is possible at the beginning, and life is full of beginnings.

"One door opens, another shuts behind
One sun sets and another sun she rises
Love comes to you in old familiar ways
Love comes to you in shadows and disguises"

Sunday Morning Classical Rock: Led Zep for Tuba, etc.

I am a shameless fan of cover songs.  Not just any covers, though.  Fiendishly subversive, cross genre cover songs.  Like two old farts playing Led Zeppelin's Black Dog on a tuba.

Oustanding stuff. But wait, there's more, and it isn't just parody. How about Kashmir with 4 cellos?

Or Stairway to Heaven by a bass saxophone quartet?

Or by Roderigo y Gabriela.

Now I realize that Hayseed Dixie and Dredd Zeppelin are not everyone's cup of Jo (although I cannot for the life of me understand how this could be so), so for the rest of you proud, flag waving fans of the classics, here is an homage to Francis Scott Key, on Ukulele, by way of Jimi Hendrix.

All I'm trying to do is take you to Funky Town. God Bless America.

California Dreaming

I am back from several days visiting old friends in the Bay Area and still acclimating to the land of ice and snow I left behind.  Even in an El Nino year, rain on the Pacific Coast is a welcome change from winter in New England, and the sun came out for much of my stay. It was a fabulous opportunity to reconnect with one of my oldest and dearest friends and take advantage of the perspective that such a large step outside of my own routine affords.

My friends live in Oakland in a classic bungalow.  The air held the tang of citrus and rosemary from the extraordinary plantings that are possible in pocket gardens in this climate.  I always marvel at the size of outdoor jade plants, and lemons the size of grapefruits in backyard trees.  One day we walked into the hills above Berkeley, where houses perched over gushing ravines in the luxurious shade of mature oaks, and where the old grade of trolley lines now served as driveways and house lots.

We also went hiking in Muir Woods, a place that always dazzles me with the immensity of the redwoods, the cool of the ravine and its wild salmon stream. This time we hiked above the well traveled paths and into the surrounding hills.  This offered an entirely fresh perspective on the great trees and their sheltered groves. The steep hillside still supported massive trees, but the incline also elevated what was carpeting the forest floor - the familiar forms of unfamiliar species: flowering trillium and sorrel, fern and lady slipper orchids.  The trunks of the trees throughout the forest were scarred by centuries of wildfires, sometimes leaving vast hollow cavities that the great trees still accommodate.  We crested the ridge and stepped out into the sunlight on an open hillside with the Pacific coast in plain view and hardly a house to be seen for miles around.  This sort of wild space just minutes from the Golden Gate is truly a treasure.

We took in Richard Thompson performing at the Great American Music Hall, a gilded baroque marvel that arose on the ashes of the great earthquake and shares its gritty strip of prime real estate with burlesque clubs and Thai restaurants.  We proceeded from there to the Boom Boom Room next to the Fillmore, and closed out the wee hours of the day with an all night breakfast at the Grubstake; a diner that offered Portuguese fare along with bacon and eggs. 

There were grebes and egrets on the bay and clouds rolling over the city as I took wing yesterday.  I'm tired and utterly delighted to have been able to take the time to climb up and out of the ravine where I hunker down in winter. Today as my children scamper about and the snow falls in clumps from the barren trees, I replay the past week in all its glory and wonder and look forward with fresh eyes toward Spring.

Concert Review: Richard Thompson Band at the Great American Music Hall (2/25/2010)

It has been a considerable while since I last heard Richard Thompson strap on an electric guitar and blister through his back catalog with his band.  At the shows I have attended in the last few years, he has tended either to have been touring solo and acoustic or in his "1000 years of popular music" incarnation with Debra Dobkin and Judith Owen.  Indeed, he has another upcoming round in April double billed with Loudon Wainwright III as Loud and Rich. 

But last night at San Francisco's Great American Music Hall, the Richard Thompson Band wrapped up a three night stand and final night of a brief, West Coast recording tour of brand new material with a second set of his previous work.  I managed to make my way from the East Coast to the West to take it all in.

The band was in top form, with mainstay drummer Michael Jerome and polyinstrumental Peter Zorn blowing horns and playing rhythm joined by Joel Zifkin on violin and Taras Prodaniuk on bass.  Thompson is a generous front man, perhaps because he has also done extensive session work, and knows how to feature his talented fellow musicians without sucking the wind out of the performance by his own massive talent. 

There are some songs in the Thompson cannon that really open up with a full band.  Highlights from the second set included a monstrous jam on "Tear Stained Letter", the dance hall classic "Al Bowley's in Heaven" that fit the band in this grand old room like a pair of evening gloves, and an encore of "I Wanna See the Bright Lights Tonight" that rolled around the floor in glorious excess.  There were also surprises, like leading off the set with "Time Will Show the Wiser" from his youthful days with the Fairport Convention, "Can't Win" from 1988's Amnesia, and the choice of "Wall of Death" from the classic Shoot Out the Lights album with ex wife Linda Thompson. 

The audience seemed to appreciate that they were part of something unusual, as there was little shouting out of requests as is more typical of his solo shows.  I did not hear a single complaint that audience favorite "52 Vincent Black Lighting" did not get its customary airing - there had been too much ear candy in an evening that went nearly three hours.

The first set featured 13 songs of previously unrecorded new material.  The only one I had heard before was called (I believe) "A Brother Slips Away", written after the deaths of three old friends.  A Thompson ballad can just as easily be of the murder variety as of the tattered heart sort, and there were songs that came from both places in the new recordings.  Thompson's deliciously over the top audience banter helped set the crowd up for the unfamiliar songs, a few of which let him and the other band members really open up and explore the boundaries though this was more in evidence during the second set. 

I had the great pleasure of taking an old friend to see Richard Thompson for the first time at this concert and his wide eyed response as we left the theater was "I have a lot of catching up to do."  I hope that the live album that results from this tour features both sets, the old and new,  bookends of an exceptionally fine evening.

Giant Trees and Musical Giants: Wish You Were Here

I've got a heck of a good day lined up today. I will spend the daylight hours with my oldest friend hiking in the misty redwood columns of Muir Woods, a place I haven't seen for over a decade, and then tonight I'll be here watching this guy do this.  Factor in some of that outstanding Bay Area fare and a flight that doesn't leave for home until noon tomorrow,and I'm walking on air.

 

 

Descant

"April is in my mistress face / And July in her eyes hath place

Within her bosom is September / But in her heart a cold December."

                                                    - Thomas Morley (1594)

I remember every note of the first tenor part for this shortest of madrigals. All the choral music of the Christmas season has put in mind my singing days, when I could follow my last, clear note reverberating from the Chancel through the high columned Nave.  In Canterbury Cathedral, this lasted seven seconds. 

It wasn't Morley, then, on that March night when we visiting choristers and the Dean's wife had that incredible space all to ourselves.  Illuminated only by the candles in our hands, the columns disappeared overhead.  We descended stone steps hollowed by the knees of pilgrims, and had a moment of musical intimacy in the crypt as powerful as what we produced in the endless space above.  I was not quite seventeen years old.

I have known two great stands of eastern trees that stood for cathedrals.  One was Cornwall Connecticut's Cathedral Pines, eviscerated in a whirlwind.  The other is Cathedral Woods on Monhegan Island in Maine, where Red and White Spruce contend with a parasitic dwarf mistletoe that conspires to lay them low, leaving only Balsam Firs and hardwoods to reassemble the forest.  I have wandered in Muir Woods and among the great Sequoia groves, seen the clear cuts amid the old growth of the Olympic Peninsula during the height of the Spotted Owl war.  I was befriended in a logger bar by a shell shocked Viet Nam vet who saved me from  the impotent rage of one of its patrons.  I was 21.

Sometimes I stand by the shore, watching the great swells dash and cream against the rocks below, and yearn to lift off like the gulls flying below the headlands.  An old friend once wrote a poem about the gravity arc of the rope swing, where "if you time it right, you can hang like lightning in the air."  Hang like the high note in the vaulted cathedral, or the toppling trees in the wind.  All of an instant, rootless, and lighter than air.

Astronauts in training simulate such weightlessness in deliberate free fall, in a plane flying parabolic arcs.  Astronauts in space are always falling toward earth.  Deep Sea divers can also become disoriented in their three dimensional environment, with only their telltale bubbles to distinguish down from up.  In my diving days, I sometimes would hang at neutral buoyancy, rising and falling ever so gently with every breath.

These days I do not sing in choirs, or swing out over dark water.  But I still wander, amazed, in the cathedrals of the heart and forest, and slip loose from earth as I lift my eyes on brittle nights brimming with stars.

The WaPo: Too Square to be Hip

Alert reader Terry Cowgill, himself a fine journalist, observes this embarrassing correction by the Washington Post:

A Nov. 26 article in the District edition of Local Living incorrectly said a Public Enemy song declared 9/11 a joke. The song refers to 911, the emergency phone number.

Clearly, the reporters and copy editors responsible for the WaPo DC edition were listing to something else on their Sony Walkmen in 1990 when Public Enemy released "911 is a Joke" as the third track on Fear of a Black Planet, an album significant enough to be considered worthy of preservation by the Library of Congress in 2005.  Pitchfork Media calls it the 17th best album of the 1990's.  Take that, Nirvana!  

But perhaps these Post Toasties were underage when PE was telling everyone who saw Do The Right Thing to "fight the power zap bee", or whatever they were going on about in that song.  It's not like it was on MTV or anything.  Mind you, my college a capella group did an angelic arrangement of Fight The Power, in harmony.  Now that's old school.

Tangled Up In Reviews

What planet are these reviewers from?  Are they too cool to admit how irredeemably dreadful Bob Dylan's new holiday album really is?

Rolling Stone lays it on thick:  

"The effect is like a Woodstock snowfall with the defiance of 1970's Self Portrait: another way of saying his roots are everywhere."

Perhaps, but from where I'm sitting his visionary talent is nowhere in evidence.

The Chicago Tribune's music critic gives the old man a gentleman's C:

"I'm willing to cut him a break here. Besides, the CD actually isn't that bad, and in some cases ("Here Comes Santa Claus" for example) is actually pretty damn hilarious."

Yes, comedy.  And everyone keeps saying that Dylan plays it straight, so the joke must be on those of us not hip enough to get it.

From Pop Matters:

"It’s a double shot of straight sentimental corn syrup, and it’s the closest Dylan has come to crooning since Nashville Skyline, his lovely 1969 country ode to domesticity. The years and cigarettes have had their way with the man’s larynx, and he can’t match the warm honeycomb baritone that surprised and confused his fans three decades ago—frankly, he often comes off as a lunatic warbling carols with almost terrifying conviction—but nevertheless, his damaged voice is full of warmth and sweetness. “Although it’s been said many times, many ways… Merry Christmas to you,” he sings, and he sounds like he means it more than Mel Torme ever did. For all the world, the record doesn’t feel like a charity album or a goofball lark or an odd experiment—it just sounds like the work of a dude who really, really loves Christmas."

Crap.  Now I'm the Grinch 'cause I say it's not just the weather outside that's frightful.  And I tend to go for screwball novelty recordings, as a rule. 

Somebody stick a Pitchfork in him; he's done:

It's not hard to presuppose that Dylan-- who has an entire encyclopedia, dozens of nonfiction treatises, and at least a handful of college courses dedicated to parsing his lyrics and intent-- is either deeply irritated or deeply bemused by his anointment, and is responding to over-the-top canonization by doing deliberately oddball stuff (see also: leering at underwear models in a Victoria's Secret commercial). Even the title-- eerily reminiscent of Kenny Rogers' 1998 turd, Christmas From the Heart-- feels tongue-in-cheek. But maybe that's a trap, too-- maybe, like zillions of red-blooded, religiously ambiguous American dudes, Bob Dylan just likes Christmastime and Adriana Lima. And we're stupid for presuming anything more.

Again with "We are not worthy?" This is embarrassing. Jolly Old St. Bob left his sooty footprints all over the carpet and the critics are in denial.

Why not call it like it is;  the man is getting more attention for this "charity offering" than any of his largely irrelevant recordings of the past decade.  And I'm not buying it.

Ho ho ho.

Riding in the Slipstream with Loud and Rich

I took in back-to-back shows this weekend by Loudon Wainright III and Richard Thompson, who are touring North America together this Fall as "Loud and Rich."  This is the first time since my Deadhead days I have followed musicians from one gig to the next, and it afforded me the chance to see how this combo was shaping up and especially to spoil myself by listening to Richard Thompson two nights in a row.  I swear, I could happily do that for a week of Sundays, even if he stuck to the same set list.  The things he can do with a guitar never fail to astonish. 

These two old friends are an intriguing pairing.  They both share a merciless wit, with clear affection for novelty songs and dark humor.  Thompson produced a couple of Wainwright's albums and Loudon has covered some of Thompson's songs.  They both have folk roots and they both have maintained a loyal fan base for about 40 years.  They clearly get along, and that was particularly evident in some of the songs they did together.  Otherwise, they are very different musicians.  Wainwright is a shoot-from-the-hip kind of performer, whereas Thompson has a smoother delivery, spot on timing and far superior technique.  They may have had equal billing, but any other performer with Loudon's skills would have merely been the opening act. 

Loud and Rich played the Flynn Theater in Burlington Vermont on October 3rd, and Harvard's Sanders Theater in Cambridge, MA on the 4th. The format of the tour has Loudon playing for about an hour, to be joined by Thompson for a pair of songs and then wrapping up with one more on his own.  After intermission, Thompson takes the stage for an hour, with Loudon coming back for two encores together (the first Thompson's choice, the second one Loudon's).  With the exception of "Down Where the Drunkards Roll" - done as a duet as the first encore on both nights -  the other songs they performed together were different each time.  The best was a raucous rendition in Cambridge of the R&B classic "Smokey Joe's Cafe", which suited their styles really well, and featured Thompson's over the top delivery of Smokey Joe's warning -  in a Scottish brogue, no less -  "You better eat up all your beans, boy and clear right on out."

I understand now why restaurant critics make two visits before submitting their reviews, because the Flynn show had some unfortunate "presentation issues", particularly in Loudon's uneven opening set, that were fortunately nowhere in evidence the next night.  Anyone, particularly a guitarist who plays his ax as savagely as Wainwright, can break a guitar string.  Loudon broke two, without a technician to swap out instruments, and forgot the words to some of his new songs on more than one occasion.  Even RT was not immune to whatever bad karma was in the air, as he unintentionally disconnected in the closing bars of 52 Vincent Black Lightning (the horror!).  To his credit, Wainwright had his game fully on at the Cambridge show. The first nights of this kind of tour are essentially the shakedown cruise, anyway.

Wainwright had a piano on stage in Burlington and pulled out "Red Guitar" and "Another Song in C", which managed to pull the heartstrings at one moment and dip into self-referential mockery the next.  He didn't bring his banjo, alas.  He featured a number of songs from his last two albums and some that haven't even made it to disc yet.  I admit that since one of these - Recovery - consists of revisiting songs from his back catalog, I was hoping for a few more old chestnuts. "Dead Skunk"?  "Swimming Song"?  "Clockwork Chartreuse"? No matter.  Always alert to topics and trends ripe for exploitation in song, Wainwright has several "for the New Depression", including "Cash For Clunkers", a crowd favorite that Loudon wisely decided to lead off with the second night.  Wainwright was game to shuffle his set list from night to night, which bodes well for the tour as he adapts to crowd response.

Thompson gave strong performances on both nights.  I was blessed with very close seats in both theaters.  The guitarists in the audience - including my wife for the Burlington show - were universally gobsmacked by his picking and fretwork.  I've seen him perform live often enough in the last few years to start to notice how even songs that seem to be in regular rotation evolve as he plays, and especially the way he sings them.  He positively growls the line "to ride" in 52 Vincent Black Lightning like the pipes of James Adie's motorbike, and the way he ratchets up the vocal crescendos of Crawl Back (Under My Stone) - the closing song of the second set on both nights - left me and everyone else in the hall as delirious as the roiling chords that wail in waves from that guitar like it were a fully loaded Strat instead of acoustic.

Thompson's set during the Flynn Show stuck to a list that included a haunting rendition of "Persuasion" and a foray into the acoustic material from the mid 90's album You? Me? Us?, from which he selected both "Cold Kisses" and (surprisingly) "Woods of Darney".  Richard has a new lament in his repertoire to go with three recent losses - with the chorus "A Brother Slips Away" - that I hope makes it into his next album.  He did great renditions of "I Wanna See the Bright Lights Tonight" each show, dropping an hilarious aside during the second performance that the original LP featured the misprinted lyric "a couple of drunken knights rolling around on the floor"  that would have made ol' Sigmund proud. 

RT seems to favor some of his more recent work more than others in performance. He knows that "52 Vincent Black Lightning" is the one song we all must have and very kindly obliges us every time. He featured three songs from "Sweet Warrior" in Burlington that I heard him do last year in Great Barrington: "Johnny's Far Away", "Dad's Gonna Kill Me" and "Sunset Song", which last has the potential to be another audience favorite in the same vein as "Beeswing".  However, the songs from his 2005 "all acoustic" Front Parlor Ballads appear destined for obscurity and rarely get an airing.

The second set in Cambridge followed the same list as the night before until the audience started calling out requests.  So near the end, with Thompson declaring he was "putty in our hands", he obliged by playing "Bathsheba Smiles", "Beeswing" and "From Galway to Graceland".  On this night with things breaking their way and all that good energy in the hall, I would have loved to have heard another song or two with Loud and Rich together.  God knows what they would have decided to play next.  Maybe something by Plastic Bertrand.  Thompson has that covered.

All in all I was pleased to have attended both concerts. A bit of a novelty act, something of an experiment, it was great fun to watch and hear.  My cousins in Charlottesville should make every effort to catch Loud and Rich when they roll into town, and RT has a solo gig coming up in Princeton, too, so my kin in Jersey have an appointment to keep.