Like many other people, I welcomed Lucinda Williams into my life with the release of the Grammy-winning Car Wheels on a Gravel Road, in 1998. Over the course of the last 10 years, I’ve been a fascinated observer of her career, both on record, and on the road. I’ve had the opportunity to see her perform live on numerous occasions, and although her backing band tended to change with every new tour, she has always had a knack for employing some of the finest musicians available. This is particularly true of her guitar players, a group that has included such greats as Gurf Morlix, J.J. Jackson, Kenny Vaughan, Bo Ramsey, and her current sidekick, the redoubtable Doug Pettibone, who shines brightly on this album.
To follow Williams’ career is to listen as she bares her broken heart time and again in her songs. But there’s good news this time out: “I’m stepping out and writing about things other than unrequited love. But because that’s not part of my experience anymore doesn’t mean I’m going to stop being a songwriter,” she explains. “There are plenty of other important things to write about — the state of the world for one thing — I don’t buy into the myth that because you get to a certain level of contentment, you have to throw in the towel.” Hopefully some of her more satisfied contemporaries are listening. (more…)
It was a strange Sunday evening in the wilds of Holmdel, New Jersey. The PNC Arts Center usually allows patrons onto the property two hours before show time at 6:00 PM, and so I found myself on the Garden State Parkway with Elvis Costello’s Brutal Youth CD on the stereo and thoughts of scoring a sensible parking space bouncing in my brain. Little did I know that, as a courtesy to the weekenders, the venue let people in at 4:00. They dumped me out into the adjacent woods to park! This did not bode well.
Now, had the evening ended there, I wouldn’t have walked away from this performance completely baffled. It would have been my shortest concert experience, but we all would have felt like we wanted to be in the same room with each other, band included. We’re all aware of the behind-the-scenes tensions purportedly happening in Camp Police. We’re also aware that even back in the early days, Sting commanded the majority of the attention, a position that could quickly irritate, and while hearsay shouldn’t color one’s impressions so early in the game, it was evident when Sting, Andy Summers and Stewart Copeland took the stage that they were plainly irritated.
