Author Archives: Roger Catlin

When The Feelies started nearly half a century ago in New Jersey, nobody expected they’d be playing well into the second decade of the 21st century at full strength.

Looking like twitchy, shy, bespectacled kids on their influential 1980 debut—best described by the title of the frantic track that kicked it off, “The Boy with Perpetual Nervousness”—they nowadays more resemble professors emeriti. But at a big sold out show at the Black Cat in DC, they seem even more shy than ever—or at least start their shows that way.

Over the din of the crowd Saturday, they quietly took seats for an opening acoustic set some may not had realized had begun. The frantic strumming and entwining rhythms were there, if one listened, but the vocals were so low in the mix, one could stand right next to the club’s biggest PA and still strain to hear Glenn Mercer’s baritone.

By their second number, a cover of “Sunday Morning,” the crowed quieted enough to pay attention. After all, the track kicks off the band’s release last fall, Some Kinda Love: Performing the Music of the Velvet Underground, chronicling a 2018 show.

It was just one of three songs performed from that salute, however. It was as if a song that had so internalized that band’s tone, intensity and simple, poetic lyrics (not to mention Mercer’s Lou Reed-like deadpan) there was no need to further reference their biggest influence.

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PHOTOS: SHAWN MILLER/LIBRARY OF CONGRESS | The sheer appeal and influence of Elton John’s music can be seen in the wide-ranging top-name artists who came to pay tribute and perform his songs last week at the 2024 Library of Congress Gershwin Awards Prize for Popular Song.

From the jolting opening strains of Metallica, of all people, at the DAR Constitution Hall slashing and burning through “Funeral for a Friend / Loves Lies Bleeding” (that may have left some Congressional ears bleeding) to the frailer tones of 80-year-old Joni Mitchell, declaring “I’m Still Standing,” albeit aided by cane and high profile backup singers in Annie Lennox and Brandi Carlile.

Mitchell, who won the Gershwin Prize last year (an event whose subsequent broadcast earned an Emmy) wasn’t the only past winner in the mix. Garth Brooks, the 2020 prizewinner, doffed his black hat and crooned two tunes, “Sorry Seems to Be the Hardest Word” and “Daniel.”

Few of the artists seemed willing to stray far from the original arrangements of the songs by John, 76, and lyricist Bernie Taupin, 73, who was sharing the award. In winning the prize named after George and Ira Gershwin, John and Taupin were the third team to be so honored, after Bacharach and David in 2012 and Emilio and Gloria Estefan in 2019; and only the second and third Brits—after Paul McCartney in 2010.

Still, both effusively praised the American music that inspired them both. “It’s been responsible for everything that I love in my musical life,” John said. “Everything I do emanates from the American songbook, which is the fountainhead,” Taupin said.

For most of the evening the two got to sit in the front row and bask in the performances of their songs by others. Of them, Lennox gave a strong gospel undergirding to “Border Song”; Maren Morris gave a reverent reading of “I Guess That’s Why They Call It the Blues.” Juilliard grad and Elton neighbor Charlie Puth approached “Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on Me” like a recital, pausing dramatically before it began to take the moment in.

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Cat Power has devoted a large portion of her career to reinterpreting other artists’ material, with three full albums and two EPs of cover songs, from artists as wide ranging as Billie Holiday, Nick Cave, and The Rolling Stones. She’s also covered Bob Dylan on those releases, largely sticking to early outtakes like “Kingsport Town” and “Paths of Victory,” or “I Believe in You” from Slow Train Coming. 

Compared to those, her latest project more resembled a hugely ambitious performance art piece—reproducing an entire Dylan concert, one of his most notorious, song for song, from the very stage it was purported to have been performed. Cat Power Sings Dylan: The 1966 Royal Albert Hall Concert replicates the concert that was actually recorded at the Manchester Free Trade Hall but widely bootlegged as being from London’s Royal Albert Hall—and is so much associated with that hall so that Dylan’s eventual official bootleg release of it in 1998 retained that title in quotation marks: Bob Dylan Live 1966: The ‘Royal Albert Hall’ Concert.

No need to do that when Cat Power, also known as Chan Marshall, recorded her show at the Royal Albert Hall to further extend the legend by bringing it to the place where it had never been. Manchester was the famous stop amid Dylan’s contentious English tour when UK folk audiences were reacting to the electric presentation of songs in the second half of the show—catcalling, slow-clapping and with someone ultimately yelling “Judas!” before the final number.

Someone, either as a joke or stirred by history, yelled the same thing when Marshall booked the Royal Albert Hall in November 2022 and recorded her version of the songs in order. Released a year later, the live album is being promoted on the current tour—for an entirely more positive audience response.

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Steve Forbert teaming up with Freedy Johnston to tour sounds like a perfect match, until you imagine them trying to combine their distinctly rough-hewn, sometimes ragged voices as they tool down the road.

That may be the reason why the two never quite share the stage in shows like the one Saturday night in northern Virginia. Instead, the idea that each brings their audience along to appreciate the other’s set which are after all pretty simpatico in lyric smarts and tuneful melodies (if not always the smoothest of pipes).

Johnston, the Kansas native, burst on the scene with a bunch of fine songs in his early albums 30 years ago. Songs from his 1994 This Perfect World still comprise about half of his freewheeling solo set (which was pretty different from the set a week before). But he had songs from three other albums, including his latest, the 2022 Back on the Road to You, as well as a new, yet unrecorded tune about the time he tried to be a drummer in a band but was fired (since he had no experience whatsoever behind a set).

“I’ve played here about 200 times,” he said to the familiar settings of the strip mall club in Vienna, VA. “It’s great to be here for the 201st!” He didn’t dress for the occasion, in his ball cap, black T shirt over black long sleeve T-shirt, jeans, and a key ring outside his belt loop, janitor-style. But he had a good rapport with the fans, requesting some “hot liquid” two songs in because “my voice needs help.” He weighted the end of his set with “This Perfect World,” his cover of Jimmy Webb’s “Wichita Lineman” to his conclusive “Bad Reputation.”

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PHOTO: DAVID DOOBININ | Juliana Hatfield looked a little severe as she stepped onto the Kennedy Center Millennium Stage for a well attended free show last weekend. In a slim dark military coat with epaulets, her greying hair center parted and pulled back in a bun.

But soon into her set, accompanying herself on her Barbie-pink electric guitar, she was as we’ve ever known her, in that earnest, high voice, staying true to herself as she mowed down subjects in her songs. There was a sort of logic to her set—the opening “Candy Wrappers” were strewn “all over the hotel room floor,” which led to “Hotel” (“welcome me when I need a home”). She may have been thinking about coming down from Boston and checking into her DC hotel.

Later, she laid bare her process of sequencing songs, saying she paired “Wonder Why,” the well-observed song describing her parents’ house, with an Electric Light Orchestra cover, because the former song described “a transistor radio held up to my ear” on which her teenage self was likely listening to ELO.

Doing cover albums has been a thing in recent years for Hatfield—her latest is Juliana Hatfield Sings ELO, from which she did “Telephone Line,” which required a bit of crowd participation, as well as the lesser known “Sweet in the Night,” which she said was her favorite.

From her other thematic cover albums she played the most famous one from the Police collection, “Roxanne,” with just the right tone, and two from her surprising collection of Olivia Newton John songs—the yearning country ballad “Please Mr. Please” and the splendidly poppy “Dancing’ ‘Round and ‘Round.”

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Chuck Prophet appeared a little wary when he looked out at the seated, earlybird audience at the Kennedy Center’s Millennium Stage, essentially a hallway of the cavernous performing arts hall. There is some prestige to start a short tour at the hallowed national space—and though a few hundred were on hand to witness it live, it’s also amplified through an in-house video available worldwide for free streaming.

Prophet by now certainly knows how to shape a show; beginning some of his wistful rockers with amusing stories and always ready with an unexpected reference or lyric turn of phrase. He told of an odd fourth grade field trip near San Clemente in “Nixonland,” of a meeting at the power lines in “Womankind,” and a yearning for an alternate world where the New York Dolls were still around and he’d be “High as Johnny Thunders.”

Those three were from the latest album, the 2019 The Land That Time Forgot, whose songs fit nicely with his live standards, from an unseasonable “Summertime Thing” to “Doubter Out of Jesus (All Over You),” a tune he said he got to sing once on Late Night with David Letterman, when the reaction of his mother later was “It’s not my favorite song.”

The emphasis of his show were songs from his 21st century releases, the 2014 Night Surfer and Temple Beautiful, his 2012 stand out album dedicated to his hometown of San Francisco and its colorful people. There was nothing, though, from his first rate 2017 Bobby Fuller Died for Your Sins, perhaps because it’s more built for a band.

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One imagines New Year’s Eve weekend gigs as big dress-up affairs, with champagne toasts, balloon drops, and an overall classier sort of celebration. Southern Culture on the Skids, as their name implies, works against most of that, with swampy, stomping anthems about dirt tracks, fried chicken, mobile homes, moonshine, and generally déclassé down-home living.

The band’s stage set Saturday at the Pearl Street Warehouse in DC, had a few strands of sad looking garland on amplifiers, some cardboard ribbons to denote the recent Yuletide they never mentioned. Bassist Mary Huff, in her bouffed up hair and go-go boots, looked the most done-up for New Year’s; she cracked open the Lite variation of what was once known as the champagne of bottled beer.

On the first of the two night stand, they didn’t have to worry about countdowns at midnight—or any kind of particular arc to their typically woolly and wayward show. The closest they came was a cover of The Pretty Things’ 1966 “Midnight to Six Man,” but that was about it. Mostly they stuck to their greasy, down-home formula, which was certainly welcome from a band that recently marked its 40th anniversary.

Throughout, guitarist and front man Rick Miller is the only mainstay, but they’ve remained the same trio for 36 years, still sounding vital, though they looked a little odd all spread across the bar’s stage with Miller center, Huff over to one side thrumming her pink bass, and the hard-hitting drummer Dave Hartman way over on the left, standing at his sparse kit of a snare and two toms.

Miller, in his seed cap and grey pappy chin beard is a demon on the guitar, kicking off with a stinging surf instrumental, “Skullbucket,” cracking a smile every time he hit a sweet riff. On harder rockers like the “Voodoo Cadillac” that followed or the boogie “Greenback Fly,” he gets a little lost in his driving solos, extending them into extended guitar workouts, cutting further and further into the groove until Huff shoots him a look as if to remind him its time to wrap up. Hartman, for his part, just keeps whacking away, with nothing to slow this engine.

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Molly Tuttle knew she had a great bluegrass band when she put together The Golden Highway two years ago, so soon after touring their first album together last year, the Grammy-winning Crooked Tree, she got busy writing songs for a new album. Ten songs from that new one, City of Gold dominated their big sellout show at the 9:30 Club last week, closing the Eastern leg of their tour.

Tuttle, fresh off a full-show Austin City Limits broadcast, was happy to be making her first appearance at the long-running DC club (which she thought was so named because that’s when all its shows start). Her confidence seemed that much more amped up to fill a rock club, following her previous area show last year, playing the quieter Birchmere across the river in Alexandria, VA.

The new album is something of a road trip into the West, into the old gold mining towns in “El Dorado” or riding an imaginary rail in the “San Joaquin” from Tehachapi to Bakersfield. And she began with its anthem of “a girl as wild as a western town” who “can saddle up, not settle down” in “Evergreen, OK.”

There was little settling down in the typically high-energy show that offered a lot of showcases for the speedy, virtuoso band members, from mandolinist Dominick Leslie, who is also part of the group Hawktail; as well as fiddler Bronwyn Keith-Hynes, Shelby Means on bass, and Kyle Tuttle on banjo.

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It was a bit of a shock to see Lucinda Williams being helped onto the stage for her Don’t Tell Anybody the Secrets tour at the sleek new Capital One Hall in Tysons, VA. Unsure on her feet and moving slowly on the arm of a roadie, she presented quite a different vision than the strong and vibrant, guitar-slinging singer-songwriter we’ve come to know over the past few decades.

The path was to a stool where she sat, minus guitar, swinging her feet, as she alternated stories of her life with appropriate songs. Her condition precluded her playing her guitar temporarily, she said. “I like to think of it as temporary.” And while she freely noted that it was due to “a stroke I had last year,” it was 2020 when she suffered that stroke. Luckily, it didn’t affect her voice, which still had its lilting drawl while speaking and was absolutely strong, clear, and ringing through her songs.

Because the tour is named after the memoir she released earlier this year and not the album she also put out in this year (that has a title like a book), Stories from a Rock n Roll Heart, the evening took the format of one of those book and music shows, most successfully done by Bruce Springsteen on Broadway from 2017 to 2021, but also attempted by Ray Davies for his book X Ray in 1995.

Williams never read directly from her book, though. Rather, she shared her vignettes of growing up in various towns in the South, playing guitar since she was 12, extemporaneously—often wondering if she was going a little too far off track before she’d get back to the song with which she’d pair it.

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PHOTO: NANCY RANKIN ESCOVEDO | Alejandro Escovedo has played with a lot of different outfits over the years, from raging punk bands to Americana outfits to classical ensembles. One of the more unusual pairings may have been the rural Italian group with whom he cut his last album, The Crossing (with whom he’ll reunite for an album of new versions of old songs before recording some new things next year).

For now, ever the troubadour, Escovedo has been touring in a trio that’s given some muscle and versatility to whatever he selects from what he called “14 or something albums.” For the tour that brought him to The Hamilton in DC, Escovedo was flanked by able Houston drummer Mike Henne and Denton, Texas, keyboardist Scott Danbom. Together they brought a full backing to Escovedo’s electric guitar and a voice that was still surprisingly strong and smooth at 72.

The stories behind “The Crossing,” a coming of age tale that somewhat mirrored his own family’s move from Mexico to Texas to California, provided a lot of the dialog. But he also moved back to things like “Sometimes” from 1996’s With These Hands. Whole albums were necessarily skipped in the 13-song set, particularly Real Animal and Street Songs of Love, but the 2001 album A Man Under the Influence provided a kind of framework for the show, starting with “Wave,” the moving song of migration that opened the show; to the love story “Rosalie” that provided an emotional heart late in the show, with its own explanatory intro; to the can’t miss, set-closing rocker “Castanets.”

Danbom, formerly of Centro-matic, and who had also played in Slobberbone and (briefly) Drive-by Truckers, had the responsibilities of a Ray Manzarek—holding down bass on his analog synthesizer while paying electric keyboards, adding a distinctive “96 Tears” vibe to things like “Break This Time.” But Escovedo often stood opposite Henne’s drum set, concentrating on the basic call-and-response of drums to guitar that’s often at the heart of his songbook.

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Call them the good X.

Unlike that corporate overlord’s sudden new name for Twitter, this one has been banging out the finest of Los Angeles punk since 1977. That they’re still around in the original configuration, sounding great, after decades of commercial indifference, intermittent personnel changes, a farewell tour, and years’ long hiatuses, is a reason to cheer. And a triumphant 24 song show at the 9:30 Club, capping a two-day residence in DC, showed them at their best.

Not that there hadn’t been a few glitches this summer, too. Washington was among a dozen dates that had to be postponed due to a member recovering from an emergency surgery. The member wasn’t named in the announcement, but guitarist Billy Zoom had been diagnosed with bladder cancer in 2015 and though he has since been proclaimed cancer-free, has gone in for additional chemotherapy.

Zoom, now 75, was first to get on the 9:30 stage, though, to plug in his guitar and begin to play along to the recorded Link Wray “Rumble” intro, albeit atop a tall stool. Always the picture of sleek, pompadoured cool in the X heyday, he looks a bit like his own grandpa now (but among long time fans doesn’t).

His ringing riffs, born of classic Chuck Berry and Cliff Gallup, were all still there, though he seemingly had to remind himself to smile. Zoom had built a stage presence based on blissful tranquility as he tore through the solos, intent on exploding the notion that rock guitarists have to also show theatrical expressions of pain as they solo. This time, though, the smiles sometimes bordered on grimaces as the show continued.

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Part of the appeal of the National Pastime are the endless stories of its colorful characters over the decades, their dizzying achievements or career-crashing failures, the arcane stats and mostly, the shared experience—around the TV or in ballparks.

No wonder a group of experienced rockers decided to mine the sport for material, creating a whole songbook of baseball songs. That’s been the mission for The Baseball Project since it formed 16 years ago. And with a new album out, their first in nine years, the band is back delighting audiences as they stomp through their rocking songs of baseball lore, as they did Thursday at The Hamilton in DC.

Ex-Dream Syndicate Steve Wynn and Scott McCaughey of the Minus 5 (and many other bands), are the kind of songwriters so steeped in their craft that they can turn out dozens of songs commemorating the most esoteric tales, and the history of baseball is rife with them. But their other famous band members, Peter Buck and Mike Mills of R.E.M., have been contributing music or whole songs lately as well.

In baseball, when big stars came to small towns for exhibitions, they’d call it barnstorming. And there was a similar feel in this tour stop—the exhilaration of seeing Buck and Mills up close on the kind of stage size they’d have when they began, slung with matching black and white Rickenbackers (though one was an electric guitar, the other a bass). More than a couple fans angled to snap photos of the amp case prominently stamped “R.E.M. Athens GA.”

The last time I caught Buck and Mills on such a stage in these parts (for McCaughey’s Minus 5), they did “Don’t Come Back to Rockville” in an encore. But by now there was so much baseball material to cover—in 26 rockers, over two sets and an encore—there was no need to dip into old catalogs of R.E.M., the Dream Syndicate, the Minus 5, or the Young Fresh Fellows for that matter.

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