Author Archives: Roger Catlin

Before it was so rudely interrupted, Bob Dylan’s annual touring regimen took on a recurring pattern, playing the same towns the same times of the year. His last time in Washington, DC was the first week of December 2019. The final show in that leg of the campaign that he never called the Never Ending Tour looked like it may well have served as his last live performance ever as the pandemic raged on, closing venues for more than a year and a half, wiping out touring schedules for more than a year as Dylan, deserving a break after so many years of service, was entering his ninth decade.

But a brief month-long tour materialized despite all odds (and during a brief clearing in the gloom of Covid variants) and here was Dylan, back in DC at the Anthem during the first week of December 2021 closing the latest leg of his tour, selling out the place at 80.

With the latest handful of subtle but tasty musicians behind him, Dylan emerged from the shadows a couple of minutes before the 8 o’clock start time, suggesting an early bird special. The ensemble remained in shadows or silhouette for much of the show, which depended on dim footlights and illumination of the curtain folds behind them.

And when they all shambled to a start on an unrecognizable “Watching the River Flow,” it seemed like Dylan, behind a big upright piano, was sputtering to keep up, the river’s flow having gotten away from him. His voice was a froggy growl, as if frayed at the end of the tour, the timing all wrong. Things didn’t much improve on the next song announcing his intention to forge his own direction despite expectations, “Most Likely You Go Your Way And I’ll Go Mine.”

It seemed like it was going to be a long night.

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Add to the list of necessary roadie skills that of leaf blower.

He’s the guy who scampers on stage at a Flaming Lips concert to inflate a series of transparent plastic bubbles surrounding lead singer Wayne Coyne—or similarly blow-up giant rainbows, or swaying pink robots, as required.

Decades ago, Coyne developed the idea of singer-in-plastic bubble at rock concerts as a method to roll over his blissed-out audience, improving and streamlining the hand-to-hand combat of crowd surfing. When Covid hit, they proved safe barriers; he devised a series of concerts in the band’s hometown of Oklahoma City where not only all the band members were enclosed in their own bubbles, but so were the audience members. Now, the band must have piles of leftover bubbles.

By the end of their fall tour Tuesday at the Anthem in Washington, DC, concert restrictions had eased enough to allow fans to move around without being confined to bubbles (vaccination proof and masks were still part of the protocol, though).

But Coyne sang almost entirely inside a series of bubbles, with new ones constantly subbing in when his got too foggy, too hot, or a little less inflated. At 60, he no longer rolls over the audience. But he did roll out a big bubble full of balloons to the crowd at the show’s end. And he had other distractions: shooting streamers, pointing a spotlight into the crowd, unleashing confetti at various times, and hoisting a site-specific set of letter balloons at the finale.

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Chuck Prophet is always cheery and maybe a little goofy on stage. But Sunday at Jammin’ Java out in Vienna, VA, he seemed cheerier than usual. “I don’t know if you noticed, but we’ve been gone,” he said by way of explaining the pandemic that wiped out more than a year and a half of touring. “And now we’re back.”

He said so as if to explain “We might be a little rusty. It’s been a while.” But he and the four-piece Mission Express sounded fine indeed. “We’re going to put this little strip mall in Virginia on the map!” Before a sold-out audience at said strip mall, he doffed his mask to begin with the march of “Bobby Fuller Died for Your Sins” and mixed in his well-honed songs from his last handful of albums, including a few from one that came out in 2020, the year time forgot, titled The Land that Time Forgot.

That collection included the dance party of “Marathon,” the reflection into past cultural touchstones in “High as Johnny Thunders,” and the autobiographical tale about growing up in Whittier, CA, and its brooding political shadow, “Nixonland.” But Prophet has such a rich array of surefire live songs that he can mix and mingle in highlights like the participatory “Wish Me Luck” (with a dour intro from Creedence’s “Lodi”), to the enduring “Summertime Thing,” which goes back nearly 20 years to the same album that produced “Run Primo Run,” which he also pulled out.

Prophet has enough songs in his quiver to select ones topical to the moment. While he doesn’t currently have one about the end of Daylight Savings Time, he did have “Castro Halloween,” which lamented “Halloween is gone,” seven days after the holiday. And cowriting “Always a Friend” allowed him to play that blast of an Alejandro Escovedo song.

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Prolific songwriter Stephin Merritt seems to respond best to creative prompts. Sixty-Nine love songs? Sure. A dozen songs that start with the letter I? Easy. One song representing each year of your 50-year-old life? Okay. All have been projects for his band The Magnetic Fields over the years. The latest was 30 songs each clocking in at 2 minutes, 35 seconds or less, called Quickies.

An accompanying tour for the collection, released in May 2020, did not come so quickly, though, due to the pandemic. A series of City Winery residencies for the band across the country, first planned for March 2020, was delayed at least a couple of times until it finally got running this fall, making its most recent stop at the Washington, DC outlet for a three night stand over the weekend.

It’s a compact crew, especially compared to the last time Merritt was here four years ago, amid a spectacular stage set and larger (but largely unseen) backing band of six doing 50 Song Memoir in order over two nights.

Here, evenly spaced across the stage was Merritt, perched on a stool to the right, alongside cellist Sam Davol (who switched to broken bongo from time to time); Shirley Simms on ukulele, vocals and autoharp, and Claudia Gonson on piano, vocals, and toy tambourine.

It was sparse looking compared to the fussy, colorful, toy-filled stage last time. And were they spaced out because of Covid considerations? (Simms and Davol wore masks, except when she was singing or he sipped tea; the audience, packed as they were, had to have shown vaccination proof or negative test results, and were asked to wear masks when not downing wine—about half did).

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One plus of The Jayhawks playing the mid-Atlantic is that their former bandmate, guitarist Stephen McCarthy, often drives up from Richmond, VA to rejoin the Minneapolis band, adding some extra country twang and bringing added authenticity to the classic albums the Long Ryders member made with them, 2006’s Rainy Day Music.

His appearance with the band at the Hamilton in Washington, DC Friday was not such a casual reunion—his addition was vital to fill out the band after Karen Grotberg begged off of dates in DC and Philly over the weekend due to a short medical leave.

Grotberg adds a lot to the band, and has ever since she joined in 1992 with thoughtful keyboards and sweet harmonies with frontman Gary Louris. On the band’s latest album XOXO, meant to showcase songs and vocals from each band member (and not rely so much on Louris), she was standout on a couple of songs.

This time it was drummer Tim O’Regan doing most of the harmonies with Louris as well as a couple of songs where he took lead, “Tampa to Tulsa” and a newer one, “Dogtown Days.” (O’Regan’s family was in the crowd, we were told, and there was a singalong to note his recent birthday.)

But McCarthy helped on harmonies as well, though his focus was that pedal steel and electric guitar twang. Still, there was a rockier sound to the all-boys lineup (rounded out by bassist Marc Perlman, who didn’t sing at all). The combination of guitars led to some dizzying heights as on “Waiting for the Sun,” one of a couple songs pulled from their third album, Hollywood Town Hall, now marking its 30th anniversary.

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Americana kingpin Jason Isbell is always a gracious frontman and performer. But he had to stop his show with his band The 400 Unit a couple of times Tuesday at Wolf Trap in Virginia to take in what he was seeing: a nearly full outdoor amphitheater packed with fans who had been waiting as long as he had to hear songs from his most recent album Reunions, released in May 2020. Sixteen months later he was performing it as he intended before an appreciative crowd under a rising half moon. “Here we all are!” he marveled. “No screens!”

A lot of the new album’s songs were built for playing live and the first couple selections from his set, “Overseas” and “What’ve I Done to Help,” snarled with expressive guitar solos from he and guitarist Sadler Vaden. Both favor a kind of wild, electric slide tonality echoing the best of ’70s inventiveness from Duane Allman to David Lindley. Isbell has attracted wide attention with his songwriting, though, with compositions that are full of the kind of detail and turn of phrase that can stun midway through.

With his wife Amanda Shires back in Nashville recovering from an unnamed malady, it’s tempting to say the band played harder and tilted more toward rock than they might have had she been there with her countrified fiddle and backing vocals. Vaden added Pete Townshend-style windmill slashes to his guitar more than once, which might have triggered drummer Chad Gamble to rumble like Keith Moon, while bassist Jimbo Hart conjured up a bass solo or two in the tradition of John Entwistle. But then again, Isbell can turn on a dime and produce quieter acoustic meditations that are all the more astonishing when they quiet a big outdoor audience that had been rocking along minutes earlier.

To keep things interesting for himself, his band, and maybe audience members who catch more than one show, Isbell switches the setlist around each night. As a result, those who peek at what he’d played in previous shows may be disappointed when he didn’t play them here. But then again, pulling things out of the hat means playing some unexpected selections, from “Alabama Pines” in the first half of the show to “Speed Trap Town” toward the end.

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Willie Nile’s pent up energy for getting back on the road was fairly palpable in his show Saturday at the Hamilton in DC.

Originally scheduled for April 2020, it had been postponed by the pandemic to summer that year, then to April this year, to finally this late summer date 16 months later. In the interim, the rocker released two strong albums of new material to play to fit along with favorites from a 40 year career.

Blending the drive and heart of the Stones with a raspy delivery of a Dylan, Nile is a master of combining the simplicity and sheer fun of Chuck Berry with the poetic insight and effective wordplay of the folk scene where he rose. With a veteran three-piece backing, his set careened from carefree, anthemic rockers to declarative stands that are durable enough to endure for future issues than the ones from which they sprang.

The title song for his new The Day the Earth Stood Still, as well as its “Blood On Your Hands” rose from the pandemic’s rise and spectacular initial fumbling by the government. “The Innocent Ones,” about another humanitarian crisis, was dedicated to Afghanistan refugees. From the uprisings for racial and social justice came “The Justice Bell,” inspired by the lifelong civil rights work of Sen. John Lewis.

Nile’s long-awaited DC show came on the day of a march marking not only the anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, but to endorse the voting rights act that bears Lewis’ name. Many of the streets adjoining the venue were still closed off from the day’s activity.

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Elizabeth Cook could well be the best of the legion of DJs on Sirius XM. Her weekday “Apron Strings” show on the Outlaw Country channel reflects her personality, as she speaks frankly and sometimes brashly about her life, her musician friends, and everyday hard knocks in her engaging twang. She’d bring that same charm to solo appearances with just a guitar accompanying her stories and really well written songs.

Out on tour for the first time since the pandemic shutdowns, she has emerged as a completely different performer. Dressed in kind of a silvery space age Ziggy Stardust jumpsuit and surrounded by a three-piece rock band, she roared through her headlining set at the Union Stage in Washington Saturday—a transformation that surprised at least some in the seated audience.

Cook has dropped the names of rock bands in her sassy songs before going for a full bore sound 0n her 2020 album Aftermath, whose excessive production more aligned with crossover roar of “The Perfect Girls of Pop” of which she refers to on one of its singles. But in front of an electric band of long haired guitarists and a Mohawked drummer—and following a quiet and very well-received acoustic solo set from Waylon Payne—you’d hardly associate her with the honest and vulnerable persona she beams out on satellite radio.

At first playing a powder blue electric mandolin and then a guitar—whose plug fell out at least once; you couldn’t hear much of what she was adding on strings either way—Cook concentrated on her sharp lyrics, which were often muddied inside those hard-charging arrangements.

Cook has crafted some strong anthems, from “Thick Georgia Woman” to kick off the set; the popular “El Camino” mid-show, and the triumphant “Sometimes It Takes Balls to be a Woman” to end her encore. When it came time for a cover, she went not to any of the classic country she plays on the air, but the Velvet Underground. Nice to hear “Sunday Morning” anyway.

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