Nick Lowe has been starting his current tour with one of his oldest songs. “So It Goes” was his first solo single after his stint in Brinsley Schwarz, it starts with a thrumming guitar fanfare before slipping into easy-going verses about a garrulous Thin Lizzy guitarist, a peacekeeping force, a tired US rep, and a missed opportunity. All are tied together with the title refrain, maybe borrowed from Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five, so it goes.
Sounding as fresh and vibrant as it did in 1976, it helped set the tone for Lowe’s pleasing show with Los Straitjackets at the Atlantis in DC, the second of a two-night sellout. But the song also made a natural bridge to the disarmingly clean and simple throwbacks to rock ’n’ roll that are part of his newest album on Yep Roc, Indoor Safari.
Teaming with the Nashville-based instrumentalists in their Mexican wrestling masks might have seemed an odd mix when they first teamed up but by now their matching proclivities toward a kind of rock purity, where a well honed lyric meets the perfect twang, makes them natural collaborators on a sound that not only maintains the classic underpinning of rock ’n’ roll but sounds as natural and immediate as anything today.
There may have been a time when Lowe may have settled into a kind of modern day crooner offering delicate downbeat ballads that showed off his late life tones. But the Straitjackets seem to have bolstered and lifted his rocking tendencies so that now, when he introduces one of his still-beautiful ballads, like “You Inspire Me” from his 1998 Dig My Mood to “House for Sale,” from his 2011 The Old Magic, he almost apologizes for slowing the pace.
Though the recurring color scheme on Indoor Safari remains blue, on songs like “Blue on Blue,” the tempo remains largely toe-tappingly upbeat. Cradling an acoustic guitar (and leaving the electric guitars to his band), Lowe at 75 cuts a dashing figure on stage in a crisp polka dot shirt and grey waves of hair. His voice is smooth and his band seemingly held back on its usual stinging sound to accommodate him.
The new rocking tunes are little marvels, from “I Went to a Party” and “Love Starvation,” a song that sounds as comfortably well known as his old “Ragin’ Eyes,” also in the set. They seemed like numbers that weren’t so much ‘50s throwbacks as they are holding up their standards.
And though there were a half dozen songs from Indoor Safari in the set, none seemed imposing or particularly unfamiliar. Instead, they fit right in alongside “Without Love,” which his one-time father-in-law Johnny Cash once recorded, and the rollicking “Half a Boy and Half a Man.”
The latter was included in a flurry of old favorites saved for the end of the set. One was the inevitable “Cruel to Be Kind,” a song so welcomed its chorus was reprised once it was over. The other was his ever-indelible “(What’s So Funny ‘Bout) Peace, Love and Understanding,” which extends its poignancy by being played a little slower and empathetically. In a fretful election season its lines dug especially deep: “As I walk on, through troubled times / My spirit gets so downhearted sometimes / So where are the strong? And who are the trusted?”
It led to the double punch set-ender of “Heart of the City” with “I Knew the Bride (When She Used to Rock ’n’ Roll).” It’s a nicely structured show for Lowe, who gets to leave the stage for a lengthy break mid-way to allow Los Straitjackets their own five song set that ran from the campy “Theme from ‘The Magnificent Seven” to the suitably primitive one finger soloing of “Caveman” and a cover of the Shocking Blue’s “Venus” that had some in the crowd providing vocals.
The Straitjackets at their most aggressive was in the encore which they began with the obscure Trashman variant “Bird Dance Beat” that throws in all the papa-oo-mow-mows and gravel vocals of their hit “Surfin’ Bird.” And if Lowe did pop out to pick up guitarist Eddie Angel’s dry cleaning during the Straitjackets set, as he joked, he came back with his own fresh shirt for the show’s second half.
Meshing so well with his current backing, Lowe may be reminded of his earlier, short-lived band Rockpile, which first recorded the two songs on which he ended the encore, “When I Write the Book,” and in his only solo performance on stage, “Heart.”
The US tour continues through December 15 in Austin.
So it goes.
