Author Archives: Roger Catlin

Joan Osborne is one of hundreds of artists who have sung the music of Bob Dylan. In her case, she included a version of his then-recent “Man in the Long Black Coat” on her Grammy-nominated debut album Relish 30 years ago. Dylan noticed and invited her to duet with him on a remake of “Chimes of Freedom” for a TV miniseries. They’d share the stage for a series of shows with the Grateful Dead, and he’d remain a touchstone for her recordings ever since.

In 2017, she recorded a full album of Songs of Bob Dylan and toured to promote it, bringing a cast of guest stars with her. One night’s recording, which featured Robert Randolph, Jackie Greene, and Levon Helm’s daughter Amy Helm, was released in April as Dylanology (Live). So Osborne is on tour to promote that—again with a stellar band, but not the same one on the record (and for that matter, repeating only three songs from the live album).

Closing out the latest Joan Osborne Sings the Songs of Bob Dylan tour at the tasteful Hamilton in DC, Tuesday, she was flanked by a formidable female front line. On one side was Cindy Cashdollar the slide and dobro master who’s played with everyone in Austin, where she lived for 23 years, to Woodstock, NY, where she now presides. She added just the right coloring to tunes, and a bit of authenticity—she played on the original Dylan recording on “Tryin’ to Get to Heaven” on Time Out of Mind, as well as the live version here.

On the other side of Osborne was Gail Lynn Dorsey, the distinctive bassist who has played with everyone from Tears for Fears and The B-52’s to David Bowie for nine years; her last appearance in DC was singing “Life on Mars” at a David Bowie tribute performance of his Blackstar album a year ago at the Kennedy Center. Besides providing a solid and palpable bottom to the night’s Dylan repertoire, Dorsey also showed some strong, soulful vocals by taking the lead on “Lady Lay Lay” and dueting with keyboardist Will Bryant on “Shelter from the Storm.”

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PHOTO: RYAN BAKERINK | There’s never a power shortage when Bob Mould comes to town. With a snarling guitar and yowling voice, he continues to electrify audiences just as he did 45 years ago when he was fronting the potent Twin Cities trio Hüsker Du. Back at the Black Cat in DC, where he’s played solo shows in the past, he was back in top-notch trio form with longtime backers Jason Narducy on bass and Jon Wurster on drums.

In a blistering 27-song set that seemed to charge by in no time, Mould played with a fervor and simplicity that echoed his earliest work, or that of his ‘90s group Sugar. On the current swing, he’s blending the sharp, simple songs from his latest album Here We Go Crazy with an equal half dozen from its 2020 predecessor, Blue Hearts. Still, the solid set began with a pair from the 2012 album that first constituted the present trio, Silver Age.

At 64, with a silvery, well-trimmed beard and professorial black horn-rimmed specs, Mould looks very down to business. But he’ll attack his guitar with a backspin riff that may unleash a sudden one-man mosh pit across the stage, evoking an inner passion.

At one point, he unspooled a windmill on his instrument, putting him in the tradition of rockers going back to Pete Townshend and Keith Richards. He hinted at one point that the sudden cutting of the air conditioning may have been to aid his vocals (if so, he wouldn’t be the first singer to request that accommodation). “Hot enough for you?” he asked the sellout crowd, adding, “The hotter it gets, the better I sing.“

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Alejandro Escovedo’s solo return to The Hamilton in DC Saturday began with the ferocity and volume of his earliest punk days, about which he was singing. It ended with songs performed so softly, and without amplification, you practically had to hold your breath to hear.

It was the last night of a three week solo tour just before a full band slot at the New Orleans Jazz & Pop Festival May 1. And already he was ruminating about his next big project: looking back at 50 years in music, in song and story. Therefore, a big chunk of his solo show had to do with introducing songs, or groups of them, with detailed reminiscence of all the scenes he got to be part of.

That included opening the final Sex Pistols concert at San Francisco’s Winterland Ballroom and checking in with fellow Chelsea Hotel resident Sid Vicious before he was taken away in cuffs. Those stories took up the first several minutes of his set before he finally dove into a trio of songs that defined that era (and were written decades later), “Nuns Song,” “Chelsea Hotel ’78,” and “Sacramento and Polk.” The feedback in his guitar and the distortion of his voice through one of those vintage harmonica microphones helped recreate the aggression of those gritty songs.

Even when he switched to acoustic guitar, his songs had a strange electronic undertow, possibly pre-taped, that he has credited to Portland, OR. producer Brandon Eggleston. Lest you think he was dependent on surrounding electronics and effects boxes in lieu of a band, however, Escovedo unplugged entirely for a couple of songs he meant to sing while strolling through the audience. Logistics of the club meant he only just walked around the stage unamplified instead (and on only one side of the stage since his rig of guitars prevented him from strolling to the other side.

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Since it first formed 35 years ago at the University of Buffalo, Mercury Rev has gone through a lot of phases before settling into the kind of poetic grandeur it gave its high water mark, 1998’s Deserter’s Songs and that continues to inform their latest work, last year’s Born Horses.

It’s the kind of big, synth-washed saturation with guitar embellishment and booming drums that would satisfy an arena crowd. It was strange and wonderful, then, to see Mercury Rev in the first week of their tour playing a club as small as the Atlantis in DC. Bringing the same kind of theatricality to their performance that they’ve brought to their sound, the touring quintet assembled on stage to the strains of Ravi Shankar and an Antoine de Saint-Exupéry audiobook.

Frontman Jonathan Donahue, in a double-breasted coat, cap, and ascot, looked like a Pied Piper, using elaborate arm motions to swim through the sound or suddenly crouch to conduct or simply present the forces on either side of the stage, conjuring up their sounds like a wizard.

One was the only other original member of the band, Sean “Grasshopper” Mackowiak, in shades, playing an electric guitar that wasn’t so much individual notes or even chords, but more a cascade of glistening effects. Opposite him was the booming drums of Joe Magistro. Behind them, also in shades, were a pair of multi-instrumentalists, mostly working a pair of synthesizers, though Jesse Chandler also picked up an occasional sax or flute to bring something different to the mix.

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The cheers went up when Mike Watt loped on stage with his bass and his cane, en route to his chair. The beloved bassist from the Minutemen, Firehose, and endless collaborations, at 67 is a punk rock mainstay and hero, who despite the chronic knee problems that require the cane, still lays it down with verve and force, as he showed with the experimental power trio mssv, at the Pearl Street Warehouse in DC Friday.

The improvisatory outfit is led by bespectacled Knoxville guitarist Mike Baggetta, who first managed to convince Watt and no less than rock drummer Jim Keltner—who worked with Ry Cooder, most of the solo Beatles and was drummer for Traveling Wilburys—to join him for his solo album Wall of Flowers in 2019.

It worked so well, they wanted to tour but because of Keltner’s other studio commitments, he was replaced on the road, and on subsequent group recordings by Stephen Hodges, an accomplished drummer in his own right, who had worked with Watt on his album Contemplating The Engine Room in 1997, and had played on several records behind Tom Waits, Mavis Staples, John Hammond and others.

To open the Pearl Street show, Hodges joined in the spirit of experimentation by dragging chains across his drum kit, adding to the string improvisations conjured up by Baggetta and Watt. It was one of several spots on the setlist that began with space for improv before they settled into any structures of a song. And even then, the tunes took some wild swings in dynamics.

For all the hit-and-miss variations, Baggetta restarted their second song of the set after a false turn. “It’s our first gig in DC,” he explained. He wanted to get it right. Maybe because that song seemed perfect for the nation’s capital: “Hypocrite.”

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Patterson Hood has written hundreds of songs in his life, the best of which he’s performed with his band Drive-By Truckers for nearly three decades.

His latest batch were largely biographical musings, covering his coming of age period in Alabama. Exploding Trees & Airplane Screams, his fourth solo outing, was eventually played in its entirety during the first of two sold out shows Saturday at The Atlantis, the cozy 9:30 Club anteroom in DC.

That it was “hours until” his 61st birthday Monday only seemed to further stoke his giddy nostalgia at his past, telling stories of being raised by grandparents and a great uncle in lieu of his teenage parents, all the parties he used to sneak into, the neighbors and adults he looked up to, the curve of the rural roads, and the general magic of childhood and the promises of adolescence. That he told the essence of his fondly-remembered stories before doing the songs kind of robbed the tunes of any surprise, but the thematic continuity of the show made it feel whole.

Hood sat for the entirety of the 19-song set, mostly playing a vintage Harmony acoustic that in its diminutive size made him look even bigger than he was. As on the album, he wasn’t strictly solo, but surrounded himself with able musicians.

Eschewing by large measure the rocking electric guitar crunch of his primary band, he relied instead on the buzzing drone of synth, a bit of mellotron, some sax and woodwinds, from the four piece touring band he called the Sensurrounders—two of whom were from Drive-By Truckers.

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Long-running rocker Chuck Prophet never lost his capacity for writing engaging tunes or shaking up his style as he does it. For his latest venture, Wake the Dead, he’s wedded his laconic lyric observations with the bright rhythms of cumbia, the Latin American musical style that originated from Colombia. With baselines not so far from reggae and stinging guitar that could be a kin to surf, fueled by a percussion-assisted beat, it’s a thoroughly pleasing, danceable sound to frame his familiar voice.

But with his show at The Hamilton in Washington on a frigid winter night last week, dancing was not possible. The space in front of the bandstand where fans have bopped for previous shows by Prophet and the Mission Express was blocked by gold circle tables extending all the way to the stage. Which may have made it more comfortable for the frankly older crowd on hand. But, like the all-seated duo show with his wife Stephanie Finch at the Kennedy Center last year, it kept the show from reaching quite the celebratory heights his band shows usually hit.

Nonetheless, the rock-cumbia connection bookended the set through some tasty covers—a bilingual blast of Eddie Cochran’s “C’mon Everybody” to open, and a can’t miss closer of Sam the Sham’s “Woolly Bully” as the final encore. The latter best employed the keening electronic organ and raspy vocals of Mario Cortez, amid his myriad percussive instruments.

As on the Wake the Dead album, he and two members of his usual band Mission Express, guitarist James DePrado and drummer Vincente Rodriguez, are augmented by a couple members from the Salinas, Calif., cumbia band ¿Quiensalve?—guitarist and keyboardist Alejandro Gomez and the multiinstrumental Cortez. And with the newly added bassist for the tour Mike Anderson, they’re touring as Chuck Prophet and His Cumbia Shoes.

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The first surprise in Gillian Welch and David Rawlings’ current tour is the stage: bare, with just a couple sets of microphones for guitar and voice, and a table between them for water. Rather than rely on a band or other equipment, they’ve stripped everything down to honest voice and guitar—and their show, which played the Capital One Hall in Tysons Corner, VA Sunday, was all the stronger for it.

Already, Welch’s alluring song craft and plaintive, melodic voice that’s produced a handful of great albums, her harmonies with her partner Rawlings enhance the songs, but they rise to a new dimension when he begins soloing on his trusty 1935 Epiphone Olympic, which has a small wooden body but a big, bright sound.

It approaches the sound of a mandolin when he’s playing fast, but more often he’s taking time to invent strikingly original solos and runs within the confines of songs that may not have come directly from classic string bands but sounds as if they could have.

He’ll shake the guitar as if to wring the right sound out of it, or wag his head when he isn’t shaking his instrument. Almost like magic, he never touched another guitar all night, using the mahogany and pine fronted arch top from beginning to end, playing to a microphone instead of being plugged in and never even stopping to tune very often.

Welch was doing her part with rhythms and more than once pulled out a banjo to some unnecessary acclaim. They concentrated on the songs from their recent album together Woodland, but had more than enough songs from their catalogs, together and apart, to fill two sets and two sets of encores.

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PHOTO: AL PEREIRA | A couple songs into his crackling set at The Birchmere, Marshall Crenshaw stated his purpose. “I’m still flogging the ’40 Years in Show Biz’ thing,” he said, though it’s been 43 years since his first single “Something’s Gonna Happen” and 42 since the self-titled debut album that became a classic. Freed from that round number, though, he traveled throughout his career, over nine different albums.

For the affable Crenshaw, 71, it became something of a parlor game, identifying each song with its year, defying what would seem to be the simplicity in his songs that made them so popular with driving, complex, interlocking rhythms from his talented band.

His guitarist Fernando Perdomo looked like he could play any kind of lead guitar, including metal, but was on point—and seemed to be having a ball—adding his leads to Crenshaw’s melodic tunes. Bassist Derrick Anderson was just as inventive in his approach, while drummer Mark Ortmann, once of The Bottle Rockets, pounded out his own rhythms.

Crenshaw is a decent guitarist himself and the four of them turned out wheels within wheels on highlights like the opening “Fantastic Planet of Love” to “Move Now.” He’d include a couple of things from albums out this century—”Live and Learn” and “Passing Through” from 2009’s Jaggedland.

But if he got too far off track, it was easy to reel fans in with the opening strains of “Whenever You’re on My Mind” early in the set, “Cynical Girl,” and “You’re My Favorite Waste of Time” and the set closing pairing of “Mary Anne.”

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PHOTO: DANNY CLINCH | A 2020 stroke never slowed the creativity of Lucinda Williams. Rather, it could be argued it has ignited her to do more than before, issuing a new album in last year’s Stories from a Rock n Roll Heart, performing a series of live-streamed concerts covering favorite artists that resulted in a half dozen more releases since 2021, writing a memoir in Don’t Tell Anyone the Secrets I Told You, also out last year, and near constant touring since she returned to the stage three years ago.

Her current outing with her solid band brings one of two different shows—a more conventional concert prioritizing Rock n Roll Heart amid her classics, the other a continuation of her more strictly autobiographical Don’t Tell Anyone the Secrets tour.

It was the latter that played the Lincoln Theatre before a hushed, grateful audience experiencing essentially the same as the book-based show she gave at nearby Tyson’s Corner, VA a year ago, that mixes reminiscences with songs, illustrated with home movie type video accompaniment.

In a way, it’s a perfect format for any artist with a long career, telling her story of musical development chronologically through tunes that influenced her before touching on early compositions, career highlights, and a couple of recent tunes that reflect what she’s learned.

With her father a poet and her mother a music major, Williams seemed destined to become a Southern-bred singer-songwriter. To hear her tell it though, a major early musical inspiration was a street blues singer and preacher in Macon she saw when she was five and who she enshrined in the song, “Blind Pearly Brown.”

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In 2000, Ian Parton was a documentary film director in Brighton, England, who started putting together musical tracks for his films the way he handled visuals, a collage style that created surprising results. Eventually his interest in the musical creations overtook the movies and he released the tracks, cobbled together from old hip hop tracks, cheerleader chants, instrumental fanfare from myriad old records and a big drum sound.

The resulting 2004 Thunder, Lightning, Strike, credited to The Go! Team, became an unlikely hit when DJs like John Peel began playing it. But when requests came to tour, Parton had to quickly assemble an actual band that could play it live. Twenty years and six albums later, The Go! Team is back on tour with the 20th anniversary celebration of that debut. And while the number of band members has fluctuated over the years, it was down to six members (and steady reliance on backing tapes) to replicate it when they played the final US stop at the Black Cat.

Nkechi Ka Egenamba, who calls herself Ninja, has been the group’s frontwoman almost since the beginning (but after the recording of Thunder, Lightning, Strike) and served as ringmaster and lead chanter—there isn’t a lot of singing involved. In the delightfully diverse aggregation, half women and half men, Jaleesa Gemerts played the big main drum kit, an important sound augmented by a second drumset occupied by anyone not playing anything else at the moment.

The newest female member was Kate Walker, who seemed delighted to be there (“I’m a fan myself!”) and played a suspicious trumpet that seemed to double its sound on some tracks, and could be played with any apparent fingering on others. She also sang the tremulous vocal on the ditty “Hold Yr Terror Close,” handled on the record by an uncredited Robin Pridy.

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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.

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