Author Archives: Roger Catlin

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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Billy Bragg wrapped up his five week North American tour Sunday in familiar surroundings —the 9:30 Club in Washington, where he was quick to joke he was starting at 9.

He had just played a more intimate show Saturday at the Atlantis next door the night before, but a big crowd still was on hand to hear a career’s worth of ringing songs as cutting as his slashing solo electric guitar chords. He had a few things to say about the political situation as well, of course, especially about the imminent election. But he also had some hard-learned lessons from his 40th anniversary tour of the States, some of which he stated, and others of which he demonstrated.

Looking sharp in neatly cut grey hair and beard, and a shirt-like jacket, the purchase of which he went into great detail, Bragg took care to tune between every song as he continued his banter. Because every performance these days is duly shot by fans on smartphone video and shared online, he explained, musicians dare not turn out a sloppy performance, lest it live forever in some corner of the internet.

This may be unexpected in a rocker who rose up in punk, raising his voice and single guitar since the start, but it made for a nicely honed performance which swelled beyond its setlist to last nearly three hours. The extended set was filled with favorites from early in his career—with “Greetings to the New Brunette,” a big singalong to “New England,” and the poignant sting of “Levi Stubbs’ Tears” in a year that claimed the last of the Four Tops.

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Stephen Merritt’s challenge to himself, at the end of the last century, was to write 100 love songs. He had been inspired by hearing a piano bar revue of Stephen Sondheim’s works—and by 114 Songs by Charles Ives, the composer born 150 years ago this weekend, as it happens.

He only got to 69 Love Songs. But that was fine, or maybe better, as it fit his droll style. The epic songscape is marking its 25th anniversary this year, sparking a series of two-night concerts in which it’s played in order, 35 songs the first night and 34, the second with no additions or changes possible. The whole project is something of a math problem, after all, with some of the songs of the first night’s set Thursday at the Lincoln Theatre, (“Roses” specifically) originally clocking in at only 27 seconds, and three others were written at just under a minute.

Reacting to a single yelled request, the ever-deadpan Merritt advised that those who requested songs that were not next one on the list would be fed to alligators; and those who needlessly requested songs that would be next would cause them to just skip the song altogether. So it was a bit of a recital of the assembled seven-piece Magnetic Fields, all of whom were pretty much sitting down, like the audience. Unlike the very fanciful playhouse stage setting and colorful costuming the last time the band played the venue, for the 50 Song Memoir in 2017, this was a very plain presentation, bordering on drab.

Merritt sat at right, in an ELO T-shirt, barely playing any instruments (except for key triangle at one point and a moo-cow toy elsewhere). The main event, as always, was his deep baritone, which seems to have gotten even deeper over the years. As it was, he tilted his head and stretched his neck as if to empty out the furthest reaches of every low note.

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The still-touring The Rubinoos tend to close their main set with their anthem “Rock and Roll is Dead.” Like a lot of the work they’ve been doing for more than a half century, it could be taken with a wink and a grain of salt. After all, when they used it to close their Sunday gig at the rockin’ Hank Dietle’s Tavern in Rockville, they’d been disproving it the whole time.

Formed by Berkeley high schoolers at the dawn of the ’70s, they began their own love with rock ’n’ roll by leaning into its roots, practicing doo-wop street corner harmonies that’d serve them throughout their career. At Dietle’s, a cool dive amid dismal office towers across from a shuttered mall, they began their early evening show and closed their encore displaying this a cappella prowess with a couple of songs from the 1950s, starting with Frankie Lymon & the Teenagers’ “I’m Not a Juvenile Delinquent” and ending their encore with the Chordettes’ “Mr. Sandman.”

Their love for the arcane cover song has served them well over the years, scoring them a minor hit with Tommy James & the Shondells’ once-controversial “I Think We’re Alone Now.” On stage, basking in the retirement age rocker energy of the room, they began its loping baseline with a long story about the time they played it on American Bandstand.

They bring a vibrant authenticity to songs not often played live in small bars—or played so well—from the Electric Prunes “I Had Too much to Dream (Last Night)” to the Stingrays’ surf instrumental, “Stingray” to their stab at the Byrds’ experimental “Eight Miles High” in the encore.

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PHOTO: MIKAI KARL | Where it’s at, Beck famously declared nearly three decades ago, was two turntables and a microphone. But in his long and inventive career, he’s dabbled in a number of musical genres, and for his current summer tour he’s backed by much more than that DJ setup to perform in front of his own band and full 80-piece orchestras.

It’s a rich and rare opportunity to hear him do justice to a couple of his best received albums this century, the contemplative and orchestral 2014 Morning Phase and its thematic predecessor Sea Change from a dozen years earlier. The sweeping swells of strings that accompanied his ballads of heartbreak and isolation were finally being given the full backing they deserved.

Saturday night at Wolf Trap, the full National Symphony Orchestra set the tone with the brief instrumental “Cycle” before Beck strolled on with an acoustic guitar to begin “Morning” just as he did on the 2014 album. Wearing a dark suit over an unbuttoned white shirt, the ever-youthful Beck bounded around the stage when he didn’t stand stock-still at the microphone. His supple voice was well-mixed over the waves of music supporting him, intoning the deepened lyric turns from a guy once known only for his slacker stance.

In all, he played nearly a dozen songs from Morning Phase and Sea Change. The orchestral undertow didn’t just work for songs from those two melancholy albums, though. He had dabbled with the sounds on many of his other albums, if only through samples, so was eager to bring them to the stage for in some cases, the first time. That was the case with “Missing,” from his 2005 Guero, and the ballad “We Live Again” from 1998’s Mutations. But even “Tropicalia” from that 1998 album got a sprightly reading—and much needed change of pace, from the NSO. “We’ll bring the tragedy back in a little bit,” Beck deadpanned.

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When the summer tour of Daryl Hall and Elvis Costello was announced, I first thought Declan MacManus was opting to fill the slot of Hall’s former partner. After all, he’s performed in many guises over the years, from his famous stage name to The Imposter to Napoleon Dynamite (before the movie of the same name). So why not John Oates?

There was some precedent for such a partnership. Hall sang and co-starred in the video for Costello’s “The Only Flame in Town” an alarming 40 years ago. But no, here they were only sharing dates on a summer tour, co-headlining in the sense they both presented their own full sets that otherwise had no other intersection with the other.

It might have seemed an odd pairing; the hit-making popular appeal of Hall & Oates catalog has little to do with Costello’s more esoteric but critically appraised songbook. Yet fans of each artist may have been surprised by how many songs they may knew by heart from the other.

Hall in recent years has built on his musical legacy by building Daryl’s House, a pleasing musical web series turned brick and mortar club in Pawling, N.Y. Inviting other artists to join him in more than 90 episodes, he’s built a solid band that stood out in the tour’s final stop Thursday at Wolf Trap in Vienna, VA.

With his poofy mane now completely white, Hall himself, at 77, may have been exhibiting the effect of two months of touring, but for a guy who built his career on a soulful falsetto, his upper register was shot. Sometimes he’d skip the lyrics with the highest notes, as on “Sara Smile”; other times he’d let the audience take it. Most times, though, he tried to go for it, as if it could still possibly happen, reaching with a kind of growl that seemed painful at times. And mostly, it didn’t work. It was a rough night to be sure.

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It’s a satisfying, full circle moment when Robert Plant and Allison Krauss close their summer set with “When the Levee Breaks.” Not just because of the continuing truth of the 80-year-old meteorological prognostication in an era when flooding is on the rise.

As in the first of two shows at Wolf Trap in Vienna, VA, the two are bringing a palpable yet atmospheric feel of the 1929 blues song that Plant and his band had rocked up so much to end their bestselling Led Zeppelin IV that they freely added their own names to the songwriting credit of originator Memphis Minnie.

Like much of the rest of the set on a sizzling summer night, the two were bringing their thoughtful, expansive interpretations closer to the original nuggets of American music that so inspired them both. Still, the sold out crowd would give standing ovations only when they covered Zep songs, however differently arranged, which happened a couple of other times too.

Plant, at 75, with signature curls now a wild silvery mane, was steady on vocals, returning at times to the mercurial oscillations of his past band and his unexpected ad libs and yelps. No longer stalking the stage bare-chested like a rock god, he more often gestured like a courtly gentleman, particularly in deference to his collaborator Krauss, 52, who in her high necked blouse and jeans appeared like a Wild West schoolmarm.

Raised in bluegrass but with an affection for rock ’n’ roll, she harmonizes surprisingly well with Plant. And like that other seemingly odd recording duo, Norah Jones and Billy Joe Armstrong, they have found their North Star in the Everly Brothers—whose songs, it turns out, were heard as often as anything from Led Zep, with “The Price of Love” early in the set and two tuneful ditties, “Stick with Me Baby” and “Gone Gone Gone” to cap the encore.

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