Author Archives: Roger Catlin

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.

Read More »

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.

Read More »

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.

Read More »

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.

Read More »

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.

Read More »

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.

Read More »

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.

Read More »

The Watson Twins started gaining wide attention when they joined forces with rocker Jenny Lewis on her 2006 album Rabbit Fur Coat, issued about the same time as their own solo debut, Southern Manners. Since then the two have largely worked in the area of country, which is probably the most natural thing in the world for a pair of sisters from Louisville who have been living in Nashville.

Backed by a crack band, the two entertained an early evening crowd at The Kennedy Center Millennium Stage, which has been attracting bigger names by also making entire shows available streaming and archived online. As such, Leigh and Chandra Watson spent nearly as much time addressing the wider world as they did the polite crowd at the storied performing arts center, where the two last performed singing backup for Kings of Leon at the 2016 Kennedy Center Honors (doing “Take It Easy” as part of a tribute to the Eagles). “We didn’t think we’d be back,” Leigh admitted.

But their country sound sounded sharp, and they immediately set the stage by describing a perfect honky tonk in “The Palace.” It was the first of a half dozen songs they’d play from their recently released album Holler. That title song began as a lament, Leigh said, written soon after the overturning of Roe vs. Wade, but she it got an overhaul to be a more joyful, upbeat song. With a singalong chorus of “Holler if you hear me,” it advises “Looking for a reason to hold the truth and carry on / Gotta keep on tryin’ harder / Why can’t we all just get along?”

Sister acts thrive on harmonies they’ve developed their whole life, and those work as well with the Watsons, though they are not as often prominently on display as you might expect. The pair does plays up the twin bit. They came in matching shiny red and gold dresses with hearts (though Leigh goes for a shorter hemline than her sister). They often played identical acoustic guitars (though they switched off) and style their long, jet black hair similarly.

Read More »

Somebody has been stepping it up at The Kennedy Center Millennium Stage this summer. The free daily showcase that once reliably booked out-of-town college and high school ensembles has suddenly seen performers that include Alejandro Escovado, Chris Smither, Hurray for the Riff Raff on its stages.

Later, it had Margo Price, in a show that was for some reason elevated from the usual lobby stage to its third floor Terrace Theatre, which still fit the crowd. For the occasion, the ace country singer and songwriter was joined by her husband Jeremy Ivey for a strong 12-song acoustic set that was quite a departure from her usual band tour—and further still from the expansive cosmo rock explosion of her latest album Strays.

But the sparse presentation brought extra focus to the breathtaking (and true) autobiographical song from her Midwest Farmer’s Daughter that started the show, “Hands of Time.” It’s a country song that has everything—daddy losing the farm, her losing a baby, left turns with men and drink, a bit of hope at the end—and largely introduced the world to Price’s considerable talents.

Chagrined at first by the setting and the hushed audience, she joked “I’m shocked they let us into such a nice establishment. I had to dig through the suitcase for proper clothes.” With the freedom to play a lot of songs they usually don’t, it was a surprising set that included one of the songs she wrote with Mike Campbell of the Heartbreakers while dodging wildfires in Topanga Canyon, “Malibu.”

Read More »

PHOTOS: LAURA CROSTA | Fans call the week or so between Jerry Garcia’s August 1 birthday and the commemoration of the day he died (August 9, 1995) the “Days Between,” after a philosophical early ’90s Grateful Dead song. In recent years the annual occasion has been marked the Hamilton in DC with a series of shows from different Dead-adjacent acts, which this year included the realms of bluegrass or jazz.

It culminated Sunday with a set from Joan Osborne, who has no little Dead cred. She’s lent after her voice to the post-Garcia aggregation The Dead and tours with Phil Lesh and Friends and has long since been embraced by the fan community, who treated her show as a kind of offshoot, with all the tie-dye and taping stations that engenders.

Even with a new album due out September 8, she said this would be “a different show” with more Jerry than usual, and there were five Dead related songs in the evening—fully a third of the set. That compared to just a pair from her new album, from the opening “Should’ve Danced More” to the title track “Nobody Owns You,” the former a note to herself; the latter a note to her daughter.

Osborne had an unusual band but an effective one. John Petruzzelli, a guitarist who has worked with Rufus Wainwright, Ian Hunter, Patti Smith, and the ace Beatles cover band the Fab Faux had a thankless task—to help conjure the memory of Garcia without seeming to ape him, and he succeeded with a nice reserved style. The other backing musician, Texan Will Bryant, filled in solidly on electric keyboards, but was even better on the Hamilton’s grand piano, adding tasty solos and trading licks with Petruzzelli.

Read More »

PHOTOS: RACHEL LANGE | Wolf Trap, the National Park-run concert space in the Virginia woods, has a big enough stage to accommodate full symphony orchestras and ballet productions. Touring rock bands typically fill it with equipment and lights.

So it is a bit surprising to see Regina Spektor solo at a grand piano and otherwise empty stage captivate an audience in a way bigger productions often don’t. As playful and surprising with her voice as she is with her precise, ringing piano playing, she was one compelling performer with a rack of disarming songs happy to take their own unique lyric turns.

She began with even less than a piano, standing to sing “Ain’t No Cover” a cappella with a drum pattern beat out by a spare pinky on the same microphone. Only then did she sit at the suitably grand instrument for her beguiling show.

Spektor said at times she was rattled by the sheer beauty of the venue; she cracked that she’d be more comfortable in a dark, divey club. She seems far from those days, though. And her silvery many tiered gown would have been out of place. At Wolf Trap, it looked a little weird at first too, but as the show went on it was easy to see how well it reflected the changing colored lights above her—she was a one woman light show too.

At the piano she began with her grand, complainy seasonal song “Summer in the City” (“Cleavage! Cleavage! Cleavage!”) and followed it with a summer out look that was “less of a bummer, “Folding Chair.” She pounded tunes that had bits of gospel in them, like “Becoming All Alone,” from her latest collection “Home, Before and After”; or played like clever, brash show tunes, like “Baby Jesus.” Even songs that began like straight pop love songs, like “How” but had room for left turns.

Read More »

PHOTOS: RACHEL LANGE | Jason Isbell’s summer tour with The 400 Unit began with some brash urgency on a splendid night at Wolf Trap in Vienna, VA. With a slightly retooled band and a terrific new album, Weathervanes, he was there to present a lot of it—nine of its 13 tracks, all told. 

And they’re a pretty strong set of songs, full of quirky characters in specific locations, playing out their fates in songs that don’t worry about changing directions midway. He’s been shuffling in the new songs with old favorites and scrambling the order nightly. It’s tempting to think he started with “Save the World”—with its heartbreaking message of a world where parents are frightened for their children because of the exploding gun violence—for a DC adjacent audience in hopes of nudging some action to the issue.

But the show stayed on the same intense level with another arresting tune from Weathervanes, “King of Oklahoma,” about a blue collar character with a crumbling marriage, numbed by possibly addicting prescribed painkillers. Both songs had equal sting from guitar interplay between Isbell, who got his first jobs in rock due to his instrumental prowess, working off another top talent, Sadler Vaden, of another beloved band of Southern rockers Drivin’ N Cryin.’

He’d go ahead and paint other vivid lyrical pictures in songs like “Strawberry Woman” and “White Beretta” but in between wove in poignant songs of his own lonely upbringing, “Dreamsicle” and his anthem to his home state, “Alabama Pines.”

Noting this year’s 10-year anniversary of his solo breakthrough Southeastern, which he hinted he would commemorate properly later this year, Isbell offered its wistful song of homesickness “Stockholm” and interrupted the planned set for a beautiful acoustic guitar and piano reading of the arresting “Elephant,” the song about a friend’s cancer that was so raw and real one wondered why anyone else hadn’t accomplished such a feat on the subject.

Read More »

Rock ’n’ roll is a sound and it is a style, and Tav Falco’s been straddling both since the late 1970s.

The latest version of Tav Falco’s Panther Burns, on a cross country tour, stopped at The Runaway in DC for a midweek show that was strangely mesmerizing and altogether rocking thanks largely to his straight-outta-Rome backing trio led by Mario Monterosso. At 77, Falco doesn’t look all that different than he did when Alex Chilton joined forces with him to form Panther Burns back in Memphis. Minus his pencil mustache, he’s maintained his black pompadour, and certainly his style.

With only a subtle croon, he does a lot with his moves, taking the stage with maracas—that forgotten engine of old Bo Diddley songs—before slowly putting on his Hofner guitar to add rhythm to the stinging lead that Monterosso had already nailed down (the length of time it took him to get the guitar over his head and adjusted was the only giveaway to his advancing age).

There’s a lot to be said about the guy’s taste. Panther Burns got its name after a legendary cat set afire on a Southern plantation, and the band has similarly mined the swampy and mysterious sounds of the American South for its inspiration.

There was so much ground to cover, Falco played exactly nothing from his latest release, the 2021 EP “Club Car Zodiac” on ORG Music. Instead he dived into his story about a New Orleans voodoo queen and his version of the classic bolero “Sway” before the somewhat surprising, straight ahead version of the Honeycombs’ 1964 chart topper “Have I the Right?” with a 1-2-3-4 countdown right from the Ramones. Then, as if another inspired turn of a jukebox, over to the 1950s country standard “He’ll Have to Go,” before his own throbbing tune of existential anguish, as he described it, “Born Too Late.”

Read More »

The Decemberists, the charming chamber folk-rock band from out of Portlandia, became famous for live performances as elaborate and detailed as their ornate songs, staging obscure battles or sea scenes with sudden appearances by man-eating whales into their shows.

There was none of that Wednesday as the band took the stage at Wolf Trap in Virginia, two years after they were originally supposed to play there, during the time when everything disappeared. The title of the current excursion, “Arise from the Bunkers! 2022” was just about the most florid part of the tour. It was enough to be present, at long last, alive and performing before thousands of fans in the Virginia woods, even as they have given up for now the costumed accessories or even the notion of promoting any particular release — I’ll Be Your Girl, their eighth full length album, came out a full four years ago now.

But certainly the audience had no complaints about their straightforward approach to their solid, 17-song, 105 minute show. The band has been sprinkling its sets this summer with selections from throughout its career (though sadly, nothing from 2015’s What a Terrible World, What a Beautiful World). “Hope you like the old ones,” said frontman Colin Meloy, as keyboardist Jenny Conlee strapped on her accordion and Chris Funk sat down to the pedal steel guitar for “Shiny,” the oldest song from their repertoire, from an an album that was mostly demos before they had a full recording contract. They followed it, though, with a new song, about meeting someone at a burial ground.

Read More »

It’s gratifying to have any Elvis Costello concert come around after two years of pandemic postponements. But the one that finally took the stage at Wolf Trap in Virginia last week had the added advantage of being opened by Nick Lowe, his longtime colleague, producer, and influencer.

It was a version of “Surrender to the Rhythm” originated by Lowe’s old band Brinsley Schwarz that was playing as Costello appeared on stage. Costello’s version came on his latest recording, marking 50 years since he and a friend recording under the name Rusty tried to release a record of such covers they did at the time.

Costello told a story about approaching Lowe back then as fans and hopefuls and being shooed off. Eventually Lowe would produce six Costello albums, play bass on a dozen of his songs, and otherwise cross paths through the years.

It was Lowe’s ringing “(What’s So Funny ‘Bout) Peace Love and Understanding?” that was the climax of the rewarding show with the two trading its memorable, ever-timely verses. Lowe had come back on stage (in a third dashing outfit) to duet on “Indoor Fireworks,” a Costello song that Lowe had released a year before its author did on The King of America. Frankly their harmonies weren’t great, but it was almost touching to see the two together on stage making an effort.

Costello’s headlining set was a freewheeling one for the huge crowd (who looked to be averaging the singer’s age, which turns 68 this week). As such, they wanted to hear songs that ignited his aggressively creative career. They were rewarded with the frequent concert-starter “Accidents will Happen” (likely because of its irresistible opening line, “I just don’t know where to begin”). But also “Green Shirt” and, before long, “Mystery Dance.” In between, he’d fit in songs from this century that few seemed very familiar with, such as “Hetty O’Hara’s Confidential” and “Either Side of the Same Town.”

Read More »