Finding good concerts with stars of the 60s and 70s who still play and sing well is of course becoming more and more difficult. Too many of them are in the morgue, or at least they sound like they are dead, and I’m grateful I’ve managed to avoid most of those kinds of concerts. But when the opportunity arose to see a clean and sober Bonnie Raitt back on top of her game, and on top of that, an opening act of Marc Cohn who still sings and plays wonderfully, even after he was shot in the head in Denver about seven years ago, was too good to pass up. This was especially so because they were performing in Louisville’s Whitney Hall which is sonically magnificent.
Jeff, the tune dude James and I headed to Louisville a bit early on a Sunday afternoon so we could wander around in downtown Louisville since the concert hall is almost on the banks of the Ohio, and there’s much to see in the area. As it turned out, Jeff being the native Kentuckian knew all the venues and the menus, and so we ended up having a light supper at Vicenzo’s a truly nice Italian restaurant within five minutes walk of the concert hall. Bring on the tiramisu and coffee!
Since we got there early we snuck in and saw Bonnie rehearsing, and got a quick glimpse of the hall itself. Wow. It looked like La Scala– with two giant wrap around balconies. And thank goodness somebody bothered to hire an acoustician to help build the hall in a sonically appropriate manner, so the sound would be good for all sorts of concerts.
Credit Marc and Bonnie for knowing their audience would be mostly people well over 40. Hence the concert began sharply at 7 p.m. and was done before 10 so the geezers with the tweezers could get home before they turned into pumpkins. Speaking of geezers I don’t think but one member of Bonnie’s band was under 64 or so….. wow. And boy could they play. That’s one of the great things about music, unlike sports. Your shelf life can be quite long if you stay in good shape. Look at Tony Bennett.
Marc Cohn of course is an example of what I’d call the last wave of original rock and roll. He did not really surface until about 1990 though he had been trying for years before that. His musical influences and heroes were people like Bonnie Raitt and James Taylor, from the first great wave of rock n’ roll.
Then he wrote a little song called ‘Walking in Memphis’ really more of a gospel piano song than anything else, that catapulted him into stardom– it was nominated for a Grammy and his first album which had the song won the Grammy. He was a ‘Best New Artist’ over night, which of course will definitely change your life. Suddenly he was playing with his musical heroes like Crosby and Nash and Taylor. The problem was, he had come late to the dance, and the d.j. playing the tunes preferred other kinds of music. The good news was, Marc had a lot of juice left in the tank compared to most burned out rockers from the first and second wave of ‘classic’ rock. And so there were more great albums by Marc in the 90s.
Sadly, he only played for 30 minutes at this concert, as I could have listened to him for hours. It was just him on the piano, or playing a guitar left handed, with one side musician to assist him. Spare but not sparse, simple but not trite, beautiful but not sugar coated pop. More than anything else Marc Cohn, a Jewish boy, sings Gospel with slightly different lyrics than ‘the eye was on the sparrow’. He grew up in Cleveland where there is a very large Jewish community, but his musical heroes were not klezmer artists. You become what you admire.
He told the story of having writer’s block and making a road trip to Memphis, where he went to Al Green’s church one Sunday for several hours. He quipped “after the first couple of hours of church, I began to think that my people had made a mistake about their home boy, that Jesus fellow.” He also told the story of running into one of the great female black gospel artists playing in a little shack of a club and singing ‘His Eye is on the Sparrow’. It was clear that the whole thing had deeply affected his soul.
2005 however was the year he was shot, and various of us were praying for him. I am happy to say the story has a happy ending. He recovered, and as he was recovering he wrote a whole slew of new songs, because Katrina hit while he was recovering. The album is called Join the Parade, which came out in 2007, and I commend it to you. Like Dylan, like Taylor, like Simon, Marc is a songsmith, each one carefully crafted, complex, and rich. Marc also married Liz Vargas the TV commentator, and is living happily in N.Y. for the last 25 years with his four girls. Some rock n roll stories don’t end with the words ‘crash and burn’.
Bonnie Raitt is that rarest of all female artists— a blues singer who plays a mean blues slide guitar. Bonnie has a lot of miles on her, but she looks like a classic red (headed) Thunderbird. She’s just great, and her voice is still wonderful, though it may have lost a bit of its power. But for about an hour and a half we were treated to vintage Bonnie and brand new Bonnie, mostly brand new Bonnie from her fine new album Slipstream.
Unlike Marc Cohn, Bonnie does not write most of her songs, but she sure knows how to commission other people to write great songs for her. There are some fabulous new songs on Slipstream, though as a whole album I would say Luck of the Draw is a better album. What the new album shows is that Bonnie is alive and well, clean and sober (which was not always the case), and enjoying life. She too commented on her religious experiences, telling us she grew up going to Quaker meetings in So Cal (she lives in Pasadena). Mostly she sang beautifully and let her band do most of the playing, except for some slick slide blues licks, and we were left wanting more of her classic numbers from Grammy nominated lps.
But how did Raitt and Cohn come to tour together, since they live world’s apart? Well turns out they had toured together before— in Australia and New Zealand a long while back. And it also turns out that they love each other’s music. That makes for a fun tour, and a mutual admiration society. Were I too rate this concert I would place it very high indeed. Perhaps a notch below last years Paul Simon extravaganza, but still fantastic.
It is always sad to watch the dying of the light, but then sunsets are the most beautiful part of the day anyway. If rock n roll is in its dotage, these concerts remind us of what we’ve recently been missing, and how wonderful and enduring so much of that music was and is. More recent artists would do well to: 1) actually learn how to play some musical instruments, not just sing, and 2) learn how to write their own songs as well. It’s a consummation devoutly to be wished.
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