| |
|
|
Country and blues
|
|
|
|
|
|
Long before Lucinda Williams laid the groundwork for her ascent into the alterna-country pantheon with a now classic 1988 homonymous album on Rough Trade, she had a whole other career as a Rory Block–style trad-folk-blues singer/guitarist that yielded two albums on the Folkways label — 1979’s Ramblin’ on My Mind and 1980’s Happy Woman Blues. Although she rarely plays any of the material from those two discs, which were reissued by Rounder in 1991, she’s continued to feed her Ramblin’ muse, with at least one gritty rocker on each release that’s less country than blues — tunes like "Changed the Locks" from that landmark 1988 album and "Joy" from 1998’s celebrated Car Wheels on a Gravel Road (Mercury). When Williams arrived on stage at the Orpheum a week ago Tuesday, she not only looked more comfortable than she has at her past couple of local appearances but she apparently felt confident enough to kick things off without the help of her seasoned backing band. With just an acoustic guitar in hand, and a music stand to hold her book of lyrics in front of her, she performed a touching version of "Passionate Kisses," a gutsy track from the 1988 album that’s become her best known number thanks to Mary Chapin Carpenter, who had a mainstream country hit with the song. More than anything she’s written since, "Passionate Kisses" captures Williams’s unique appeal, with its deceptively simple yet artful chord progression and guitar hook, and lyrics that reveal a woman — now 50 — who wants both the freedom to rock out and a stable home life, the authority to lead the boys in the band and the womanly vulnerability to surrender to romance. Fifteen years later, it remains the blueprint for the kinds of songs that have made her such a darling to critics. But once Williams was joined by the boys in her band, she cranked up the volume, dug in her heels, and played a gritty set that peaked with a hard-hitting version of the bluesy "Joy." There was plenty of strumming and twanging along the way to keep her feet planted firmly on the rootsy side of the tracks. Yet with her mussed-up hairdo and thin, boyish figure, she looked every bit the Keith Richards/Paul Westerberg rocker, a point she brought home when, in an uncharacteristically talkative moment, she introduced the closing number of her 14-song set — "Real Live Bleeding Fingers and Broken Guitar Strings" — as a tribute to the late, great Minneapolis band the Replacements.
BY MATT ASHARE
|
