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PURRFECTION
LUCINDA WILLIAMS DELIVERS
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If there’s anything redundant about touring behind a live album, neither Lucinda Williams — who released Live @ the Fillmore (Lost Highway) in May — nor her fans were feeling it a week ago Tuesday at the Opera House. The concert was a little less rockin’ than the November 2004 San Francisco gigs caught on the double-disc set. But Williams and her versatile band — guitarist Doug Pettibone, drummer Jim Christie, and bassist Taras Prodaniuk — got their licks in. Especially Williams, who said she’d planned to try out just two new songs but wound up playing a handful that, like the performance, seem to indicate her music is traveling in softer directions. Two particularly captivating new tunes defined her spectrum. Early on she played "Jailhouse Tears," a white-trash rocker full of booze, drugs, violent love, heartbreak, and power chords. It’s hard to ask for more, especially from an artist with such a brilliant ear for poetic detail and a voice that by turns drawls, purrs, and grinds gravel. The other new ones were ballads, all alluring, but the best was "Where Is My Love," a sweetly pining jazz shuffle complete with ninth chords from Pettibone that evoked the mystique of Billie Holiday. She played a generous selection of favorites, too, most of them drawn from her 1998 breakthrough Car Wheels on a Gravel Road and 2003’s loud ’n’ lovely World Without Tears (both on Lost Highway). Love was the night’s theme. Williams referred to her superb accompanists as "my love band," and the camaraderie on stage indeed seemed high, with supportive smiles and nods exchanged after turns like the supple, sliding bass runs Prodaniuk used to underline the shifting emotions of "Pineola," which is about a young poet’s suicide. And right after Williams first took the stage in her vest, studded belt, and jeans and sang "Ventura," with its lyrics "I want to get swallowed up/In an ocean of love," she was. The crowd cheered and applauded songs, between-song patter, and even Williams’s observation that the Opera House’s sound — stunning for this show — was the best she’d ever had on stage.
BY TED DROZDOWSKI
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