Lucinda’s rocking. She plays for about an hour and fifteen minutes, and then she calls Patty Griffin back out to do a couple of numbers with her. They finish the show to monstrous applause and then there’s only the buzz of people talking.
The place is still packed, maybe even now more packed than it had been before, and there are empty flattened beer cups all over the floor and the occasional wet spot. Charlie, the nice young man who is the road manager, is up there on the stage getting everything ready. Just before the show, Robert comes over in a white turtleneck and coat, boots and dark jeans, looks totally relaxed. He loves Marty Robbins and Willie Nelson. He’s a big guy and there seem to be no large signs of the sensitive wordsmith or poet about him, but all you have to do is watch him step to the microphone and start playing and begin to pull his voice up out of himself and listen to the songs he’s written to find out that isn’t true. Somewhere deep inside him he must have a secret cave where he keeps care and love and heartbreak and loneliness and the joy of life and irony and even humor stashed away, and he lets pieces of them out when he’s writing about the people in his songs. I talk to Robert for a while before the show and then they go on.
It’s the same magic you see every time you get out in front of the stage when they’re on it. A smooth and very loud voice asks the crowd to welcome them and it echoes out over the audience and then they come onto the stage and pick up their instruments while the cheers and the shouts rise in volume until a great roar is going up and the people wave their arms and welcome them in.
They play the songs to a reaction of human vocal thunder that keeps rising after each number and I don’t believe they could fit many more dudes in here at this point. I mean not without getting the fire marshal all upset. As good as I’ve already heard them, the band sound seems bigger, the drums and strings and the bow on the fiddle more intense, Robert’s voice up on the edge of what a human heart can go through for love. They play strong and seem to draw even more strength from the crowd, and it’s plain the feeling is mutual. It’s an amazing show from start to finish, with slow sweet spots, and rocking-out-tunes, and ballads that are timeless, and the people don’t want to let them go at the end. They have to keep playing for a while. You can see that they’re glad to do it. This is why they each spent all that time learning how to do it. This is a big part of the reward for the time spent. But the last number always has to come. The last beer has to be drunk, the last date made, the last kiss taken, the last keys taken away.
Even though there are some nights in front of the stage when you wish the night could kind of just keep on rolling.
Nashville, February 2001: The bus sits idling behind 328 Performance Hall, down on Fourth Avenue South. My squeeze and I just drove up from the house this afternoon, it’s only four hours, a breeze up I-40, an old and familiar trail that we’ve run like dogs. Grand Ole Opry. Bluebird Cafe. Gruhn’s Guitars. I’ve toted a cold Budweiser over in my coat pocket from the hotel. She may have secreted a Honey Bun or nabs. There’s another bus next to Robert’s, don’t know whose it is. I see Bill first thing when we go up the sidewalk, all dressed in black behind the building, and his grin lights up even in the dark. We’re staying just up the street at the large, convenient and somewhat swanky Hilton Towers. Bill gives me a shake and her a hug and both of us a pass. He takes us on the bus for a while and we visit some, then we decide to go in and catch the rest of the Kasey Chambers show, since she’s opening for them.
Backstage a ramp goes down to an open concrete floor with long black curtains hung at the rear of the stage, and the band’s playing in front of those curtains. Eight or ten people are milling around. There’s a side room with a cooler full of Shiner Bock and Bill tells me to help myself. I get myself a Shiner and her a Diet Coke and we go around the left side of the curtain where there’s a small railed viewing place with ten or twelve chairs, where folks can sit and watch the show. There’s a little dark-haired girl at the microphone out on the stage, and she’s really rocking, and Bill says she’s from Australia, and that her daddy and her brother are both in the band. I can see her daddy, I think. I figure he’s the older guy with the Les Paul.
We sit back there and watch the show for a while. It’s very good. It’s very comfortable. We can even smoke. They play a Fred Eaglesmith song called “Water In The Fuel” and make it smoke. Bill and I catch up on our visiting. It’s been more than a year since I’ve seen them, which was the last time they played in Oxford. This place isn’t as big as the Austin Music Hall, but it’s nothing to sneeze at. Rich is back there and we talk for a while. Tom’s on the bus resting, getting ready for the show.
The opening act finishes and we go back out and Robert is coming up the sidewalk wearing a cap and a pea coat with a bag over his shoulder and what looks like a cup of Starbucks and a music publishing guy, Luke, head of Mercury Records. I shake hands with them and we get back on the bus and I introduce Luke to my lady and then Robert talks to her. Luke’s kind of shy about it, but wants a book signed, and I’m glad to do it for him. I think people in the music business like to read fiction because so many of them are writers themselves. They appreciate a good line or phrase. They know heartbreak and tragedy. They know the joys of life and the burning sufferings of love lost. (And why is there so much about love in songs anyway? Probably because since time immemorial love is the main thing that really matters to just about everybody. If you don’t have it, I figure you’re screwed. You’re out in the cold, shopping by yourself, watching TV with corn dogs by yourself, all rolled up in a cold and lonely blanket by yourself, silent with your thoughts. You’ve got to have somebody you can touch, smile at, talk with, sleep with and make the old wonderful love. And if you don’t, you might have a song. Or maybe your woman’s messed over you recently and you’ve got a song about that. Lots of songs are about that. Maybe she was a real fox and all your friends were jealous as hell and wanted to talk to her all the time and you loved her a lot and she was a great cook who was built like a brick shithouse but then she run off to Missoula with a Flathead on you. The whole world’s out there to write about, and loss is a big part of it in country and western music. I reckon it always has been. Of course that’s not the only thing to write about. You can also write a song about a five-pound bass and have it go over bigtime.)
I meet Marty Muse, who’s on the pedal steel, but Bryan Duckworth’s not there. Robert says Bryan took some time off, months ago, to think about what he wanted to do with the rest of his life. And then, later, he called back and decided not to rejoin the band. I’m glad to meet Marty, but can’t help being sad not to see Bryan. He was a fun guy to be around, and I wonder what the band’s going to sound like without a fiddle and with a pedal steel instead. I know it’s got to sound good, but I know it’s got to sound different, and after a while they get ready to go on.
