Hoyden on the Road

The Songwriter's Tour
w/Guy Clark, Joe Ely, John Hiatt and Lyle Lovett
Whitney Hall,The Kentucky Center for the Arts, Louisville, KY January 21,2007


In my experience vacation in January, unless it involves a beach, is almost always a "use it or lose it" affair. Finding myself with four days to blow before the end of the fiscal year I planned to go home. Winter finally showed up around the same time and made the trip temporarily questionable until my dad called to ask would I be up for a Sunday night show after driving for 6 hours. Now if there's any carrot that would make me drive through Ohio in an ice storm it's live music.

~sidenote~Ohio drivers are notoriously bad. When I lived in Kentucky we made fun of them and it amused me greatly when I moved to Michigan that they felt the same. In both states telling someone "you drive like someone from Ohio" will likely start a fight.

Seeing any one of these songwriters perform solo would have been enough, all four on the same stage promised to be a special treat indeed. John Hiatt is my absolute favorite. It won't win me any big promotions to say so but if my store was on fire the one thing I'd rush in to save would be the photo of me being embraced by Hiatt at an instore performance after I had successfully delivered my big rehearsed speech about how much his work meant to me. I am a huge fan of artists who have overcome and, now safely on the other side, write equally well about their dark nights of the soul and the small everyday pleasures they relish now.

The show setup was simple-four chairs, four guys with guitars. They each performed a song one by one alphabetically (and as we later figured, chronologically) with only two songs featuring all of them. For 4 friends who've been doing this off and on since 1989, there wasn't as much interplay as we expected, John and Lyle were very chatty, the other two less so. Guy Clark seemed to be unwell, his songs were fine but he looked uncomfortable when the others were singing and even left the stage briefly. Hopefully it was a temporary ailment, not a return of the cancer he battled in 2006. Joe Ely was very fun but more than the others his songs cried out for more than just a guitar.

Highlights included Lyle's "LA County", his cover of Clark's "Step Inside This House" (my favorite Guy Clark song which almost unbelievably, turns out to be the first he ever wrote) a new one about a South Texas girl in the time before car seats, Ely's new Bonnie and Clyde song which namechecks Louisville, Clark's superhero song which I am embarrassed to say I don't know the proper title of and Hiatt's "Crossing Muddy Water", an agonizing tribute to his first wife who committed suicide which he performs only rarely.

The only other flaw with the show was a personal issue-I have seen John Hiatt so much that I no longer need to hear his "hits". Now he's a consumate showman-there's no way he's not doing "Thing Called Love" or "Memphis in the Meantime" or "Tennessee Plates" but those are the songs I want to hear least. I really just need a command performance where I would name the songs. My intense fandom also leads to a case of PCS or Premature Clapping Syndrome. I need a lot fewer notes than most to know what's coming and, even in the dark, that can be a little embarrassing.