I've been following Rosanne Cash since the late 70s. I'm not even going to start on her pedigree or talent. And I'd never seen her play! She seems to rarely perform in the Northeast. So when she announced a date at The Cabot in Beverly (Thursday, November 29) it was another case of not hesitating more than a second. Apparently that hesitation cost us some good seats (maybe there was a pre-sale??), but we still grabbed great ones, second row balcony center. We were very psyched to go see her, and The Cabot was packed.
Both of us worked at home that day and then took off in what was basically plenty of time to get out to the North Shore. But even so we had to wade through oodles of traffic, finally ending up in our favorite restaurant in Salem, Gulu-Gulu, a couple of hours before the show was going to start. This gave us time for a nice leisurely hang, trying their cheese board and crepes and eclectic beers (I had a saison and a barleywine by Idle Hands).
Got over to Beverly after that and parked in our normal space. The night was already getting windy and chilly, as many nights this Fall have been, but we got in easily and up to our seats to settle in. Mark Erelli was the opening act and he was as good as we've seen him. He opened with three new songs, and then did his great By Degrees, which he's recently re-recorded with Rosanne, Anaïs Mitchell, and a cast of millions of real Americans. You should check it out.
Erelli is a very interesting artist to my mind, a local musician who's written some great songs and shown incredible talent. But he also can be a boring solo folk guitarist when he puts his mind to it. We saw a little bit of both on Thursday and in all he was exactly what we'd expected. He only did a couple of other songs after the show-stopper of By Degrees, a short first set with only 7(?) songs, but whatever.
Then they took longer than they might setting up Rosanne, and finally her band came out (Kevin Barry on lead guitar!) and launched into A Feather's Not a Bird. Rosanne came out a moment later and started singing, engulfing us in the waves of her voice. You could call her an alto, you could call her a country mega-hit musician, you could call her a folkie with a guitar (she played guitar on every song except the opener), and you'd just be scratching the surface. She has as many facets as any musician, and she and her band (husband and composer John Leventhal on the other guitar) showed us a good number of them in her 2-hour set.
Wow, she was as cool as I'd imagined, and as in charge of her act as you'd want to see. Leventhal was a little too loud and a little too brash at times, but Rosanne gently reminded him over and over that not only was she the main act, she was the conductor. She calmed him down and got Kevin to turn up when it was needed with a look and a gesture or two. And she hyped up her drummer, keyboardist, and bass player (who were adequate, in descending order of talent IMO).
But who cares who was on stage with her, the inadequacies of The Cabot's sound system (particularly bad with the challenging voice of Erelli), or the heritage she comes from with her father and first husband ... the amazing thing was her riveting voice. Here are a few songs she played, mixing mostly tracks from her fantastic last three records:
A Feather's Not a Bird
She Remembers Everything
Long Black Veil
The Only Thing Worth Fighting For
The Sunken Lands
Modern Blue
I'm Movin' On
Money Road
Blue Moon With Heartache (she introduced it as her earliest song, written when she was 14)
The Undiscovered Country
When the Master Calls the Roll
But the song of the night was a cover, her version of Ode To Billie Joe. This was a tour de force like you can't believe! The only sound throughout the theater was the sound of dentures dropping out of gaping mouths, astonished at the sound (it was a mature audience). I've listened to these words many times and I have a good idea what they mean, to me that is. As she said after we'd all toweled off, "Forty years later and we're still wondering what the heck they were throwing off that bridge, now *that's* a good song!"
And she closed her long set with her earliest mega-hit, Seven Year Ache! Oh Dog ... I'd been waiting to see and hear her sing this for almost 40 years, and it was as catchy and meaty as I'd imagined. I can still see her cover picture on that record.
She came back out for an encore with the embarrassed Mark Erelli. She said she's asked him if he knew this song and of course he did, and of course he sang a few beautiful verses to 500 Miles. But she took the other verses and left him in the dust.
That was it, we had been blessed by Rosanne Cash and felt a lot better for it. The cranky crowd finally made it down the stairs and out onto the sidewalk in the cold evening. Back to our car quickly and a smooth ride home, in bed by 11:30 or so on a Thursday, not bad.
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