| Robyn Recap |
[Mar. 29th, 2005|08:22 pm] |
Southpaw, Brooklyn NY on 3/25/05. Here's how it went down.
I am a maniac who has to be right up front, so I got to the club really early, Charles met me there, and we were the first ones in line. We plonked ourselves front and center.
The opening band, American Altitude, wasn't bad. Folky, which is good. All their songs kinda sounded the same, which is bad. At some point during their set, I turned to Charles and said, "I think you are the only man in this club who is not cultivating some sort of hipster sideburns. That's good!"
Robyn came out a little before 9 p.m. Mmmmman it had been a long time since I'd seen him. I think the last time was in 1997, when I went to one of the gigs that was filmed for Storefront Hitchcock. Back then, Robyn was just starting to get very gray.
Now, he is completely gray. Like wow-real gray. That was kinda weird. He was wearing his red shirt with the little targets and green lizards on it.
He played for about 2 hours, all acoustic. And he started with
Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands
(Did I call it or what, ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) chuckdee? This was with harmonica. Robyn stopped after about 4 minutes and said "I'll finish that tomorrow at Maxwell's.")
Glass Hotel
(After Glass Hotel, Robyn said "Thank you, fellow clothes-wearers." People started throwing request lists up to the front [aided by me, who would toss them past the monitor and/or hand them to Robyn] and yelling out requests. He agreed to play Ghost Ship [never one of my favorite Robyn songs] after warning us that it was long, and prefaced it by telling the sound engineer, "Put a bit of rock-and-roll delay on the voice, if you haven't already.")
Ghost Ship
(More reading of written requests, with quips from Robyn: "More requests, all from North America! ...Anal Damage City? I've played that already." He prefaced the next song by saying "Most of my songs fall into a divide before 1988 or after 1988, after which I wasn't as much fun, but I gained a bit of depth. Why? Did I fall off my motorbike? Did I change my drugs? Did I fire my manager? I fired my manager!")
Surgery
Mexican God
Trilobite (with a recycled [for shame!!!] intro about a collection of cells insultingly being called one name, like Lisa. )
She Doesn't Exist (Absolutely exquisite. I always forget about this song.)
The Crystal Ship (Doors)
Mind Games (Lennon)
A Man's Gotta Know His Limitations, Briggs
(At this point, Deni came out. Generally, I am not a Deni fan, but BOY the usual Robyn-Deni repertoire sounded a lot better than it did eight years ago. More about being impressed with Deni later. All the following songs were done with Deni.)
Arms of Love (with harmonica)
DeChirico Street (dedicated to Tim Keegan)
Radio Storm
Sinister But She Was Happy (it took a lot of badgering from several parties [including me] to get him to play this)
Egyptian Cream
("So, people come up to me and say, 'Why do you write songs about sex and death, Mr. Hitchcock?' and I say, 'You're kidding.'")
Beautiful Queen (dedicated to Michele)
(Robyn and Deni leave. Robyn returns after a few minutes and plays the following songs solo)
Devil's Coachman
Queen of Eyes (my request, yay! alternate lyrics: "In the horrible age of decay and abuse, it's good to know someone has got an excuse.")
(Deni returned and we all played "Stump the fiddle player." Deni kept up with the following four songs very well, despite never having heard them before.
She followed the changes and worked up some rillycool solos too! Robyn provided guidance before each song by telling her what the key changes would be. His stylistic instruction amount to one phrase for all three songs: "It's psychedelic." Uh, thanks Robyn.)
Gigolo Aunt (Barrett)
Rain (Beatles)
Waterloo Sunset (Kinks)
Wolcott's Medicine Show (Robbie Robertson)
Song that goes "Everybody knows that Dubya sucks but Rumsfeld is the antichrist."
And that was the end.
It was a good show, and it was great to see Robyn again, after so long.
It won't go down as one of my favorite Robyn shows, though. Something about the request-heavy format disappointed me, which surprised me. For instance, when I saw John Wesley Harding that first time, with moobie and blergeatkitty, I was familiar with only two JWH CDs, and the request-driven format was exciting, because I got to hear a variety of stuff and almost all of it was new to me.
At the Robyn show, though, a lot of the requests were kinda bleh. Other people's favorite Robyn songs are not my favorite Robyn songs. At least not in Brooklyn.
Apparently he played a show in DC last week where all the requests were things I love. I guess I just live in the wrong part of the country for being surrounded by simpatico fegs.
But. Robyn was here and I saw him. Yay!
I hope it's not another seven or eight years before I see him again. |
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