Playin’ Rock ‘n’ Roll
Monday night shows that don’t let out until after eleven are a bit beyond me at this point, but even though she’s down here annually for the Byron Bay Blues Fest, Lucinda Williams doesn’t tour Australia often, so this was a must-see concert, at the (largely) civilized Enmore Theatre, and I’m happy to have made the effort, if a bit jaded this morning.

Often enough, a musician with a new album out pretty much just runs through the new material, but this show covered off at least one or two numbers from each album in her catalog, not really getting to the new stuff until well into the two-plus hours she spent on stage. It is, however, unusual, to say the least, to see a singer-songwriter reading the lyrics, but there she was, a music stand to her left, with the printed lyrics to all her new songs, managed by an efficient roadie, who’d bring out a new batch as needed, as well as handling everybody’s various guitar-changes. (There was a moment when – and I’m guessing – Lucinda couldn’t hear her guitar on the pick-ups, and stopped a song just a minute or less into it, but it was actually all o.k., not the roadie’s error, and they started over.) Interestingly, for someone renowned as a song-writing craftsman, Lucinda Williams doesn’t play much. I don’t think I saw much in the way of any chord changes at any time she had a guitar in her hands, electric or otherwise, but her backing band, Buick 6, managed to drive their blues solos into near jazz improvisational levels without ever losing the melody, so why should she do more than strum anyway?

Lucinda Williams new album, Little Honey, finishes with the AC/DC classic, “It’s a Long Way to the Top (if You Want to Rock ‘n’ Roll),” and I seriously wondered if she would be so bold as to perform it in front of an Australian audience, even if they were, from my observation, very much partisans in her favor. She did, of course, leading, in her encore, from Son House through to Faces’ “Every Picture Tells a Story” (n.b. that’s her accreditation of the song, better known as a Rod Stewart when-he-was-still-good number, although everybody knows he kept it off the last Faces record for his own solo effort) and straight through to a rousing rendition of Oz-rock favourite.