The Gentleman Cowboy

For my birthday this year my dear sister and brother gave me a couple tickets to the annual Lyle Lovett concert at the Chateau Ste. Michelle winery in Woodinville. Kim of course was my date, and she wore those handsome cowboy boots of hers that she won from running that darn half-marathon last fall.

These shows used to be "neighborhood" events for us, literally a 5 minute drive over from Novelty Hill. Now from Bainbridge it's a bit of a hike, and we turned the evening into a full on date night complete with dinner at Il Tropea in Redmond.

We ended up coming a bit late because when we read the ticket we thought that we weren't that interested in seeing John Hiatt, the "opening act". Ha! Turns out that this concert was a different format than usual. Apparently there is an old tradition in the Nashville country scene where musicians will share a stage a do a kind of musical dialogue -- one guy does a song and the other may or may not sing back up of play along. Then the other does his song in response, again with some help. Like a friendly duel.

So they did start on time and we missed the first duel or two. Whoops!

There were three things that I liked about this format very much:

1) I find myself in concerts trying to figure out what the band's mood is -- or what their attitude toward their body of work is -- by reading into the set list. I'm sure it's just me over-reading, but I do a bunch of mental noodling during a show, esp. in the downtime when the band plays something I don't know or like. But with this format I liked "solving" the problem of why the second person chose the song they did as a response. Some of the pairings were easy -- two songs about Memphis, or two songs that are standards, etc. Since I didn't know much about John Hiatt, it was an interesting entry point into his work, through Lyle.

2) Usually Lyle has a Very Large Band. For this show it was just him and an acoustic guitar. When I listen to music I'm pretty focused on the lyrics, esp. Lyle's lyrics, so it was great to have his voice dominate his songs. It felt much more Lyle. I was also struck by how not-technical he is, even compared to Hiatt. It's like his music is a sort of rough clean place to lay out his lyrics. I guess I've never seen him that alone and unvarnished for that length of time. I loved it.

3) Because there were just these two guys sitting on chairs up there doing a back and forth musical thing, the whole scene lent itself to quite a bit of banter. It was like overhearing some guys jamming a bit on a porch in Texas. And they almost talked as much as they sang -- no kidding. And there was quite a bit of interaction with the audience too. Lyle came across as a very sweet, country gentleman cowboy. Very polite, very dry and deeply funny.

I think the audience was evenly split between the people that came to see Lyle and the people who came to see John. I kinda got how these two guys might have met up, but there was enough of a demographic difference between their fans -- and they have pretty different world-views -- that I would have liked more back story on how they got thrown together on stage. I came away with the impression of John Hiatt as a hillbilly version of Neil Diamond. So like Lenny Kravitz last week, who was not exactly my cup of tea, he made the "main act" seem that much cooler.

But Lyle is such a dear dude I'd be happy to go see him every year, even if he brought KISS and Peewee Herman and Victoria Jackson.