Saturday evening we headed down to the East Village to Webster Hall to catch the Lucinda Williams show. It seems that all of the shows are in the East Village and yet nearly every time to go to one it is a venue we haven’t been to before. Webster Hall is pretty interesting. It was built in the 1880s and is supposed to be the first nightclub in the US. It looks to me as if it has had minimal remodeling over the decades. The few updates have been on the surface, literally. They have added electricity, water sprinklers, speakers, and spotlights over the years but nothing has been installed behind the walls or hidden in the ceiling. Instead they ran layers of conduit and pipes on the outside of the walls and facades or even punched holes in the ceiling making all these improvements visible.
The posted time for the show was misleading and was actually the time for the doors to open so we wound up getting there a couple of hours earlier than we needed to. Toni decided she was not going to be able to wait until after the show to eat so she headed across the street to a place we had been to before, The Village Pour House. I wasn’t hungry so I decided to wait at the bar at the hall. She told me if I changed my mind I could meet her. When we were last at the restaurant in December we learned that this is the official watering hole for the local KU alumni to hang out. As fate would have it Toni had timed it perfectly to show at their door for the middle of the final game of the Big 12 Tournament. She wound up having Thai at the restaurant next door instead.
We found out that the venue was set up for standing only, no seats. However, one of the bouncers rounded up a chair for me and set us up just in front of the soundboard. This guy looked like he was wearing football shoulder pads. No exaggeration, he had to turn sideways to walk through doorways.
Lucinda’s show was good, not great. Pretty much the same formula for her live shows the last couple of times I saw her. Started out with semi-acoustic slower numbers and gradually kept notching up the tempo and volume until by the end she was rocking it out and shaking the rafters. The new material sounded OK but there was probably nothing there that will replace her older songs in the long run. You can check the song list below. After the show we were just waiting around for the others to clear out when our friend the bouncer came up to us and gave me the guitarist’s playlist complete with his notes of what guitar to use for each song and what chords to play. FWIW they did stray from the setlist as there was one song added for the finale. Lucinda is known for very little stage patter and simply introduces each song with, “This song is called ‘Sweet Old World’ “, or whatever. But for the last song of the evening she went on for some time about the state of the world and politics before the house lights came on and she launched into Buffalo Springfield’s “For What It’s Worth” (Hey, hey, what's that sound? Everybody look what's going down).
The audience roared and jumped right in singing the entire song with her.
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