Joined: 26 Nov 2003 Posts: 2 Location: Derbyshire, England, UK.
Posted: Wed Nov 26, 2003 1:06 pm Post subject: Newcastle Opera House
Robben Ford At The Newcastle Opera House 21/11/03
I'm tired of the bullshit. I'm tired of TV advertising in my face. I'm sick of calls trying to sell me health insurance and I'm sick of just knowing Friends and Pop Idol exist. I'm tired of music everywhere that's so bad it isn't even music. I'm tired of cynicism and people mouthing off who know nothing. I think I knew all this, but an hour and a half in a hall listening to and watching The Man make his stand in this old northern city Saturday night really nailed the lid down on it.
He comes on after this tired and worn out singer who used to be in a famous English band has vacated the stage. Whether it was the same bullshit that was bothering me I wouldn't know. Anyhow, the Ford guy comes onto stage in a long coat and I think 'he's going to be too hot playing and singing in that all night,' but he keeps it on the whole way. Maybe this is what they mean by cool. He has a black guitar, a shiny black guitar, starts playing it and you have it confirmed for you what you pretty much knew before you came: this guy is world class. He opens his mouth and sings at you, and though he's not world class at that, he's good enough. You wouldn't want him to be a world beater: that and the guitar would be too much and anyway, the good Lord doesn't ever put that much pressure on someone.
So this music comes at you, the rockin' blues and you haven't a doubt that if Mozart was alive he'd not only be here but be in row three lapping it up. First song you're checking out the man, the long hair, the fifty-something face and body clashing with a photograph on an album cover from thirty years ago where a baby faced kid smiles out at you. You're still noticing the black and grey clothes. You're noticing how damn tall he is. You're studying the way the guitar sits on his frame and how his fingers deal with the fretboard. A guitar player yourself, you always look at the masters to try to work out what they have that you don't, or try to understand how they have access to the magic when you don't. The notes curl and slide at speed from speakers at perfect volume, fingers working with some apparent effort, but not much. Chording the backdrops to verses and fine, clean sax breaks, it's effortless, moves and manoeuvres perfected through being executed thousands of times.
The set begins to move through its natural cycle. Song two, I know: Help The Poor. Its familiarity is pleasing, but it doesn't much matter. The rest of the set I hardly know but it leaves a deeper and deeper imprint on me, the thumb of it twisting and pushing into farther recesses of a place in me I can't name. I feel it in the back of my spine one second, in my head the next another. I can't work it out. That doesn't matter either. What does is the pleasure I'm feeling. The intensity of it. It doesn't come from one song or another but gathers as each bar of music passes by, containing as it does, so much. There's a whole lot more going on than a guitar maestro. The drummer, can't be thirty yet, straight hair hanging down long and half-kemp is sharp and passionate. His musical personality comes pushing through early on, strong, more than a supportive figure but not a vain one either. The bass player is young too, and stands like his shoes are glued to the boards and he's really solid. And there's a sax player who looks like he just got off from a long stint at the post-graduate library. He can't be twenty-five and he's all glasses and sensible short hair. And clothes? If this is showbiz, then the stage clothes must have got lost in transit at some airport or other. I like it this way.
The point is, there's a band playing, a collective, with a unified spirit, all in service to what they're doing. Making music like this is a form of worship. Seems like it to me, anyway. Not only does reverence and respect have to be paid to the heroes and trailblazers on the blues timeline, the wallet has to be emptied to the process. The lore: the flicks and tricks, the technique, the arcane knowledge that makes being able to pour out this music into the world. Even mainman Robben is doing this. He perhaps more than the other three. Without the commitment to the search for perfection, or for higher musical learning, none of this is possible. Talent alone is not enough.
There are songs the band plays that send me. One called Up The Line is a fine, fine thing, but the long piece that follows is a tour de force that has me tied up in a spell of reverence. Then another slow thing has the guitar player playing such sweet chord inversions that keeps me there, keeps me hanging on, keeps me in that zone, of entrancement. This is music with not only total purity of spirit and intention, it has intelligence. This isn't a musician who reels off the blues in clichés. Even when the band move into a song with signature riffs and changes we've all heard dozens and dozens of times before - even someone who hasn't followed the blues these past thirty years has collided with the staple patterns over and over again - the familiarity isn't tiresome, it's historical. Or it's that this band deliver it with a spirit that transcends the apparent limitations of the old three chord constructions.
Or is it a question of intelligence though, or impeccable taste? Are the clichés consciously avoided or does the band leader skate past them unseeing in pursuance of a personal blues destination? Willie Dixon's tune anyway, It Don't Make Sense sounds so fresh it could have been written last week. And its lyrics are so damned interesting and relevant the way Robben Ford plays and sings it. Like the piece immediately before it (or was it immediately after? I can't tell you) which came right out of the blues and ran with joyous abandon into a lush, soulful jazz territory, it tears up time, stretches is so five minutes sounds like an hour's worth of satisfaction. I wasn't expecting the unexpected but I was magnificently wrong-footed by that. When the 'straight' blues does turn up again later, it comes as a further blessing, and I'm still trying to work out how that was the case. Probably this guy is incapable of making anything sound banal: can inject any chosen song with a freshness that comes from both abundant skill and a love for music deeper than a well.
The why's of a gig aren't really important however when it's as good as this. The big thing is the depth of pleasure you feel, the being bowled over, the being won over, the feeling of a more complete well-being than you surely deserve. The experience just became more and more intense, the collective groove stronger and richer, the solos more glorious and fitting, until the man in the middle lifted his axe off his body without the guitar tech standing by and you know it's almost done.
The encores should be celebrations are were here: two tunes most everyone in the hall would know, especially the last Badge, which was so special I can hardly talk about it. Go out on a happy high. Go out not going through the motions. Go out celebrating the fact that we're all alive and here in the moment.
The afterwards.
We go to the bar. Maybe the man will come out. Of course it would be wonderful to get the chance to shake the Man by the hand and say thank you. I can even make it practical. What about a live album so - and this may be stupid, I know - nights like this can be re-heard at least, if they can't be re-lived. What was the name of that track after Up The Line? I've got to know. He doesn't show. The guys in the band do, and take a drink. On another night maybe I ask them to satisfy my curiosity, but they're talking to other people, and anyway, how can 'thanks for the show, it was great' be made truly meaningful when more extravagant gestures of praise feel more appropriate.
In the back street by the stage door, the tour bus stands outside, small and empty of the musicians. A couple of guys are carrying out guitars and other box like shapes, the menial things that enable the musical experience to become a growing thing in the minds of those who were on the wavelength or who were the most needy.
The ordinariness of the scene is discouraging. It occurs to you how strange it is how someone who can play like this is only playing to a small audience. Across the town on Newcastle in a week or so, a month or so, a man who can't play as good as this will play to ten thousand people. Cold night fog makes the back street look mangy, desperate and lost. It doesn't seem fair that soon one of the greatest musicians on the revolving planet will walk out onto this place, so far away from limelight and luxury. Maybe Robben Ford likes it like this. No superstar trappings, no limousines and no flunkies. No bullshit.
Then again, what do we know of a man's life when we see him on the stage. Guesses and muses are difficult to avoid. Are you as wealthy as you deserve, man? And are you happy? A man who can give us a night like tonight deserves to have true wealth, whatever that is, overflowing from cupped, laughing hands.
*
I'm tired of the bullshit. I want more purity in my life. I want more simplicity. I want more nourishment of the soul and the spirit. I need to buy more Robben Ford CDs. I need electricity and gadgets on which to play them. Nothing in life is ever simple.
Joined: 16 Jul 2003 Posts: 534 Location: SF Bay area
Posted: Wed Nov 26, 2003 3:36 pm Post subject: Welcome, indeed.
A second welcome to you, Craig. What a pleasure to read your articulate review. Feel free to post many more, any time the mood strikes you. You did, indeed, take me there.
And welcome to the world of Ford Fan-atics...now you know why. Make yourself at home. _________________ www.elizabethgage.com
Extraordinary review of an extraordinary experience. Thank you so very much for taking the time to express this heartfelt piece. I may never get to see Robben play, but as Kirk expressed, you had me right there with your writing. _________________ garylamarLOUDguitar
Joined: 16 Jul 2003 Posts: 328 Location: The Netherlands
Posted: Wed Nov 26, 2003 11:31 pm Post subject:
Hi Craig,
What a wonderful piece of writing, and what a accurate description of how Robben put me back on track a few years ago, in a time I was a lost musician. I hope your writing will be seen many more times at this forum.
Welcome to the Club!!
Joined: 15 Aug 2003 Posts: 234 Location: Hartlepool, U.K.
Posted: Thu Nov 27, 2003 2:15 am Post subject:
Gan canny, kidda! _________________ "Creativeness often consists of merely turning up what is already there. Did you know that right and left shoes were only thought up a little more than a century ago?" - Bernice Fitz-Gibbon 1894-1982
Joined: 26 Nov 2003 Posts: 2 Location: Derbyshire, England, UK.
Posted: Fri Nov 28, 2003 11:15 pm Post subject: Same Review -Second Draft
At the risk of behaving what we call in England a “twat” - a completely self-absorbed fool, to put it more politely, here’s a second draft. Craig.
Robben Ford At The Newcastle Opera House 21/11/03
I’m tired of the bullshit. I’m tired of TV advertising in my face. I’m sick of calls trying to sell me health insurance and I’m sick of just knowing Friends and Pop Idol exist. I’m sick of cynicism and people mouthing off who know nothing. I’m tired of music scratching at my ear everywhere that isn’t even music. I think I already knew all this before Saturday night, but I wasn’t aware that I felt so bad about the state of things. It took an hour and a half with The Man In The Long Coat to really nail the lid down on it.
He comes on stage after this tired and worn out singer who used to be in a famous English band has vacated the area. Whether he was beat looking because of the same bullshit that was bothering me, I wouldn’t know. Anyway, there’s Robben right there in that long dark coat (and a wide open necked white shirt), and I think to myself ’he’s going to be too hot playing and singing in that all night,’ but he keeps it on the whole way. Maybe this is what they mean by ‘cool‘. He has a black guitar, a shiny black guitar. He starts playing it and you have it confirmed for you what you pretty much knew before you came: this man is world class. He opens his mouth and sings at you, and though he’s not world class at that, he’s more than good enough. You wouldn’t want him to be a world beater: that and the guitar would be too much and anyway, the good Lord doesn’t ever put that much pressure on someone.
So this music comes at you, the rockin’ blues and you haven’t a doubt that if Mozart was alive he’d not only be here in the room, but be in row B lapping it up and tapping his foot. First song, you’re still checking out the man: the long hair, centre-parted, the fifty-something face and body that clashes with a photograph on an album cover from thirty years ago. Back then he’s a baby faced kid smiling out at you from the miles of aisles. You remember that you saw him playing with the Great Joni back then and you think, man, that was a lifetime ago.
You’re still noticing the black and grey clothes. Then you’re noticing how damn tall he is. You’re studying the way the guitar sits on his frame and how his fingers deal with the fretboard. A poor guitar player yourself, you always look at the masters to try to work out what they have that you don’t, or try to understand how they have access to the magic when you don’t. The notes curl and slide at speed from speakers at perfect volume, his fingers working the wire and wood with some apparent effort, but not much. When he chords the backdrops to verses and fine, clean sax breaks, it’s effortless, moves and manoeuvres perfected through being executed thousand upon thousand of times.
The set begins to move through its natural cycle. Song two I know: Help The Poor. Its familiarity is pleasing. The rest of the set I hardly don’t know but it doesn’t much matter. It leaves a deeper and deeper imprint on me as it rolls across the evening towards the night, the thumb of it twisting and pushing into farther recesses of a place in me I can’t name. I feel it in the back of my spine one second, in my brain the next. I can’t work it out. That doesn’t matter either. What does is the pleasure I’m feeling. The intensity of it. It doesn’t come from one song or another but gathers as each bar of music passes by, containing as it does, so much. There’s a whole lot more here than a guitar maestro doing his thang. The drummer, can’t be thirty yet, straight hair hanging down long and half-kemp, is sharp and passionate. His musical personality comes pushing through early on, strong, more than a supportive figure but not a vain one either. The bass player is young too, and stands like his shoes are glued to the boards and he’s really solid. And there’s a sax player over on the left who looks like he just got off from a long stint at the post-graduate library. He can’t be twenty-five and he’s all glasses and sensible short hair. And clothes? If this is showbiz, then the stage clothes must have got lost in transit at some airport or other. But I like it this way.
The point is, there’s a band playing here, a collective, with a unified spirit, all in the service of the music and the tradition. It’s about values and the passage of time, but it’s intensely concerned with the here and the now too. Making music like this is a form of worship. Seems like it to me, anyway. Not only does reverence and respect have to be paid to the heroes and trailblazers on the blues timeline, the metaphorical wallet has to be emptied to the process, paid in blistered fingers, time spent away from important relationships and I daresay, hard cash for equipment and who knows what. The lore has to be catered to and cared for also: the flicks and tricks of technique: the arcane knowledge that enables such a music to be poured out into the world. Even Robben must still be doing this. Without a commitment to the search for perfection, or for higher musical learning, none of this is possible. Talent alone is not enough. A question crosses the mind: what has Robben given up for all this? To give me relief from the strain and the trouble of the world. To give me this detoxification?
There are songs the band plays that send me. One called Up The Line is a fine, fine thing, but the long piece that follows is a tour de force that has me tied up in a spell of something between awe and an adrenalin shot. Then another slow thing has the guitar player playing such sweet chord inversions that keeps me there, keeps me hanging on, keeps me in that zone of entrancement.
This is music with not only total purity of spirit and intention, but with an abundant intelligence too. This isn’t a musician who reels off the blues in clichés. Even when the band move into a song with signature riffs and changes we’ve all heard dozens and dozens of times before - even me who has not followed the blues these past thirty years - the familiarity isn’t tiresome, it’s historical. Or it’s that this band deliver it with a spirit that transcends the apparent limitations of the old three chord constructions. And as the records show, Robben is a guy who seems to glory not in a blues that got stuck in dusty grooves, but in blues with a twist: a dropped beat here, some jazz inflected tones there or a chord from some other room from the mansion of music. Plus, an intangible something always injected into the music like something protean and gaseous: a something that says not ’this is blues’ but ’this is music without the restriction of a name.’ This is what I hear tonight.
Or is it pompous to talk of questions of intelligence? Is it rather a matter of impeccable taste? Are the clichés consciously avoided or does the band leader skate past them unseeing in pursuance of a personal blues destination? I don’t really have the brains or the musical experience for the answers. What I do know is that this Willie Dixon tune, It Don’t Make Sense sounds so fresh it could have been written last week. And its lyrics are so damned interesting and relevant the way Robben Ford plays and sings it, it could be today’s news. Like the piece immediately before it (or was it immediately after? I can’t tell you) which came right out of the blues and ran with joyous abandon into a lush, soulful jazz territory, it tears up time, stretches is so five minutes feels like an hour’s worth of satisfaction. I wasn’t expecting the unexpected when I came out for this tonight, but I was magnificently wrong-footed by this temporary detour into this beautiful floating sound. Yet when the ‘straight’ blues does turn up again later, it comes as a further blessing, and I’m still trying to work out how that was the case. Probably this guy is incapable of making anything sound banal.
The why’s of a gig aren’t really important however when it’s as good as this. The big thing is the depth of pleasure you feel, the being bowled over, the being won over, the feeling of a more complete well-being than you surely deserve. The experience just becomes more and more intense as the collective groove grows stronger and richer, the solos more glorious and fitting, until the man in the middle lifted his axe off his body without the guitar tech standing by and you know it’s almost done.
The encores should be celebrations and they are tonight: two tunes most everyone in the hall would know, especially the last one Badge which was so special I can hardly talk about it. Go out on a happy high. Go out not going through the motions. Go out celebrating the fact that we’re all alive and here in the moment. Which we are. O yes. We’re right here.
The afterwards.
We go to the bar. Maybe the man will come out. Of course it would be wonderful to get the chance to shake him by the hand and say ‘thank you,‘ not in a humble way, because tonight you were treated as an equal, treated with respect. I can deal with the problem of looking fumbling and childish by making it practical. Say, ‘Robben, what about making a live album out of this tour so - and this may be stupid, I know - nights like this can be re-heard at least if they can’t be re-lived?’ And ‘Say, what was the name of that track after Up The Line? I‘ve got to know.’ It might be cool, though not cool at all at my age, to walk out of the building with his signature. It’s a ridiculous proposition, really? Except to watch the hand write the name is, you know, going to make you feel special. And you can put it on a wall and look at it, and go, ‘that was from the night I saw Robben Ford.’ And somehow something of that night will tangibly always be with you.
But he doesn’t show. The guys in the band do, though, and take a drink. On another night maybe I ask them to satisfy my selfish curiosities, but they’re talking to other people, and anyway, how can ‘thanks for the show, it was great‘ be made truly meaningful when more extravagant gestures of praise feel more appropriate. You feel like the room, an ordinary bar, doesn’t deserve The Man, but you also feel like the room is impossibly empty without him.
In the back street by the stage door the tour bus stands, small and empty of the musicians. A couple of guys are carrying out guitars and other box like shapes, storing them away for the next part of the journey. These are the menial things that enables the musical experience to occur, this wonderful thing that will actually grow in the minds of those who were right there on the wavelength tonight or who were the most needy.
But the ordinariness of the scene is discouraging. It occurs to you how strange it is how someone who can play like this is only playing to a small audience. Across the town on Newcastle in a couple of months or so, a man who can’t play as good as he will play to ten thousand people. It hardly seems fair when right now the cold night fog makes the back street look mangy, desperate and lost. And it doesn’t seem right that soon one of the greatest musicians on the revolving planet will walk out onto this place and on to this small vehicle, so far away from limelight and luxury. Maybe Robben likes it like this. No superstar trappings, no limousines and no flunkies. No bullshit. Or maybe he doesn’t.
Then again, what do we know of a man’s life when we see him on the stage. Guesses and muses, even though they feel like a vulgar intrusion into his privacy, are difficult to avoid. Are you as wealthy as you deserve, man? And are you happy? We want you to be happy. A man who can give us a night like tonight deserves to have true wealth, whatever that is, overflowing from cupped, laughing hands.
*
They say it’s a bad thing to have heroes. That you should look across to these people, not up. Because it will make you feel inadequate. Maybe so, but to watch the world class performer right in front of you in real time, if you set your mind right, will inspire you to take whatever skill you have and make whatever you can out of it. Give you the energy and the motive to bend your shoulder to the plough until your back aches like shit and there’s only five hours of the night left to sleep. You don’t know where it’ll take you in the end, but wherever you end up, it’ll be an honest place, a deserved place. And however small the light is that shines upon you, it shines upon you. And that will be enough.
You cannot post new topics in this forum You cannot reply to topics in this forum You cannot edit your posts in this forum You cannot delete your posts in this forum You cannot vote in polls in this forum
FAQ
Search
Memberlist
Usergroups
Register
Profile
Log in to check your private messages
Log in
