After a few months off for the birth of son Aidan, the dynamic songstress returned to the stage with authority as part of the Rubin Museum of Art's Naked Soul program. The intimate acoustic concert, which started a wee bit late due to maternal necessity, not only showed she hadn't lost a step, but instead seems recharged and more entertaining than ever.
Dana swiftly set the tone with a vigorous rendition of Otis Rush's "Nobody's Fault But Mine," then cast aside the planned setlist in favor of songs she wanted to sing and the audience wanted to hear.
Naked Soul strives to combine the power of music with the glory of art. Each musician picks out pieces from the museum collection that he/she feels drawn to and details the connection felt toward them. For Fuchs, who admitted she's been on an emotional roller coaster the past couple of years with the passing of her sister, parents and two brothers, Buddhist works have resonated strongly. She explained to us about true enlightenment coming when there is no fear.
Dana certainly didn't display any at the show, engaging the audience at every turn, saying she pictures faces from her audience when practicing her material. She surprised longtime producer, guitarist and co-writer Jon Diamond by wanting to perform the new song "Callin' Angels" as her second offering of the night. The ballad contains verses for each of the family members she lost in chronological order of their departures, and the audience wound up as choked up by the words as Fuchs was on the stage.
The evening also included a number of covers, from Randy Newman's "Guilty" -- which Dana said she hadn't performed live since her early days in New York City to "Love Hurts," best known by Nazareth but originally performed by The Everly Brothers. Fuchs admitted she often channeled Koko Taylor when performing Etta James' "I'd Rather See You Blind," and also belted the Beatles' song that has brought so many fans in the door, "Helter Skelter," from Across the Universe. One of Dana's many strong suits has been making covers her own, presented in her unique voice and style. There wasn't a false note -- or feeling -- in any of them, which begged comparisons to how she drew inspiration from the works of art on the screen behind her as well.
Can I call her and Jon's attempts at performing "Bad Seed" a highlight? See, they never actually executed the song. It's been about a decade since they played it during a show, and even with an audience member trying to help Diamond find the key by queuing the song up on her cell phone, it was not to be. Fuchs did promise to deliver it at a later concert. (We'll be holding you to that, Dana. I've been waiting to hear it for years.)
But we did get a glorious "Nothing on My Mind" and the ditty lent itself well to some Buddha shorthand. As Fuchs explained, the country song at its heart is about attachment to a partner who ends up leaving ... and then karma when the person who did the leaving gets left. She quipped Buddha was probably rolling over in the proverbial grave with her oversimplified explanation.
Dana told us some charming and lighthearted stories about motherhood, but quickly added she wouldn't become one of those artists who obsesses on that experience. And then she performed a song that drew a nice parallel. Her mother wanted her to write a love song. She thought long and hard about that, and then delivered a tune that was about as close to a love song as she thought she'd ever get -- "Misery." I expect Fuchs' life as a parent to be expressed in her music in much the same way, not with ribbons and bows, but cutting straight to the heart of it all the way she always does -- with keen insight in lyrics, some catchy riffs and a voice that drives us there.
It's certainly not ideal to go to a concert when you're under the weather, but I wasn't going to miss out on my first Stevie Nicks solo show. Nor did I want to miss out on hanging with Stevie bud Jenna nor Chrissie Hyde and the Pretenders.
So I bundled up and headed to Madison Square Garden. I'd previously seen Chrissie at Lilith Fair and that woman has lost not one single thing over the decades. She and the boys put forth a high-energy set while the front woman displayed a penchant for humor as well.
"It's like being on tour with Elizabeth Taylor," Hynde quipped of her tour buddy between dedications of "Hymn to Her" and "Back on the Chain Gang."
Hynde and drummer Martin Chambers are the only remaining members of the original Pretenders lineup, but they gelled very easily with the rest of the newer faces on the likes of "Holy Communion" and "My City Was Gone," as well as the rest of the bevvy of more familiar numbers. On the former, Chrissie again garnered laughs by saying her song about religious tolerance is now appropriately about mere tolerance in our upside-down world.
She praised Chambers' work at the kit as he laid down a Buddy Rich riff en route to the striking familiar opening beats of "Middle of the Road." That song, "Don't Get Me Wrong" and "Brass in Pocket" kept everyone's spirits high. And the lighters -- well, the cell phone screens -- were out in force when she showed off her still amazing vocal range with "I'll Stand By You," sung back at her by thousands.
And then it was time for Stevie, a woman I worshipped in the early '80s, I remember imploring my mom to rush home so I could see her HBO special. (Before we had a VCR, of course.) And Jenna and I had to employ our own brand of tolerance with the nuts all around us in our otherwise fine seats, straight across the arena from the stage. To our left and ahead of us, people got into verbal tussles about whether standing was allowed or not. To our left and behind us, more fighting -- this time about the two women chirping and giggling behind us. And I couldn't fault the guy next to me for his complaints, although I did fear his "lose some weight" response to them saying "grow some hair" would end violently.
So at times, it was a little difficult to focus on the show. But there was an amazing combo of "Wild Heart" and "Bella Donna" -- the title tracks to the two albums that made me a diehard Stevie fan. And Hynde returned to the stage to sing "Stop Draggin' My Heart Around" with Stevie (and music director/wunderkind Waddy Wachtel).
Before the tour, Stevie said publicly she wasn't going to be matter of fact about her setlist for the show, picking gems from her "gothic trunk of mystical things." I know Jenna could have done without "If Anyone Falls" and I certainly didn't need another uninspired take on "Gypsy," but both of those were gotten out of the way relatively early.
For me, the highlight of the night was the Buckingham Nicks tune "Crying in the Night." The Fleetwood Mac precursor played very well all these decades later. Stevie credited Waddy with forcing her into it, and so cheers to him for that one.
Among the others Nicks picked out for the tour was her self-proclaimed best and favorite song, "Moonlight (A Vampire's Dream)" from Twilight -- hope she doesn't mind if I respectfully disagree and stick with "Silver Springs" -- and "New Orleans," which she said she started writing while emotionally watching coverage of Hurricane Katrina.
Because of all the bickering around us, we were pretty selective about songs we chose to stand up for and rock out on. We stayed up for "Gold and Braid" when Nicks originally came out, got back up for the duet with Hynde (since most everyone else did), popped up for "Stand Back" -- as Prince's spirit wafted through the air ... and on the videoboard, then again when "Gold Dust Woman" and "Edge of Seventeen" closed the set. Everyone was on their feet for the encores "Rhiannon" and "Landslide." Both were lovely, even though the latter had just started appearing on the setlist during the most recent dates.
I couldn't have loved the show more if I had actually been conscious for it.
While riding the early November roller-coaster, it was rather wonderful to have three unique musical events to attend. It's better than chicken soup for my soul.
The first one took place before the Tuesday shockeroo at Madison Square Garden. It was the original lineup of Temple of the Dog, touring for the very first time, in support of the 25th anniversary release of their self-titled album. For those not in the know -- and there are quite a few 'cause I got a lot of "I don't know who that is" when talking about the show -- after the passing of Andrew Wood, his Mother Love Bone band mates Stone Gossard and Jeff Ament got together with Wood's roommate, Chris Cornell, and Soundgarden drummer Matt Cameron to commiserate about their grief and ultimately pay tribute to their friend. Mike McCready, who became a cornerstone in Pearl Jam with Stone and Jeff, handled lead guitar on the project and some guy named Eddie Vedder did some vocals on the album.
Setlist: Say Hello 2 Heaven, Wooden Jesus, Call Me a Dog, Your Saviour, Stardog Champion, Stargazer, Seasons, Jump into the Fire, Four Walled World, I'm a Mover, Pushin' Forward Back, Hunger Strike, Quicksand, Heartshine, River of Deceit, Holy Roller, Reach Down.
Encore Break: Man of Golden Words/Comfortably Numb, Times of Trouble, Achilles' Last Stand, Missing, Fascination Street, War Pigs. Second Encore Break: All Night Thing.
It was an event I never expected to be able to experience, an actual Temple of the Dog show. After 90 minutes online for Ticketmaster the day they went on sale, I wound up with first row in a 300 section behind the stage. And truth be told, I wasn't so happy about that. (Especially day of show, when a guy I ran into told me he got a floor seat that day.) But I ended up really happy with my seat -- section 300 is the highest level in the arena, but it also juts out about halfway over section 100. So I had a nice view from behind that allowed me to see the interplay between the musicians, particularly Stone and Jeff.
This was something of a strange show for me. Questions just kept popping in my head. Everything from nonsensical to realistic. With the exception of one song, the music didn't really wash over me the way I feel like it usually does. It was a strange sensation.
I wondered what kind of reaction each member was having to the audience reaction? Did they feel less response than the waves of enthusiasm that radiate from Pearl Jam or Soundgarden crowds? Did they notice at all? Were they upset that covers -- most notably "Achilles' Last Stand" by Led Zeppelin -- seemed to get more of a reaction? Did the members of Pearl Jam compare and contrast Chris and Eddie as front men in their heads? Is that what some of the knowing nods were about?
The question hanging in the air was the one I didn't ask, namely would Vedder be there to sing his vocal portion of their big hit, "Hunger Strike"? He wasn't, but I didn't care and I loved the way they handled it. Cornell pointed the microphone at the audience, inducing them to sing Eddie's role. Let's face it, legions of Pearl Jam fans have longed to do that for decades.
There was a great story about how Ament had created a prop for the film Singles, a five-track cassette that had names of fictitious songs on it. Cornell told us he resolved to write a song based on each title. And that's how "Seasons" came to be -- that would be the only song of the night that I disappeared into. It reminds me so specifically of that era and where I was and what I was doing at that time.
Later we got a great surprise, another of the songs based on that cassette prop called "Missing" that had apparently only been played publicly once before. My question for that one -- "Was I the only one who loved that more than yet another cover of 'Comfortably Numb'"? I was truly grooving on that one.
At some point my questions got more mundane. Would the glass barriers everyone was leaning on so heavily fall off before or after the floor seemingly moving below my feet would give way? It was a very real concern, I started standing further back against my chair. And wasn't Mother Love Bone's "Holy Roller" a fantastic 1-2 punch with Temple of the Dog's "Reach Down" to end the first part of the set?
Andy Wood's presence was really felt in that building, a place Chris said he always dreamed of playing in. And that was the case with David Bowie as well during Friday's Seu Jorge show at Town Hall. It became a veritable Wes Anderson adventure for me when I went to the Bad Dads VI art show at the Spoke NYC Art Gallery first and saw dozens of art works inspired by the visionary director's work.
For those who don't know the boy named Seu, here are the facts. I generally consider Anderson my favorite director. In his film, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, Jorge plays Pele dos Santos -- a helping hand on Jacques Cousteau-esque Zissou's crew who often sits by his lonesome and sings David Bowie sings in Portugese while playing an acoustic guitar. Obviously a very cool cat.
And that's what Jorge did for us too. He was decked out in a costume from the movie, or at least an incredible facsimile. I didn't really expect to hear absorbing stories, charmingly spoken in halting English. Like the one about getting a phone call from Anderson asking him to playing Pele and his bemusement over why the director would want him to portray a soccer player.
Then they got down to the nitty gritty. Seu was asked whether he knew David Bowie's music. Well, he kind of confused him with the other blond rocker -- Billy Idol. But he did know Bowie's cover of Simon & Garfunkel's "America" and the No. 1 hit "Let's Dance." Anderson sent him more of Bowie's songs. As Jorge explained it to us, "'Changes' was the one that changed everything."
It's difficult to describe how hearing a song you know in one language sung in another in that atmosphere can affect you. It's the same, but it's different. Seu admitted in doing translations, there was a lot of paraphrasing. Except when it came to "Starman," as he utilized Nenhum de Nos' word-for-word version. Anyway, the music is so powerful, I could feel David Bowie in the room, I could feel Seu Jorge in the room. It was almost ethereal and very visceral.
He told us more tales of being on The Life Aquatic set, how he didn't know the star-studded cast by name, but he'd point to them and recall them being in particular movies. Anjelica Huston wound up playing translator for him, telling him Anderson's directions in French.
But we didn't have to speak the same language to feel the kick in the gut Seu experienced when David Bowie died last January and Jorge's father passed away the very next day. He dedicated "Life on Mars" -- already my favorite adaptation -- to the both of them, adding he knows his father is now on Mars. It was captivating and life-affirming and a bunch of other adjectives that haven't been invented yet. After a tough week, it sounds silly to say, but it did restore my faith in humanity. We're all in this world together.
It's hard to convey in any language how powerful the man and his guitar delivered Bowie's chestnuts. Through the songs he adapted for The Life Aquatic and some others, the likes of "Space Oddity," "Rebel Rebel," "Five Years" and "Queen Bitch," he just resonated. He wasn't overdramatic or artificial in the slightest, he provided an outlet for Bowie's message with charm and grace.
And then there was Kristin Chenoweth on Saturday night at the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre in a completely different show focused on the Broadway baby's love of the Great White Way. The approach may have been different, but the same reverence came through. The vocal spitfire performed songs she's known for, ones she's always loved and selected tracks from her latest CD, The Art of Elegance.
Over the course of her storied career, Chenoweth has been in A Chorus Line three times -- as Diana (with hair spray-painted black), Maggie and Val. While performing the latter in the Bible Belt, "Dance 10, Looks 3" was modified to "boobs and butt" because "tits and ass" were words that couldn't be uttered.
Then there was her take on her Wickedly beloved "Popular." Chenoweth started off by presenting the song in different languages, but Glinda's original connotation was quite different from the bucket of laughs she earned with mannerisms and inflection on certain words (personality dialysis?) that certainly recalled the president-elect. Later she did a take on her hero's Madeline Kahn's "I'm Tired" from Blazing Saddles, a reminder that she forsook a dream role -- Kahn's part in Young Frankenstein on Broadway -- in order to be Olive Snook in one of my all-time favorite TV shows, Pushing Daisies.
She tugged on our heart strings a lot. The song for her parents, "Fifty Years" was punctuated by a pair of stories -- first that her parents had been at her first two shows on this two-week engagement, soaking up the spotlight when they were introduced. And then on the third night, they were not there -- they were across the street at Hamilton. Kristin laughed that it was just like when the Von Trapp Family Singers are introduced at the end of The Sound of Music. They were gone. When the poignant ballad was over, she thanked her birth mother as well, a petite blonde who happened to be sitting with her daughter one row ahead of me.
"A House Is Not a Home" has become one of Chenoweth's trademark songs over the years, and even she didn't have a dry eye when she finished belting it out. I don't know her, but I certainly felt as though I did as she took seemingly every word, every syllable to heart. She felt just as strongly and delivered just as passionately the usually male vocal on "Bring Him Home" from Les Miserables.
Speaking of Kristin's persona shining through, she apologized (though she needn't have had to) for getting religious on Sandi Patty's "Upon This Rock," bringing out Furman University singers for the crowd-pleasing "Jesus song." "For you atheists, it'll be over in about four minutes," she quipped. She sipped on a 7-11 Big Gulp through the first act, but what she really had me at was "I had Chick-Fil-A today."
Chenoweth had a special guest each night of the run. Ours was very special indeed -- Kelli O'Hara, who bested her buddy at last year's Tony Awards. "Oklahoma" seemed like an appropriate and fun duet since they both hail from that state and studied with the same vocal teacher.
The second act of the show gave a big part of the spotlight to her friend and music director, Mary-Mitchell Campbell, performing on the piano right behind Kristin all night. After all the musicians on the stage cracked everyone up with "I'm Not a Diva," Chenoweth and Campbell beautifully warbled Dolly Parton's "Little Sparrow" and described creating their emotional version of Don Henley's "The Heart of the Matter" on a day in which there had been a terrorist attack.
And it was all capped by the return of the Furman singers for Lady Antebellum's "I Was Here" and then Kristin, microphone in her hand but down at her side, belting "Smile" -- do I know this most from Charlie Chaplin or Eric Clapton? No matter, because now I know it most from her -- to the rafters.
Through some eagle-eyed maneuvering, I picked up the last signed copy of her autobiography before the show and getting that and her new CD signed seemed to be an impressive ploy when Chenoweth came out and graciously gave everyone a less-easily-discernible scribble after the show. Before working her way through the throng, not speaking in the chilly night air, she excitedly jumped up and down and clapped as she came out the stage door -- mirroring the actions of almost everyone waiting for her.
When I got back to Penn Station, I heard the Muzak version "Moon River." Nice symmetry, but Kristin definitely wore it better. But a nice cap to a pretty great week after all.
I'll admit I'm not quite sure which way to go with this particular blog. Should I detail how to crush on an 88-year-old in one easy lesson? Maybe I should recommend meeting people you might be on the fence about when working out your game plan. I can probably leave out the claim that they host Chiller in April and October so that there will always be a chill in the air while you're waiting on line outside.
The October event wasn't quite as jam-packed as in years past, you could actually make your way through the corridors with little trouble, and save the headliner, nobody's line seemed to be too much of a wait. In fact, if it wasn't for the presence of Tim Curry, the latest event might have been overly tame. But the Rocky Horror Picture Show star brought fans in in droves. The longest wait of the night for most of us was excitedly queuing up on the photo op line for our 30-second brush with the man, the myth.
The other crown jewel was Martin Landau. The man is 88 years old, but he seemed sharper than any of the rest of us. I was tickled just watching him check his cell phone. And then again when the gentleman in front of me informed the Oscar winner that he had just had a birthday -- he turned 72. Landau then quipped, "You're just a kid."
I'm a big fan of his work -- starting with the brilliant suspense thriller North by Northwest and on to Tucker: The Man And His Dream, the movie I expected him to win the Oscar for before he finally did with his dazzling turn as Bela Lugosi in Ed Wood.
But first and foremost, I wanted to talk with Landau about the 1998 X-Files film. I wasn't sure what to expect, that was made almost two decades ago and maybe he wouldn't remember much about what some consider an unrewarding part. (Don't count me in that number, please.) But Landau had a lot of great things to say on the subject.
Chris Carter told Landau he was the only person he could envision playing Dr. Alvin Kurtzweil. The X-Files creator didn't have much of a character outline beyond a general description that he needed to seem sane and insane. The beleaguered doctor delivered a lot of exposition in the film, basically getting Mulder to go on wild goose chases. "I created a character out of nothing, so it was great fun," he said.
Even Mark was gobsmacked -- his word -- at being in the classy octogenarian's presence. After taking my photo with Landau, the actor looked at it and pronounced it to be "perfect." I couldn't agree more.
The first thing I had him autograph was my comprehensive X-Files book, the one that I bring to almost every convention getting anyone connected to the show to sign. He said, "You're a big X-Files fan, aren't you?" I said "Oh yes," proudly pointing out my Fight the Future shirt I wore in his honor. "Yes, I saw that," he replied. That tiny little logo on the left side? I wouldn't have noticed it myself if I didn't know it was there.
There was a little post-it note his handler put on the book with my name on it for ease of signing. When I reached for that as Landau went to sign my Fight the Future lobby card, he indicated he didn't need it, he knew my name. Again, I was giggly fan girl ... "Martin Landau knows my name."
Upon departing, he offered his hand to shake. I told him I thought North by Northwest was a perfect movie. He responded with a gracious thank you and gave my hand an extra squeeze in the process. If ever there was a reason not to wash a hand ever again, that was it.
I got to talk X-Files again with James Remar. And I was on the fence about approaching him, because he's mentioned but not pictured in the comprehensive book. Boy, I was so glad I did. "The X-Files saved my life," he said plaintively. He perused the book very closely, reading every word about his
episode, "Daemonicus." He recalled the title and his character very distinctly.
Remar had spent the summer of 2001 in New York City, riding Ladder Company 3's truck with friend Patrick Brown. He got a phone call from the show days before 9/11 telling him "he must come do this." He signed on, and a couple of days later, the towers fell. Ladder Company 3 lost most of its men, including Brown, in the attack. Remar showed me a cell-phone picture of his hand on his friend's name at the memorial. It really got to Mark and me.
It was quite emotional and might have been overwhelming if we didn't then get into our latest round of what's the right way to take a picture next. Blog readers might remember Tatum O'Neal -- who by chance was positioned at the same table Remar was this particular weekend -- urging Mark to shoot tilted down from above. Then Malcolm McDowell negated that concept, saying eye level was the way to go. Remar agreed with McDowell and Mark. Boys 2, Tatum 1.
I also was on the fence about meeting Eddie Deezen, perhaps best known from Grease, The Polar Express or WarGames, but on my list because of Midnight Madness. I showed him a pic of myself and Sestra cosplaying the movie's Game Control girls at New York Comic Con. As he signed my DVD cover, he said that film was a really fun one.
Funnily enough, Deezen later posted on Facebook that he was surprised that the project most fans talked about him at Chiller was -- Midnight Madness. Surely the Game Control girls would have gone over huge at this event. No one knew who we were at the "other" convention.
I also met Marsha Warfield. I'll just say she was subdued, compared with the others. I was complimentary as I could be, admitting that when I'm feeling overloaded by work sometimes Night Court is my only remedy. My biggest response came when I asked her whether she wanted to "stick her hand in Bull" -- the puppet I brought for the picture. "No way," she said.
Besides the picture and Warfield adding her Jane Hancock to my favorite Night Court script, there was one other little thing I wanted to ask of her. Now mind you, this was her first convention and I believe I was her first customer, so she might have been understandably thrown by my request that we act out one of my favorite Night Court lines. But ultimately, she was game.
So with the camera on, "Roz" said, "What's that behind your back?" and I reply (in my best Larroquette "Dan" impresssion, which admittedly isn't a real good one) "New Jersey." And then I quickly quipped, "It really is New Jersey" and got a thumbs-up.
All of that was accomplished during the early-bird hour, so the only thing left was to wait on a couple lines for my Tim Curry photo op. About an hour later, I was sitting next to the Tim Curry! I babbled something about how much I appreciated his work, he replied -- in a voice clearly affected by his stroke but still with that same familiar warm British tone -- that meant a lot to him and offered his hand for a shake.
And then bubblehead that I am, I totally forgot my prepared line. Back when Clue was released, I actually went to different theaters to see the three different endings. They weren't all tacked on like they now can be seen on the DVD, you had to figure out which place was showing which ending. But in place of that, I offered the horrific, "Are you having a good time?" I shudder just thinking of it now. I composed myself, we took the picture, I wished him a fine weekend and off I went, hanging my head in disgrace. But not for long, because when I think back on the Chillers, this will rank as one of my favorites.
It was great fun to experience Tedeschi Trucks Band's Beacon residency this year from two different angles.
I went with Mark to the opening show Friday, then with my cousin, Jill, and her daughter, Kristen, on Tuesday. As usual, Mark and I recognized songs two or three notes into the piece, while Jill and Kristen sat back and enjoyed the musicality of performers at the top of their respective games.
The Friday show opener was Amy Ray, perhaps best known as half of the Indigo Girls, but working her "country project" to full advantage. It was an energetic set capped off by the appearance of Susan Tedeschi for the final two songs -- a cover of the Indigo Girls' "Share the Moon" and a tribute to the co-founding member of the Allman Brothers Band entitled "Duane Allman."
Friday setlist: Don’t Know What It Means; Keep On Growing; It Ain’t Easy; Laugh About It; Right On Time; Get Out Of My Life, Woman; Isn’t It A Pity; I Want More; Soul Sacrifice; Within You Without You; Just As Strange; How Blue Can You Get?; Don’t Drift Away; Sticks & Stones; Had To Cry Today. Encore: I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel To Be Free, You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere (with Amy Ray)
Park still refers to the Tedeschi Trucks Band as "Soul Stew," the moniker they used when Derek Trucks and wife Susan Tedeschi first started combining forces on the road together. They've always provided a hearty meal for the senses.
I was particularly thrilled to get Derek and the Dominos' "Keep on Growing" and Blind Faith's "Had to Cry Today" on Friday's setlist. Now mind you, as a purist, I wouldn't just accept any old act covering treasures from two of my five favorite albums of all time. You've got to have A+ game, which Tedeschi Trucks Band always delivers.
It was also a thrill to hear "Isn't It a Pity," which now not only
reminds me of the song's author, George Harrison, but also of Billy
Preston, who did such a bang-up job combining with Eric Clapton on that
tune at the tribute concert for George.
Derek's just my favorite guitar on the planet. I've been watching him since he was 13, and I still marvel at the fact he seems to continue to get better every time despite already being on top of his game. This show featured a lot of echoes of his self-titled band with such Derek Trucks Band standards as "Get Out of My Life, Woman" and the Nina Simone cover, "I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free." Mike Mattison took the lead several times, including on the former and the Howlin' Wolf cover "I've Been Abused."
Although there wasn't spoken reference to Derek's other other band, the Allman Brothers during the TTB set, he did get people's eyes bulging out of our collective heads by donning what looked to be Duane Allman's Goldtop Les Paul for a searing cover of Santana's "Soul Sacrifice."
Rest assured, Susan found it pretty easy to carve out some space front and center. Paying tribute to B.B. King, who once made Johnny Moore's "How Blue Can You Get?" his own, Tedeschi did the same by scorching vocally and with the guitar (in B.B. style) until the house was on our collective feet.
The second night featured Dave Mason, who opened with a set that included a lot of Traffic staples, with varying degrees of success. Taking a different tack with "Low Spark of High-Heeled Boys" made it stand out over such fare as "Dear Mr. Fantasy," in which the absence of Steve Winwood was more keenly felt. But as expected, the virtuoso guitarist was at his best working the strings of his instrument. I rued the fact that "Only You Know and I Know" was done without Tedeschi's powerhouse vocals, but Jill was kinda thrilled to hear "We Just Disagree." And then we were given a reminder that he has played with all of the notable names of his era with his set closer, "All Along the Watchtower" -- he played acoustic guitar on Jimi Hendrix's legendary cover of soon-to-be Nobel Prize winner Bob Dylan's song.
Tuesday's setlist: Goin' Down to Mexico, Let Me Get By, Laugh About
It, Bird on the Wire, Just as Strange, Idle Wind, Bitches Brew, Color of
the Blues, Don't Know What It Means, Get What You Deserve, I Cannot
Make It, That Did It, I Wish I Knew How it Would Feel to Be Free, I
Want More, Soul Sacrifice. Encore: Night Time Is the Right Time, Feelin'
Alright (with Dave Mason).
A few overlaps from my first night here, but the overriding takeaway was that the former Derek Trucks Band vibe is becoming more ever-present in the current Tedeschi Trucks Band incarnation. And that's not a bad thing, just an observation. Mike Mattison actually started the show on lead vocals with the ZZ Top cover "Goin' Down to Mexico" before coming out of the back row for the likes of "Get What You Deserve" and "I Wish I Knew How to Be Free." The Miles Davis cover "Bitches Brew" also reminded me of Derek's previous band in that the jazzy element was always a fret away.
Jill and Kristen seemed to get into the show right away. And it doesn't hurt when the upbeat nature of "Let Me Get By" gives way to a glorious cover of Leonard Cohen's "Bird on a Wire." Tedeschi Trucks Band ran the full gamut -- pulse-pounding rockers to thoughtful ballads without dropping a beat. There were moments when I could tell my relatives were blown away -- or they have seriously good poker faces.
One of the highlights of the set came with just Tedeschi, Mattison and Alecia Chakour clustered together for George Jones' "Color of the Blues." We heard tell that Susan guests on that number on John Prine's new duet album. If it's half as good as it was delivered that night, that will be worth the price of a download.
Duane's Gold Top made its way to the stage again for "Soul Sacrifice." Hey, who wouldn't play that any chance they got? Derek delivered another masterful sequence of solos to cap the set. And although, I could watch/listen to him do that forever, he was gracious enough to let Eric Krasno have much of the time and space on the Sly and the Family Stone cover "I Cannot Make It."
Susan again grabbed the guitar spotlight, tearing the house down during the Bobby "Blue" Bland tune "That Did It." I was exhausted after she finished knocking that one out and was glad that she could "take it easy" for the next couple of numbers after that. She probably didn't need to, but I think I did. If we've said it once, we've said it 100 times -- how fair is it that she's got that powerful singing voice and then this supreme talent for scorching the guitar on top of it?
The encores were fun -- first the horn section got to work it out on Ray Charles' "Night Time is the Right Time" and then Dave Mason (and his keyboard player Tony Patler) came out for "Feelin' Alright." Yeah, we were feelin' no pain after that one. Except for the thought of having to wait another year for the next Beacon residency.
I didn't think New York Comic Con 2016 set up well for me at all. Boy was I wrong.
My wariness was based of the initial celebrity guest list, which didn't feature the allure of last year's screening and panel for The X-Files as well as the appearance of longtime favorite John Larroquette. But as I found out, NYCC clearly has more to offer than just those actors making themselves available for panels, photos and signings.
Sestra and I worked up very specialized costumes for Day 1 -- so specialized that no one seemed to get our drift. We were Candy and Sunshine from the 1980 flick Midnight Madness -- perhaps best known as Michael J. Fox's first feature film. Obscure, to be sure, but we would have thought some of the tens of thousands would be geeky enough to pick up on the reference. Oh well, I think we still looked pretty sharp.
Without the need to be in the door at 10 a.m. sharp to get into the long queue for main stage panels, we strolled in after the doors opened and the huge throngs were already inside. I was immediately besieged by people giving away free stuff -- books and buttons and even a foam chainsaw. Nice, that's the way the con should work, for sure. (While walking to the Javitz Center, we got one of our best freebies -- a
survival hygiene kit promoting the Hulu show Freakish with such con necessities as hand sanitizer and
tissues).
One of the actors I was really looking forward to meeting was J. August Richards -- best known to the Sestras as Gunn from the Buffy the Vampire Slayer spinoff Angel. Expected him to be as tall as he was, but definitely did not expect him to be as cool as he was with us.
He alluded to our matching outfits, but he didn't know the movie. Still, when Lor told him we needed a Leon to be the Game Master, he willingly agreed. Now normally that might be considered to be lip service, forgotten the minute we paid, got our picture and moved on, but I saw J. August later that afternoon at a hilarious gaming panel (the object was for players to throw each other off girders or onto subway tracks where death was swift and merciless). When I told him he did a good job as he exited, he stopped and pointed and yelled "Leon!" I was like, "Yes!!" I was suitably impressed.
The next day we started with the Falling Water panel, which gave us an intriguing look at a new USA series spearheaded by Blake Masters and executive produced by Gale Anne Hurd. In the show, a trio of strangers realize they're dreaming parts of the same dream together. Stars Lizzie Brochere, Will Yun Lee and Zak Orth were on hand with Dr. Moran Cerf, who detailed the science behind the science fiction.
Sestra and I were definitely living the same dream when we saw Mike Massimino at the Penguin Random House booth. Lor knows the astronaut best from The Big Bang Theory, in which he had a recurring -- and funny -- role as himself.
Now it's one thing to meet people who have entertained me, but quite another to be talking to (and squatting beside) someone who has blasted off and walked in space. I was almost speechless. Except for the word "Astronaut," that is. I just kept exclaiming that over and over.
We both bought a copy of his book, Spaceman: An Astronaut's Unlikely Journey to Unlock the Secrets of the Universe. Sestra's was personalized to "Fruit Loops," a joke from Big Bang Theory that made her happy and gave me material for the rest of the weekend. Have to give big kudos to Massimino for the visceral way in which he described every aspect of space missions, even before the big rocket blasts into the sky -- far better than just watching a documentary on the subject.
I was much more grounded when meeting Jonathan Maberry, author of the upcoming X-Files Origins novel Devils Advocate. We got our posters signed, but even better, Sestra implanted the idea of interviewing skeptical Maberry -- and possibly believer Kami Garcia, who wrote the Agent of Chaos coming out at the same time in January 2017 for our Sibling Cinema blog.
Another of my planned events for the weekend was my photo op with Carrie Fisher. Never got on one line for an hour only to be put on another one for another hour. And I'm always amazed that all of us can wait like that and not show any wear and tear when we get face to face with the celeb. She made the photographer hold -- they shoot these things as fast as humanly possible, herding us in and out -- but she made sure she was comfortable and I was comfortable and that we had a firm grip on each other without my hair in the way before giving the OK to click. Her dog, Gary, had his tongue stuck out at us from his perch on a neighboring chair.
A couple things I enjoyed more than usual were the cosplayers, even taking pictures with some of them. There was Freddy from Nightmare on Elm Street and a couple of sharks (Tiburones!) Everyone who has tuned into Doctor Who at some point or another in its decades of existence has his or her own doctor, and mine is No. 9 -- Christopher Eccleston played the role for one year. His cosplayer was sharp indeed, I don't remember having previously seen one that good.
We finally got some props for our own attire on the final day as we wore our spanking-new Sestra shirts. For those not in the know, we started calling each other "Sestra" by following clone Helena's lead on Orphan Black and then commandeered that for our Sibling Cinema blog. Basically the comments consisted of "Hey, Orphan Black! Nice shirts!" We definitely should work up business cards for next year.
Had two items on my agenda for the final day -- the screening/panel for Eric Kripke's new show Timeless and another thing I didn't know about until perusing the NYCC schedule of events -- Hannibal show runner Bryan Fuller (the brilliant mind also behind Pushing Daisies and other cult fare for people like me) signing a new cookbook released with Janice Poon, who helped create the show's somehow mouth-watering dishes.
Like Falling Water,Timeless looks like a show to take a chance on. We saw the second episode before Kripkeand cast Abigail Spencer, Matt Lanter, Malcolm Barrett and Goran Višnjić came out to talk about it. The episode reminded me a lot of the Supernatural episode in which Nicholas Lea played Eliot Ness, not surprising since Timeless is another Kripke production. The show seems to have a lot of opportunities to traverse time as the scientist, the soldier and the professor board their machine to key moments in history. Actually, now it kind of sounds like Quantum Leap too.
We had no problem getting into that panel, which saved the bigger question for later. I headed right to the Titans booth for the Fuller signing that was over an hour away, just to hear that the line was already capped off. That came as very disheartening news not only to myself, but to two others who had been told they wouldn't even be starting to form that line before that time.
The three of us hung together and hovered outside the capped line -- even though we were told we couldn't block booths in the process. I'm here to tell you, dozens lined up behind us. We waited the hour and the woman with the cutoff sign kept sounding like the voice of doom, but we did ultimately get the proverbial golden tickets to buy books and get on line. Was funny spending all that time trying to look inconspicuous and like we weren't trying to listen in on conversations any time the guy in charge came over to the one holding us back.
I spent 15 minutes watching the swatch of Fuller's amazing technicolor dreamcoat I could spy from behind him. And also partaking in a new obsession. I'm not a fan of the Pop! Funko figures that don't look much like the characters they're supposed to be, but I quickly got into the X-Files Titans, plastic mini figures from different shows that they've craftily put into mystery boxes so you don't know what you'll get. The Titans booth traded figures on display for duplicates, so that's how Sestra scored me Scully in place of less-appealing villainess Phyllis Paddock. They had Hannibal ones as well, the chase variants will get you every time, right in the wallet.
When we finally got up to our Hannibal friends, I told Janice that all her work on the show always made me hungry and I didn't really care whether that was wrong or not. And then, finally, I was in front of Bryan Fuller. It was amusing that we had been told the two of them wanted to get out of there as quickly as possible, but it was a booth employee that brusquely tried to move us along while they tried to listen to what we had to say. I did manage to blurt out that I've always found Fuller's creative vision to be unique and inspirational.
After we continued along the show floor, into terrains we don't usually get to while hopscotching through panels and autograph or photo op lines, Sestra found me a cool -- and rather dangerous -- booth with a wide array of art related to Wes Anderson movies. I could have happily gone broke in there, but settled for a few packages of magnets and a killer story about how the director showed up at his gallery one day. Not only did he get to show off his collection, but then Anderson brought up his friend, Jason -- Jason Schwartzman, of course. A fine tale for me to pin on to this year's Comic Con.
There are performers who get the concept of fan conventions, and there are those just go to make the quick bucks. There's always a small fear that one of your favorites will be the latter. And then there are the ones like Robert Englund, who understand that we're not just autograph seekers who want to take a picture of them. We're fans who they've made an impression on.
Now mind you, waiting for your turn to meet the horror icon best known at Freddy Krueger is a grueling task. At Monster Mania, it meant sitting on one line for about an hour, another for two hours and a third for another hour. But at the end of the day, it was so worth it. Not only does he listen to your tale of fandom, he offers up tidbits that you wouldn't have considered asking about in the first place.
Monster Mania has started doing the kind of VIP treatment I'd first experienced at Wizard World Philadelphia. Basically, it means that people who paid for the privilege can cut you in line, no matter how long you've been waiting. Which was the case here, except that even with that designation, the line stayed long and unwieldy because Robert was really conversing with each and every person he met. It wasn't just spelling your name, saying you love the person's work, maybe getting in one question and then moving on.
The VIPs in front of us never really moved. And ultimately, we got put in front of those people in the last room -- the one Robert was signing in -- because those in our row had been waiting since the doors opened that day, about three hours by that time. We benefited from being in that row. Sestra was just along for the long ride on the slow boat to Robert, she'd met him before. But she did sneak down and meet all the other Nightmare 4 cast members in attendance -- Lisa Wilcox, Danny Hassel, Tuesday Knight and Andras Jones -- ostensibly since the rest of us were awaiting the big guy.
Robert was really playing to my fellow fans. When you were near the front of the room, you could hear the stories he was telling and it made the final wait time fly by. He quipped a line from the first Nightmare, "I'll kill you slow," after someone gave him a replica of Freddy's knives glove for his picture. That made Sestra giggle, which made me giggle in turn.
With a table full of photos to choose from for the autograph, I found it a difficult choice. Sis recommended the one with the slate in the picture, since I'm a movie buff in general, and that wound up being the perfect choice. After I sat down at his table and before I could even ask a question, he queried, "Do you know the story behind this picture?" "No, tell me," I said in possibly my most girliest voice.
That picture was taken for Robert's audition scene for the original Nightmare on Elm Street. After that, they changed the look of Freddy -- his face was "dripping with goo" but they realized they would be unable to match that in every shot throughout the film. The sweater was a little smaller, the hat was altered as was part of his ear meant to be bitten off by a hound of hell.
I chuckled when he said he auditioned "while on a little show called V," because V was one of my favorites from that era. He added that he had been interested in creating a character with makeup, which he later got to do a lot more of on that show as Willie, the kind-hearted lizard alien. "I thought I'd do that forever," he said of V, and it instantly reminded me of how shocked I was when the series wasn't renewed back in the day.
He told us about how much Nightmare changed the image of Wes Craven, who was thought of more as a David Lynch-type director. He recalled a bar he used to frequent that had the poster of Craven's Last House on the Left on one side and Lynch's Eraserhead on the other.
And then he really listened to my favorite story of taking 12-year-old Sestra to the movie -- how the usher said people had run out because they couldn't handle the movie and Sestra boasted that she would be able to. And then how she subsequently got spooked during the first death and wanted to go to the bathroom, but I told her to just crouch down behind the seat instead (so I wouldn't miss any, of course.) Sestra added a bit I didn't remember about making screeching sounds like Freddy in the dead of night after that. "That's the way to do it," Robert said. "Or on the outside of the window."
We also talked about one of the recurring themes of the series -- girl power. Robert said women initially watched the first one with their hands behind their eyes, but then saw the stories were about strong females fighting a beast ... and winning. "It was the first sort of story to do that ... except for Sigourney Weaver in Alien," Englund said.
In parting, he recognized Sestra's shirt as the subtle Nightmare on Elm Street 4 reference that it was and took a good crack at my Sam Loomis' Hardware shirt -- he tried for Halloween instead of Psycho. To be fair, the doctor in Halloween is named Sam Loomis as a tribute to Psycho.
I got to talk more about the "girl power" nature of the films with Wilcox, the female lead in Nightmare 4 and 5. She clearly learned a lot from the films, as she directed me -- putting me in the perfect position for photos. Around these parts, we call that doing her best Tatum O'Neal.
She's always maintained she was a lot like Alice when she started, so it was the perfect role for her. And I could truly see both those elements in the short time I got to spend with her. The "Alice Lives" pins given away to us were a nice touch as well.
Then we met Curtis Armstrong. The man had a righteous Orphan Black shirt on, so his coolness quotient quickly went up. And then even further because he was an engaging individual. Although this past season we've been watching him in Supernatural, my favorite will probably always be Moonlighting.
So we engaged in some Blue Moon conversation. When I said he and Allyce Beasley were adorable together as Bert and Agnes, he said he had just had lunch with Allyce in New York a few weeks prior to discuss stories for the book he'll be publishing next July. Just the idea of Curtis and Allyce hanging out kind of made my heart happy.
We talked about "Atomic Shakespeare," which I had just viewed, being a stellar episode. And I added that I had seen him in a guest spot on Cybill Shepherd's next show, Cybill, in which he and Moonlighting nemesis Jack Blessing played directors. "That was a weird one," he admitted. Hope there's more to that story in the book!
When I met Lee Majors at Chiller a few years ago, he must have been under the weather, because he was on top of his game for his panel at Monster-Mania. He told great stories, although Six Million Dollar Man clearly wasn't his favorite gig. I believe the word he used was "boring." Kind of a hard hit for diehard fans like myself to take, but he was acting it and not invested in like a good pre-teen.
"Have you ever tried to run with bell bottoms on, swishing back and forth?" he asked. "Now I walk in slow motion. ... I wish I was [bionic], especially in my left knee."
But he did tell us some funny tales, and we weren't bored in the slightest. The Bigfoot episodes starred Andre the Giant in that role. "He sure threw me a long way," Majors said. "I looked up into the sun and here comes the shade. He drops down on me and I didn't feel a thing. That's how good he was. ... All day long he was drinking six packs. I never saw him go to the bathroom all day."
I even got up to the audience microphone to ask about quirky things that happened during filming. He replied that the effects guys Inky and Joe wouldn't always get everything right. "I'd go to kick in a steel door and they hadn't loosened the hinges. Or I go to bend a bar and it would be too tight. During one explosion, they set it off and burned my butt. ... There were bloopers that we'd see at the end of the season. I was with Stephanie Powers in a cave once and [her line was,] 'Are we trapped?' and I said, "Does a bear shit in the woods?'"
Of course, the upcoming Six Billion Dollar Man project starring Mark Wahlberg came up. "What a slap in the face," he said. There's also a Fall Guy project in the works with Dwayne Johnson attached.
Now he's got a great role in one of the hottest current shows in con fandom, Ash vs. Evil Dead.
He plays Bruce Campbell's father and has really relished the experience
so far. "The only thing I didn't like ... he starts calling me 'Pop.'"
The Fall Guy is clearly a personal favorite of Majors' since he
said that character was more like him in real life. He also loved doing
stunts and did about 85 in his career. "It made the day go faster. ... I
used to be 6-1, I think I'm 5-11 now after all those stunts."
He's still friends with Lindsay Wagner, his bionic female counterpart, and Richard Anderson, who was on both programs. They've seen each other over the years at other conventions. "One day I said I'm tired of looking at these hairy-legged crew guys. That's when we came up with the bionic woman."
He told some great stories, among them, that his football teammates dared him to try out for The Crucible, his tiny role in his first film Strait-Jacket with Joan Crawford and friendships with Paul Newman and Elvis Presley. He enjoyed being able to bring personal favorites like Roy Rogers in as guest stars on his shows. And the best career advice he ever got was from legend Barbara Stanwyck, his co-star in The Big Valley. "Be on time, know your words, hit your marks and keep your mouth closed."
The Fright Night panel with Amanda Bearse and Stephen Geoffreys proved to be equally as fun and informative. They talked about how Roddy McDowell would tell great stories from all his years in the business -- from Charlie Chaplin to Elizabeth Taylor, and how McDowell and Chris Sarandon always treated them like peers on the set.
The cast had time to rehearse before starting the project. "We kind of knew there was something good and golden here," Amanda said. "This is icing on the cake," Stephen added. "It's what ... 30 years later? We're still talking about it."
Both Bearse and Geoffreys said writer/director Tom Holland really had a unique vision, so when Geoffreys had to spend four or five hours in the makeup chair it was well worth it. "It was all in the script," she said. "He took it very seriously, but it was so human." "When Tom had something to tell you, he put his arm around you," he added. "It was a real personal thing. I think it shows in the final product."
And that's the fan experience in a nutshell, we still think about these movies and shows fondly decades later because of the care and talent put into them back in the day.
I can probably count on one hand the number of concerts I've gone to in which I didn't know a fairly sizable chunk of the artist's catalog. But gonna need one of those digits for Keith Urban. I find him very personable as a human being and talented as a guitarist and vocalist, but I only know one of his albums, and none of the songs in the setlist were from that one. Mark wasn't familiar with the material either. That didn't stop us from fully enjoying the show.
But we were covered as everyone else in the audience seemed to know every single word. Up on the lawn behind us, six girls were dancing with each other and singing every word about as loud as they could. We were just enjoying the groove. And the dazzling array of guitars that Keith would bring out almost every song. We cringed as one of them was shot-put in the air in what we hope was the general vicinity of a guitar tech. Another one was signed and handed to a kid in the crowd.
This man's stage presence certainly is engaging. He acknowledges all the signs he can see. He brought a girl from New York at her first Keith concert up to the stage (and later her dad too), asked her what her favorite song was and sang some of it -- "Break on Me" -- to and with her, even though he'd already played it. Which reminds me, he also pointed out some unique personailty quirks of New Jersey residents, and as Mark put it, every other song seemed to have a lyric aptly proclaiming it to be Friday night.
His crew set up a "B" stage at the back left end of the covered seats so he could play to those of us sitting on the grass for a spell. "Who's got the best seats now?" he inquired. Well, it could still have been those in the paid seats, for he has a fine behind. (I feel confident saying that's just a Paige aside, and not Mark's feelings as well.)
During "Somebody Like You," performed with second opening act Brett Eldredge, both gentlemen played up to the camera as though they were singing right to one person. Which it did kind of seem like they were doing. On the main stage, he brought the first opening act -- Maren Morris -- to perform "We Were Us" with him. And he utilized modern technology to sing "The Fighter" with Carrie Underwood on the videoboard.
He covered Muse's "Unintended," and later did a huge chunk of John Mellencamp's "Jack and Diane" in reggae-esque fashion and little snippets of Bob Marley's "No Woman, No Cry" and The Police's "So Lonely." Recognized those, but as I said, it didn't take away from anything to not know his catalog as well as the other thousands.
The encore songs featured Keith performing "Stupid Boy" alone on the acoustic guitar and the crowd-pleasing "Raise 'Em Up." Had I had any of my strawberry lemonade vodka left, I surely would have raised it up for that. Then he thanked each and every one of us for choosing his show and "jumping through hoops" to get there.
It was a whirlwind trip to Boston. After an 11-hour work shift threatened by a few computer system halts, I boarded the express to South Station. This was definitely an express trip, I was due back on board 24 hours after I arrived.
Got a little nap in at Chez Fitz -- of course, I was hanging with my Pearl Jam bud, Liam -- and then headed over to the hallowed ground of Fenway Park. Felt completely exhausted ... but if the delectable Sharon Gabet (best known as Raven Whitney on Edge of Night) tells you you're looking good, you go with it!
Loved our fan club seats, two sections over from Pesky Pole. We looked directly onto the stage in center field, more than I can say for the floor seats that seemed to be facing the right-field wall.
Main set: Release, Long Road, Elderly Woman Behind the Counter in a Small Town, Low Light, All Those Yesterdays, Given To Fly, Mind Your Manners, Why Go, Daughter/WMA,/Another Brick in the
Wall, Even Flow, Faithfull, Grievance, I Am Mine, Down, Black, Do The Evolution, Masters of War, I Am a Patriot, Porch.
Encore 1: Strangest Tribe, Society, Just Breathe, Sleeping by Myself, Wasted Reprise/Life Wasted, State of Love and Trust, Comfortably Numb, Corduroy.
Encore 2: Draw the Line, Alive, I’ve Got a Feeling, Baba O’Riley.
We got two openers for the price of one -- "Release" and "Long Road." I immediately realized that this is a band tailor-made for sending their words and music into the open air ... and that it had been about 13 years since my last outdoor Pearl Jam show. (It wasn't until I made a chart for this blog that I realized I had never before gotten "Release" on one of my setlists.)
"Elderly Woman Behind the Counter in a Small Town" made an early entry into the set. With a woman whose back was tattooed with more lyrics to the song than its elongated title in front of us, our section was emotionally engaged in the show pretty quickly. And "Low Light," "All Those Yesterdays" and "Faithfull" drove me completely mad -- they're tracks from my favorite Pearl Jam album, Yield, that I had never seen live before.
They scorched through the first set with the likes of "Given to Fly" and "Mind Your Manners" and "Even Flow" and "Porch." At one point, Stone and Matt cracked me up by starting "Grievance." But then they stopped to do "Faithfull," and went back to "pledge their grievance to the flag" after that -- apparently they jumped a song in the setlist.
Of course, we were awash in Boston references and baseball references and Boston baseball references. It's not like I didn't expect that, but it still brought me out of my reverie to some degree. Former Red Sox hurler and fashion plate Bronson Arroyo joined in for "Black," even singing the background do-do-do-do-do-do-dos from the old days.
Eddie elicited some boos from the crowd when he mentioned loving the Cubs, and he chastised the crowd for not remembering what it's like to not bring home a championship for a very long, long time. But he added that his favorite American League team was the Red Sox, and all was right in the land once again.
It was horribly cute when "Youk" -- Kevin Youkilis -- brought out Eddie's ukelele, it was what one might call a natural. Later, sports personality, and I use that term loosely, Peter Gammons took the stage ... and then left it. I guess he just wanted to say "hi" to Ed.
One of the show's highlights was a cover of Bob Dylan's "Masters of War." I've heard/seen Eddie perform this with Mike at "Bobfest" a number of years back, but the full band sound was truly something to behold. I got chills. Until I looked to the side and saw the number of people streaming for the exits, then I got annoyed.
They took it down a notch in level, albeit not, in quality to start the second set. "Strangest Tribe" is a soulful song that I hadn't previously experienced in concert, and the show marked only the second time Eddie's "Society" from Into the Wild was performed by the band. "Just Breathe" and "Sleeping by Myself" kept us pretty chilled out until they rocketed into "Life Wasted," complete with reprise, and "State of Love and Trust."
In compiling my setlist chart, I saw that ELEVEN of the songs they hadn't performed before "for me." Granted, a couple were covers -- like Pink Floyd's "Comfortably Numb" and Aerosmith's "Draw the Line" -- and I'm saving the best for last, but that seemed like an awfully high number. To share my bounty with the rest of you, they were in order of appearance ... "Release," "Low Light," "All Those Yesterdays," "Faithfull," "Masters of War," "Strangest Tribe," "Society," "Sleeping by Myself," "Comfortably Numb," "Draw the Line" and the holy grail, something they haven't performed (except for one other time in Boston) since their earliest incarnations, "I've Got a Feeling."
Their Beatles song ("All Those Yesterdays") AND a Beatles cover? Let's just say my socks -- no, they weren't red -- were knocked off.
When I'm in-season at my job and for my own sanity, I generally stick to my regular schedule -- Fridays and Saturdays off -- so I can rest and recuperate. There are precious few things that make me divert from that course. Damian Lewis at TimesTalks would be one of those.
My first exposure to Damian came during the inaugural season of his Emmy-winning role as Nicholas Brody in Homeland. After that, I went back and saw everything I had missed ahead of that, including the amazing mini-series Band of Brothers and the offbeat procedural Life. I love all three of these to bits and pieces, and any given day of the week, I would probably tell you that any of them was my favorite.
Now there's a new one in the mix I haven't seen yet -- Damian is back on Showtime in Billions with Paul Giamatti. On the TimesTalks waiting line, I felt like the only one who hasn't seen it yet. Lots of glowing testimonials. Maybe enough to prevent me from waiting for the box set to come out and pay to watch it streaming. Of course, in the meantime, I could just continue my Homeland and Life rewatches, as well as Wolf Hall and a variety of movies that I already own.
There's something to be said for getting there early so you have a front-row seat. I met some very fine people who have many of the same tastes that I do. First, there was the artist known as Damianista -- she writes and coordinates the Fan Fun with Damian Lewis blog and companion Facebook group. She knew who I was the minute I got there. And we made a new friend, Joyce, who doesn't do the social media thing. We spent about 90 minutes discussing everything under the sun.
Until ... we saw Damian walking into the building. Holy crud, he's yummy. Anyway, when we got let in, Damianista, Joyce and I quickly slipped into the three seats in front of the stage.
Being a New York Times evening, it didn't seem too off the mark that the discussion started on a political note. (On "Brexit," he's in favor of staying.) I think most people who know of Damian Lewis do know that, although his American accent is flawless, he's actually a Brit. From there, moderator Cara Buckley delved into Lewis' personal history and his own opinion of the hedge-fund managers he researched for Billions, which prompted him to quip, "I was hoping it was going to be an easier evening than this. ... I just wanted to talk about what sort of [makeup] I was wearing on my skin. Whether or not I wore waterproof mascara or not during rainy scenes."
He had a great explanation about why he has been tapped to play working-class American roles, even though he comes from a privately educated background in another country. He called it a "genetic fluke," but I think that's seriously downplaying what he has to offer. He pinpointed it more clearly in regards to his casting on Band of Brothers. His demeanor meant he was well-suited for the maturity and bearing inherent in Richard Winters. And then once Hollywood saw he could do that convincingly, it became a lot easier to nab those kind of intricate roles.
Damian said he does identify with the characters he's been played, adding maybe his red-headed Irish blue-collar look helps him land some of those parts. But in Brody, Winters and Charlie Crews from Life, he appreciated their American sense of drive and desire, of wanting to build or achieve something with their lives.
Homeland became something of a zeitgeist, not in small part because he said the show "reeked of quality and class," mirroring real-life situations -- minus the part in which a CIA operative and a suspected terrorist get personally involved -- while still being able to entertain. Lewis nabbed the Emmy and the Golden Globe that first season. "I didn't know people could get that famous," he said.
He made us laugh quite a bit, whether it was talking about wearing a thong to get his character's walk right in The Escapist -- "it was a little divisive." He also detailed different groups of Homeland fans, including those who watched just to see the relationship between Brody and Carrie (Claire Danes) develop -- "They should have ginger babies, it's going to be so exciting" -- or liberals discussing what made for a terrorist act.
Damian's descriptions of his roles were as piquant as the parts themselves. Henry VIII from Wolf Hall was
deemed "the lovable genocidal maniac." Brody from Homeland
was described as "tumbleweed blown across the bleak landscape of his
life," while Bobby Axelrod from Billions is "blowing the tumbleweed ... kicking it about."
He'll soon be seen on the big screen in Our Kind of Traitor, based on a John LeCarre novel. He considers his role of Hector to be the ambiguous LeCarre character in the story, he's exacting revenge for personal reasons but softened by Stellan Skarsgard's bid to save his family. The idea of Damian taking over as James Bond was not referenced, but the idea of him playing Steve McQueen in a biopic was brought up. "I consider it a lot, but I'm not sure anyone else has."
I do think his feathers got a little ruffled when his success was mentioned in connection with that of Benedict Cumberbatch, Tom Hiddleston and Eddie Redmayne. As he pointed out, that is a tiny minority of actors who hailed from "posh" schools in Britain doing well at the moment. "There is every reason for you to fail, mostly because of typecasting. ... There are also a handful of actors, contemporaries of mine, who are doing very well as actors and they're wonderful and talented actors, but aren't big, big stars like Tom and Eddie, Benedict. [And some of them have taken the point of view that,] 'Oh, now, they're getting in on the act. ... I was going to be that star, but that got taken by a guy who got a nice education.'"
He told two very touching stories about Band of Brothers, one about the episode in which Winters and his company discover a concentration camp. Lewis and the rest of the cast were not prepped or rehearsed for it, as he explained, their harrowed reactions were very real. The other was about watching the final ep and seeing Winters' lip quiver. "It was the first time I had seen him express any emotion about the second World War. ... When he recounts the story of one of his co-veterans being questioned by his grandson, and his grandson says to him, 'Grandpa, were you a hero in the war?' And his grandfather says, 'No, but I served in a company of heroes.' It's difficult not to well up now, and Dick, his lip just quivers and his voice chokes, and it's epic. ... It's like a crack in a slow-moving glacier. It's an extraordinary moment when he just shows that little bit of emotion, because he's not given to that as a man."
After it ended, Damianista approached the stage to talk with him while the rest of us hung back and watched. And she said one thing and another and he nodded and she said another and another. And then ... "Paige'll do it." And I said, "I don't know what it is, but Paige'll do it!"
At that point, I went up to them at the stage. Bless her heart, Damianista introduced me as a "big fan." I think then I tilted my head, so he could see I was wearing my Life cap (the title being on the back of the hat). Damian extended his hand, saying, "Hi, Paige, thank you for coming." I think I got a two-handed shake on that.
Anyway, I found out that the "it" was a quick video they wanted me to shoot for the anniversary of Damianista's blog. It was arranged that she would go to the lobby and be taken to Damian from there. Great! Except for the fact that she disappeared in the throng of the exiting crowd and I couldn't find her again.
Now I wasn't exactly panicking during this time, because Joyce was with me and we were marveling over my unexpected introduction to Damian. I really didn't feel I should push my way through the crowd, so we just made our way to the lobby when we could, and then looked all around without success for Damianista.
Eventually I did find her, and the video had already been shot. So that was kind of a bummer, but I will never think of this night as anything but a big win. Especially since Damianista is my walking .gif -- repeating "Hi Paige, thank you for coming" -- at will. Won't tire of that any time soon.
P.S. from P.S.: Click here to read the fab Fan Fun blog of the evening, and below, the interview I almost recorded. I have to say, I am quite sure this person did a better job than I would have, since my heart certainly would have been beating double-time and my hands shaking even more than that.
