Our Saturday Evening Post tonight is the first of two this weekend where, for once, the sausagefest gets shelved and we give some love to the ladies.
Today we have the 66th birthday of someone who has -- astonishingly given that I remember when she first hit when I was in high school -- been around 40 years now.
That's four decades establishing herself at the forefront of what she helped become this Americana/Roots genre that has 14 radio stations in every town these days.
Her music is, frankly, absolutely and consistently exquisite. Really one of the best songwriters of the era, and somehow well under the radar of many people.
She's always done it her own way, and not according to the album-tour-album dictations of the music industry.
In an era of records where the songs of value swim upstream to spawn amid oceans of filler, none of Lucinda Williams's songs ever sound like placeholders.
One of her albums is considered by many to be the pinnacle of the genre, which is surely a bold statement but not wholly inaccurate when it comes to Car Wheels On a Gravel Road.
When it comes to what Lucinda Williams show to share, there are surely many choices but I settled on this one.
It comes from the tour behind my favorite record of hers -- the follow-up to Car Wheels, called Essence -- and is a nearly-pristine soundboard capture of indeterminate origin, sourced here from a boot CD.
Lucinda Williams
House of Blues
West Hollywood, CA
7.30.2001
01 Metal Firecracker
02 Car Wheels On a Gravel Road
03 Right In Time
04 Blue
05 Reason to Cry
06 Are You Down
07 band introductions
08 2 Kool 2 Be 4-Gotten
09 Out of Touch
10 Drunken Angel
11 Changed the Locks
12 Essence
13 Joy
14 Big Road Blues
15 Get Right with God
16 Lonely Girls
17 Bus to Baton Rouge
18 Come to Me Baby
19 Can’t Let Go
20 Positively 4th Street (bonus track)
21 Essence (bonus track)
22 Blue (bonus track)
Total time: 2:03:10
disc break goes after Track 12
Track 20 is from the Bottom Line in NYC, 1994 (from the "In Their Own Words" CD on Razor & Tie Records)
Tracks 21-22 are acoustic home demos from 2000/2001
Tracks 1-19:
Lucinda Williams - guitar & vocals
Bo Ramsey - guitars
Doug Pettibone - guitars, harmonica & vocals
Taras Prodaniuk - bass & vocals
Don Heffington - drums
Jim Lauderdale - vocals
Track 20:
Lucinda Williams - guitar & vocals
Gurf Morlix - additional guitar & vocals
Gurf Morlix - additional guitar & vocals
Tracks 21-22:
Lucinda Williams - guitar & vocals
soundboard recording, possibly sourced from the 2002 "At the House of Blues" bootleg CD on the Turtle label
747 MB FLAC/January 2019 archive link
The dumbass bootleggers blew it on the first bonus track -- it was missing the first few notes for whatever reason -- but I managed to get a lossless file of the complete track and substitute it. Otherwise nothing was changed.
I'll be back tomorrow with some more Superwomen, with a post about one of the classic all-time FM shows, which -- coincidentally -- I just remastered.
Today,, however, we celebrate Lucinda Williams -- born this day in 1953 -- and encourage her to please keep making music until age 166.--J.
