By Matt Koelling
The 2016 Summer Concert Series on Monday nights at the Ocean City Music Pier had already been an unequivocal success, still so much depends on how you finish. This year’s edition ended with the incomparable Lucinda Williams leading a capacity crowd, now all on their feet, in a full-throated singalong cover of Neil Young’s “Keep On Rockin’ In The Free World” as the third and final encore of the night, after a two-hour set.
Talk about “sticking the landing”. Lucinda Williams and her longtime band with the Bob Dylan-inspired namesake, Buick 6, made a case for being the Simon Biles of this season’s summer lineup. Buick 6, to their credit, were on double duty Monday night. They opened the show sans Lucinda, operating as a three-piece doing displaying an instrumental accompaniment prowess that would make Booker T and his MG’s proud. This also included interpolations of Prince and David Bowie in tribute to the long musical legacies left by both the recently and dearly departed pantheon artists. Buick 6 even spent close to an hour after the show with the fans who filled the Ocean City Music Pier on Monday evening over at the merch table afterward, not getting up until every patron waiting for some conversation or a picture had left satisfied.
As for Lucinda Williams, she’s been quite busy herself, especially considering this is a woman who released only five albums in the first 22 years of her career. Suddenly then in 16 months, she released three full albums of studio material on Lost Highway Records: the double-album Down Where the Spirit Meets the Bone and then more recently The Ghost of Highway 20, an album she was touring in support of at her concert at the Music Pier this week.
We asked Lucinda about this, among other things, in an exclusive discussion prior to her triumphant turn as the grand finale performance in this summer’s concert series.
OCNJ Daily: Around the time of Car Wheels On a Gravel Road, you were releasing albums at a pace akin to Sade, Fiona Apple or 80’s-era Michael Jackson…now suddenly you seem to be churning stuff out at a rate closer to Prince after he first was released from his Warner Brothers contract. To what do you attribute this recent prolific run?
LW: That has more to do with the music business than it was anything that had to do with me personally. I was always writing and whenever I could, recording…but I was in a lot of different situations with record companies and contracts when I was younger. It wasn’t until I got to Lost Highway {Lucinda’s current label, where she’s now released 10 albums worth of material within the last 15 years, while in addition releasing Buick 6’s Plays Well with Others on her own subsidiary Highway 20 label} that I really felt like I had a home and that wasn’t until the early 2000’s. Although I guess that I sorta had to learn how to get into the habit of getting into the studio. Essence was the first time I felt a real amount of pressure, because of the success of Car Wheels. I had to sorta learn how to deal with that, so it helped to finally have a record company that was fully behind me and didn’t go out of business.
OCNJ Daily: Kind of ironic that it took 25 years in the business, plus the record industry to virtually fall apart in the downloading era, before you were able to find stability.
LW: I never really thought about it like that but yeah, that is kinda funny how that all worked out, now that you mention it.
Lucinda has been out of the studio and on the road steadily since The Ghost Of Highway 20’s release, a few days prior to our conversation, she’d just performed the Velvet Underground’s “Pale Blue Eyes” at a Lou Reed Memorial Tribute charity concert event at Carnegie Hall, which was organized by Reed’s widow/avant-garde-artist/composer Laurie Anderson. Squeezed in between our conversation and her appearance in Ocean City, Lucinda had the privilege of partaking in the 40th Anniversary celebration for The Last Waltz, the Martin Scorsese-directed concert film about The Band’s final show, which took place at Lincoln Center earlier this August. Lucinda had just gotten back from rehearsals in Woodstock, at The Band’s late drummer/singer Levon Helm Studios. Helm and Lucinda had done a few shows together over the years prior to Levon’s passing.
OCNJ Daily: That must have been amazing…The Band might be the greatest American rock band ever…at least Top 3 or 5.
LW: Well…American and Canadian [said with a grin]
OCNJ Daily: True. Guess I meant more in terms of the style and Levon’s background but you’re absolutely right [laughing]. Also thought that might be the most anachronistic example in the history of rock music, Robbie Robertson being a kid from Toronto who just happened to write all these richly detailed songs about the antebellum South. Either that, or John Fogerty singing about being born on the Bayou while actually bein-
LW [interjecting to finish the sentence]: From California.
OCNJ Daily: Exactly. Now we know about some of your more influences…for example, this new album feels kinda reminiscent of Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska.
LW [sounding almost breathlessly flattered]: Oh My God…I love that record, it’s one of my all-time favorites, so I feel blessed to hear you even put mine in the same sentence as that one. I’m a huge Bruce Springsteen fan, that’s part of the reason {her cover of the Darkness on the Edge of Town deep cut} “Factory” is on there. I can’t wait to do that one when we get to Jersey.
OCNJ Daily: Can’t wait for that either but yeah, they’re both such sparse, desolate, almost a little dusty-sounding records to my ears.
LW: Yeah, in that sense, you’re right.
OCNJ Daily: I was also gonna say the title track on the new record sounds a little bit like “Waiting Around to Die” by Townes Van Zandt.
LW: [pausing to mull it over] You know, there is some stuff in the chord structure and the tone, where I can imagine someone could hear that…sure.
OCNJ Daily: But beyond those type of examples who are closer to your contemporaries, who were those artists who were formative influences in your early childhood? Who were the artists that made you first fall in love with music, or made you wanna play professionally? Who are some of the key ingredients that coalesce to sort of make up that “Lucinda Gumbo”?
LW [Laughing]: Lucinda Gumbo…I like that…I might steal that later. And man, there’s so many… Hank Williams…Conway Twitty…George Jones…Johnny Cash…… Loretta Lynn…Loretta you know, she’s still out there, doin’ it. Tammy Wynette. Patsy Cline…And then you have all those old bluesmen and women that I grew up with in my house and on the blues stations down in Louisiana and Texas too…Mississippi Fred McDowell…Mississippi John Hurt…Memphis Minnie…Ma Rainey…Robert Johnson…Skip James. Then later on a lot of that late sixties rock stuff…Neil Young. Creedence. Cream. The Doors…There’s so many, I’m forgetting a ton of them off the top of my head but all those got tossed into the sauce back there somewhere.
Lucinda performed “Factory” Monday night as if she’d been waiting all tour to play it at the Jersey shore. Meanwhile a song written about a place on the country’s opposite coast, “Ventura”, felt wholly appropriate as Lucinda sang “I wanna watch the ocean bend, the edges of the sun then/I wanna get swallowed up, in an ocean of love” as she was able to look directly out of the Music Pier’s large bay windows overlooking the high tide of the Atlantic Ocean rolling in shortly after the sun had set.
An aforementioned essential ingredient of “Lucinda Gumbo”, Skip James, made an appearance during the first encore on a cover of James’ “Hard Time Killing Floor Blues”. Meanwhile the song’s only completely solo acoustic song of the evening came on the title track to The Ghost of Highway 20, before which Lucinda told the crowd “this is a song about being connected to where you’re from…and never letting go of that”. Further roots exploration came in the form of “Dust”, which was a song on the new record that enabled Lucinda to fulfill her lifelong dream of taking the words from a pome written by her Arkansas poet father, Miller Williams, who besides being Lucinda’s father was best known prior to his daughter’s musical breakthrough in ’98 for reading one of his poems at President Bill Clinton’s 1997 inauguration.
Further intimate moments followed including the beautiful new country ballad “Can’t Close the Door On Love”, containing the amazing couplet “Your smart as a whip but you can be a handful/And your always right…some of the time”. We can only speculate the principal subject of that one is Lucinda’s manager of nearly a decade, Universal Music Executive Tom Overby, who she married onstage in 2009 during an encore at First Avenue in Minneapolis, the legendary club featured in the 1984 film Purple Rain.
Yet for all the warmth displayed in the more subdued moments of Monday night’s show, Lucinda was by her own drummer/vocalist Butch Norton’s declaration during Buick 6’s opening set “in a really, rock kinda mood tonight”. The band matched the intensity of that mood from the onset of the gospel-soaked boogie of “Protection”, however it was after the acoustic portion of the set when Buick 6 and Lucinda really worked up the kind of lather that only four folks in a truly rocking mood could muster. Bassist David Sutton’s rumbling and funky bass line anchored “Foolishness” while leaving Lucinda room to vent on a newly added final verse rebuking racism, sexism, ageism, with Donald Trump catching some sharp shrapnel in the process. Lead guitarist Stuart Mathis was the standout on this particular evening, making his instrument growl, howl and move the way however he wanted all evening, including a stellar run on the set-closing “Joy” from Car Wheels, also incorporating the main riff from Led Zepplin’s “Heartbreaker” in what might have reminded anyone at the Ocean City Music Pier last week of the venue’s previous performers, Get The Led Out.
Sometime in the midst of all this rocking, we couldn’t help but notice an older woman entering from the handicap-section’s adjacent side doors at the Music Pier, walking with the aid of a cane while taking in the frenzy onstage. Upon offering her up our seat near the front stage-left by the speakers, she smiled, thanked us but instead politely declined, instead holding up a sign that just read “Blessed” and electing to stand while leaning against the side wall to leave herself room to dance back and forth.
By that point, “blessed” was a feeling it was hard not to have in the room on this beautiful final Summer Concert Series event of the summer of 2016.
Blessed at being able to see what we were seeing onstage.
Blessed by OCNJ Daily, for giving this writer, recently returning to his Jersey roots after 12 years in LA, a chance to get paid to do something he might even pay to do.
Blessed by Summer Concert Series co-promoter Bob Rose, who made sure my parents got prime seats in the venue’s sonic sweet spot near the soundboard for this show.
Blessed by this 92-year-old Ocean City boardwalk venue, which has been a great host to a varied, strong lineup of rock artists each Monday night all summer: from the Indigo Girls to the Beach Boys, from Colin Hay to Citizen Cope, Jason Mraz to George Thorogood, The Machine to Get the Led Out, Bacon Brothers to Lucinda Williams.
Blessed to have had musical icons like David Bowie and Prince in our midst for as long as we did, along with the music they left us, even if they left us too soon this year.
Blessed by Rich Mancinelli, Vice President of Summer Concert Series co-promoter BRE Presents, who lined OCNJ Daily up with multiple interviews with members of this lineup, including the unforgettable opportunity to spend an hour speaking with Lucinda Williams about music, family, life and literature for an hour earlier this month.
We thank Lucinda for her time then, her performance on Monday but mostly we thank her for being her, which means one of the best songwriters of the past 20 years.
Until next summer’s series, Ocean City, keep on rocking in the free world.
Set List:
- Protection
- Car Wheels On a Gravel Road
- Drunken Angel
- I Lost It
- Can’t Close the Door On Love
- Ventura
- Ghosts of Highway 20 (Lucinda Solo Acoustic)
- Place in My Heart (Lucinda & Stu)
- Side of the Road (Lucinda, David & Stu)
- Factory (Bruce Springsteen cover)
- Doors of Heaven
- Dust
- Real Live Bleeding Fingers and Broken Guitar Strings
- Changed the Locks
- Essence
- Foolishness
- Joy
Encore List:
- Hard Times Killing Floor Blues (Skip James’ cover)
- Honey Bee
- Rockin’ In The Free World
