Music

Kacey Musgraves brought pure country to Red Butte on Thursday night.

Musgraves branded her latest tour the “Rhinestone Revue,” and the name sure fits. Her band sported cowboy hats and Mariachi suits with flashing lights on the shoulders. The Red Butte stage was decorated with neon cactus lights, pink frills and a disco ball.

Every song Musgraves sang was a hit with the audience. They knew the words, they danced, they ate it up. Musgraves sang “Biscuits” and “Silver Lining” with a backup bass, banjo and steel guitar that really added depth to the songs. And while we’re on the subject, Musgraves singing harmonies with her band is a beautiful and rare sound that makes me blush to think about my horrid attempts at duets with my radio.

The “Pageant Material” artist befriended the Utah audience by telling a story of when she came to the Beehive State in 8^th grade to perform in a Wild West show associated with the Winter Olympics.

“My friends asked me to go to the Dairy Keen, and I had no idea what the hell they were talking about,” Musgraves said. “It’s the Dairy Queen, y’all.”

Musgraves performed small town anthems like “Dime Store Cowgirl”, “Step Off” and “Mean” with the same passion and pure talent that her fans love. Her ballads are soulful and funny without being trite. They bleed pure country dancehall magic, which makes sense, because Musgraves lists her idols as Willie Nelson, Glen Campbell and Loretta Lynn.

On slow, sweet numbers like “Fine” and “Late to the Party,” Musgraves’ reminded me of Allison Krauss – her voice is almost an instrument unto itself. But she is very much her own artist, one who rocked a rhinestoned suit, picked on acoustic and electric guitars and said exactly what she thought. Case in point: she gave a shout-out to Sam Outlaw, who opened the show.

“I really love when people keep things country as s***,” Musgraves said. One of Outlaw’s songs was titled “Jesus take the Wheel… and Drive me to a Bar,” so I’d say that’s about as country as it gets.

She introduced the relatable “Family is Family” by saying, “I’ve got some freaks in my family, and this one goes out to all the freaks in yours.”

The East Texas native ditched the band for “Merry Go Round,” one of the songs that kicked off her career with its insightful social commentary about small town life.

One of the best surprises of the night was when Musgraves busted out her version of Miranda Lambert’s “Mama’s Broken Heart,” which, as it turns out, Musgraves wrote herself. No offense to Miss Lambert, the other East Texas queen, but I liked Musgraves’ version better (and the audience seemed to agree).

With her song “Good Ol’ Boys Club,” Musgraves used her music to stick it to her naysayers.

“I wanna do it myself, thank you,” Musgraves said.

Musgraves and her band really put on a show for “Follow Your Arrow,” the song that captured the nation’s attention back when it was released for her Grammy-winning album “Same Trailer, Different Park.”

Musgraves and her band closed things out with “These Boots were made for walking.”

And that’s just what they’ll do. Musgraves’ Rhinestone Revue was a classic country show.

Before Wednesday’s sold out Blondie show I had heard that some in the Red Butte concert series’ back office thought it might be one of the best this year.

It very well may have been especially if your markers include an audience heavy on the low back chairs that make the lawn seating more comfortable, who made no use of them once Debbie Harry and company took the stage.

From opening number “One Way or Another,” Harry, striking in two-tone blue and white, was animated and energetic from the moment she grabbed the mic. Her exuberance caught up to her a bit in “Rave” from the band’s 2014 release Ghosts of Download, when her vocals were heavily backed up by keyboardist Matt Katz-Bohen.

She recovered quickly with “Hanging on the Telephone” and owned up to it before playing “Mile High” by asking, “There’s some altitude here right? I can’t breathe.”

If the altitude got to her early she recovered just as quickly. Her breathy falsetto and sultry rapping were flawless the rest of the night.

After again revving up the crowd with “Call Me,” the band played three more from recent releases, “What I heard,” “Euphoria” and “A Rose by Any Name,” all very electronic dance focused and probably the night’s best example of how the band’s abilities coupled and Harry’s voice were able to keep the crowd on their feet even during lesser known songs.

If Harry has a hard time remembering ” a lot of stuff” from the past as she admitted earlier in the evening it wasn’t apparent during her rap in the middle of “Rapture,” the first number one song in the united states to feature rapping. Harry strutted around the stage not missing a beat. It was also the song that featured the best solo of the night from guitarist, and Blondie co-founder, Chris Stein. Guitarist Tommy Kessler wailed on most of the other solos. The band’s other original member, drummer Clem Burke, and bassist Leigh Foxx, who joined the group when they re-formed in the mid-90s, kept the rhythm pounding.

“Rapture” bled into “Kiss” a tribute to the late, great Prince and then a cheeky version of the Beastie Boys “(You Gotta) Fight For Your Right (To Party.)

It’s easy to forget while dancing to hits like “The Tide Is High” and “Heart of Glass” that Blondie are not just a group with a handful of pop hits (kudos to the teenagers who were up front in the dancing pit singing every word all night) but a seminal band that blended the dynamic influences of New York’s late 70s dance, rap and punk scene into new-wave gold.

Harry reminded the crowd that “Heart of Glass” is the back beat sample in Missy Elliott’s 2002 hit “Work It,” before an encore of a Misfits cover, “Hollywood Babylon,” and “Dreaming.”

Dreaming is free. Blondie is not, but the Red Butte crowd appeared to think they were worth every penny.

Opener Desi Valentine’s “Eyes on Me” the first number of the night did just that, commanding the crowds’ attention quickly and getting people on their feet early. In case you needed reminding, Valentine showed the British are still doing 60s soul as well as anyone. A point driven home by his cover of Amy Winehouse’s “Valerie.”

As we sat on blankets at Red Butte last night my friends and I compared notes on how many times we’d seen Wilco, the night’s headliner. It was the fifth time for me, not including the Jeff Tweedy acoustic show I’d seen at Kingsbury Hall a few years ago. But at least one member of our group recalled seeing the band at the now-defunct—but never forgotten—Zephyr club. This is typical of Wilco shows. Their fans form a dedicated group, and I count myself among its members.

And so, when the band took the stage, with Tweedy in a wrinkled chambray shirt, baggy jeans and his now trademark wide-brimmed white hat, there was reverence from the crowd.

Wilco is our coming-of-age story. We might be significantly older than we were the first time we heard “Passenger Side” but, you bet your ass we still sing along, because we remember a time when the five dollars in gas money mentioned in the song was enough to actually get somewhere.

And what we, the devoted masses, got at Red Butte last night was a delightful mix of old and new tunes and, as always, beautiful and versatile musicianship.

It’s easy when you know all the words to all the songs—as everyone did last night—to forget that Wilco is no greater than the sum of its parts. And it’s parts are the God-like Nels Cline on the guitar, Glenn Kotche on drums, John Stirratt on bass, Pat Sansone on guitar and Mikael Jorgensen on guitar. And while only Tweedy and Stirratt remain from the band’s original incarnation, this may well be the best the band has ever been.

But about those songs. Alt-country trailblazing Wilco showed up with songs from A.M. and Being There and experimental prog-rock Wilco showed up with tunes from Yankee Hotel Foxtrot and A Ghost is Born. And new Wilco showed up, too, with the live debut of “Someone to Lose” from their soon-to-be-released Wilco Schmilco album, and a few from last year’s Star Wars.

And they’ve still got it—from the sonic sounds in “I Am Trying to Break Your Heart” to the wistful lilting tone of “Hummingbird,” these boys can still play. One thing that was lacking, to my dismay, was cranky Jeff Tweedy banter with the crowd. I’ve been at shows where his banter was akin to storytelling and I’ve been at shows where he’s (rightly) scolded audience members for being on their cell phones. But last night we got, “Hey Salt Lake City. We love it here.”

And, as was the case at last year’s Red Butte show, the real treat came with the band’s second encore—an acoustic set complete with a banjo and lots of old favorites, including “We’ve Been Had,” an Uncle Tupelo cover—just for those of us who have been with the band since before it existed, or you know, everyone in the crowd. Because that was all of us last night.

Hey, Salt Lake, Wilco loves you, baby. The band is returning to Red Butte Garden Tuesday night for a sold-out show.

Born from the ashes of alt-country heroes Uncle Tupelo in 1994, Wilco has developed a faithful fan base of loyal listeners hooked on Tweedy’s thoughtful—and when at their best, poetic—lyrics and the band’s masterful playing.

Probably best known for the 2002 album Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, widely acclaimed and quickly rejected by Reprise Records, Wilco eventually released it for free online. It later became their best-selling album, and the entire process can be seen in the documentary I Am Trying To Break Your Heart. Yet in recent years, the band’s music has felt less inspired and more rote in both design and sound. Some have begun to dismiss the band as dad rock. It’s a fair assessment of their newer stuff, but an unfair dismissal of their pioneering early material.

Last year Wilco played Red Butte and played their new album from the first track to the last before as much as introducing themselves to the crowd or playing a single fan favorite. This year they have a new album, the not-yet-released Wilco Schmilco, and set lists available online seem to indicate that they’ll be playing a few tunes from it, mixed with songs from last year’s Star Wars album and some old favorites. And, as has been the case with the last few Wilco shows in SLC, hard-core long-time fans will need to wait until the encore for their red meat.

Wilco is at Red Butte on Tuesday night. The doors open at 6, the music starts at 7. The show is sold out.

Jackson Browne (who knew his first name is Clyde???) as our music writer Christie Marcy pointed out, wrote the sound track for the seventies, a decade which everyone who lived in wishes was the sixties. So, he was part of the sound track of my youth. A tricky subject.

I’m a food and wine writer, not a music writer. But sometimes time trumps expertise so I was SLmag’s designated hitter at Red Butte last night where Browne and his incredibly competent band played an unusual two-act show—no opener, just a 15-minute intermission.

This was a silver-back crowd; chardonnay was out in full force. But we squeezed our blanket into a space next to a 17-year-old redhead. She was there with her parents, Australians who were in SLC for the USANA-fest and she had been raised listening to Jackson Browne. They were sitting back on the VIP terrace but she wanted to sit up close.

At 7:36, Brown said hello, slid onto a piano bench and commenced playing “Rock me on the Water.”

At 7:40, the crowd put down their wineglasses and started batting around a beachball.

From there, the band went on to play stuff from the new album, Standing in the Breach, interspersed with singalong oldies like “Fountain of Sorrow,” a lovely lyric covered by Joan Baez on Diamonds and Rust, one of the most poignantly nostalgic albums ever.

And that’s the heart of Jackson Browne: So many of his songs have a yearning melody at their core, highly hummable, easy to song along with (to the 8-track in your car) with plenty of the creeping country twang that finally came out of rock ‘n roll’s closet in the 70s, spreading from the folk clubs in Browne’s SoCal home and the boot-scooting bars in Austin to everywhere else. 

In the 70s, his perfect lyrics ached with a nostalgia for a past that hadn’t yet happened, the gestalt emotion at that time. It turns out, it was nostalgia for a past that never happened. Say a prayer for the pretenders, captured in Clyde’s song of the same name.

We were all so much older then; we’re younger than that now.

Browne himself is still the lean Southern California folksinger guy—gaunt but more groomed than a hippie, occupying his slightly uncomfortable place on the spectrum between Bob Dylan and Paul Simon, and verging into Huey Lewis when he slips into the commercialism he’s capable of but lyrically eschews. He’s an old-school pro, moving easily from piano to several guitars and back again and giving affectionate credit to his bandmates.

Still, an occasional chord makes you think, if things had gone a little bit wrong, Jackson Browne could be playing piano in a motel lounge. If things had gone a little bit right, his audience would be living off the grid instead of driving BMW SUVs.

Browne’s youthful plaintiveness has matured into political statement. That’s happened to a lot of us. Instead of singing about hitchhiking out of Winslow, Arizona, Browne is bemoaning the environmental devastation caused by by fossil fuels. Oddly, his lyrics sound more optimistic now. Standing in the Breach says in the title track, “You don’t know why, but you still try/For the world you wish to see.”

Last night at Red Butte, the well-heeled audience (Red Butte tickets are not inexpensive; this is not a hoi-polloi venue) danced along to “The Pretender,” the anthem of the aging middle class before they were aging or middle class. That album came out in 1976, the year I left Austin. How did he know we would all become pretenders, “caught between the longing for love and the struggle for the legal tender?” Why don’t we care that we did? The—can I use the word poignant again?—contrast between the listeners’ memories conjured by the songs and the present reality was painful.

But the response to Browne’s music seemed to rekindle the idealism of youth—surprising the singer, who seemed almost bemused by the enthusiasm of the audience as they sang along and raised their hands in time with lyrics from the new album, “You know the change the world needs now/Is there, in everyone.” And the band responded to the audience’s energy with more passionate playing. 

We were his audience all along. He’s always been singing “For Everyman.”

Ann Wilson admits that Heart, the band she leads and co-founded with her sister Nancy, didn’t think much of the news that the powerhouse Seattle rockers were being inducted in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame back in 2013. In hindsight, though, she’s come to realize the honor did change some things—particularly how other people treated the long-running group.

“We were kind of cynical, like ‘Yeah, yeah, we’re a working band. Go ahead and put some letters behind our name. We’re a working band. We’ll juust go back to work the next day,’ Wilson said in an interview with Salt Lake magazine. “But after the induction, it’s like having a masters or PhD. All of the sudden, people treat you differently. Whether it’s true or not, people suddenly start taking you more seriously. It’s an interesting thing.”

It’s also probably a frustrating thing for the Wilson sisters, who have been making waves in the rock ‘n’ roll boys club since they broke through 40 years ago with the hit album Dreamboat Annie, and then dominated MTV and radio through the 80s and early 90s with a series of hits. Who cares what a museum says about you when you have that kind of track record? But Wilson is far from bitter. Rather, she comes across in conversation as a person thankful to still be able to get on stage and rock with her band to thousands of adoring fans.

This summer, Heart is headlining a tour that includes fellow Rock Hall of Famers Joan Jett and the Blackhearts and Cheap Trick, and Wilson notes that her band has toured plenty with both. She says to expect plenty of the classic hits from all the bands, like Heart’s “Barracuda,” Jett’s “I Love Rock and Roll” or Cheap Trick’s “Surrender.” And she also notes that all three acts are still writing and recording new music, even if people don’t buy albums like they used to.

Heart’s new album is Beautiful Broken, a searing set of new original tunes and some re-recorded old songs that the Wilsons felt never were recorded properly. The result is classic Heart, rocking heavy one moment and soaring with gorgeous ballads the next. The title track and “Two” both make it into the band’s set on the summer tour, but Wilson knows the audience wants to revel in the oldies for the most part.

“There’s just enough new stuff and just enough hits,” Wilson says. “People who come to the show … they like hearing the really exciting new stuff, but if you just went off and did 10 new songs, they’d all be out there buying t-shirts.”

Wilson sees the different eras of Heart’s history as “whole different lives” in her mind. The 70s were great because Heart made their way out of their Seattle hometown onto the radio and the road. The 80s was a commercially successful time, but the industry was “a lot more clamped-down in terms of what radio would play and not play. They didn’t want experimentation. I’ve never seen a time when naturalness, whether it be female or male, was placed at a lower premium. It got so into the hair and shoulder pads and corsets and stiletto heels. Like you were playing in a costume drama, kind of.”

The 90s might have been the most musically satisfying era, she says, when Heart went on hiatus and the Wilson’s created the Lovemongers, a side project with a penchant for Led Zeppelin covers. “That was awesome,” Wilson says. “No expectations. Just fun.”

No matter the era, the Wilson sisters were typically some of the only women finding success in a male-dominated genre. Wilson thinks it’s easier today for young women to break through, but it’s still a challenge.

“It IS still male-dominated,” Wilson says. “But it’s getting closer [to equality] than when we came up. It’s closer than I’ve ever seen it. It’s just a matter of women being out there and getting good. I don’t think men want to keep women down or anything like that. I just think there aren’t as many women who are good. Yet. But they’re getting there. They ARE getting there.”

No doubt a few more will be inspired seeing Heart on Monday in Utah.

Heart, Joan Jett and the Blackhearts and Cheap Trick play West Valley City’s Usana Amphitheatre on Monday, Aug. 29, at 6:30 p.m. Tickets range from $30.50 to $90.50 and are available through Smith’s Tix outlets.