Music

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.

If there is a soundtrack to the ’70s, there is no doubt that Jackson Browne is prominently featured on it.

The iconic singer-songwriter mastered sweet melodies and introspective lyrics, becoming a key player in what is now known as Southern California sound as a songwriter long before becoming a star in his own right. The Byrds, Nico, Bonnie Raitt and Linda Ronstadt all recorded songs written by Browne early in the decade—but, you know him best for co-writing The Eagles’ “Take it Easy” and his own hits “Running on Empty,” “Doctor My Eyes,” and “Somebody’s Baby.”

Jackson.jpg

Browne has been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and the Songwriter’s Hall of Fame and he plays a sold-out show at Red Butte Garden on Wednesday night. Doors are at 6:30 and the music starts at 7.

photo credit: Grace Potter website

Thursday’s Red Butte show rocked.

Opening act Con Brio had a full band and a lead singer who channeled Michael Jackson and Bruno Mars in his sound and his dance moves. It was the most I’ve seen a Red Butte audience interact with the opening act. The band even got everyone up and dancing – a rare occurrence before the headliner.

Now, on to Grace Potter, the star of the night. I’m not sure if it’s blasphemous to liken Grace Potter to the trailblazing Stevie Nicks, but I pray that the post-Fleetwood Mac gods will forgive me, because Potter has that same girl-power rocker vibe that one doesn’t easily forget.

She flipped her long blonde hair and danced all around the stage while belting out her rock anthems with serious talent. Potter is loud, but she definitely knows what she’s doing when she pushes her vocal range. After all, this is rock ‘n’ roll.

My favorite moments of the show were when Potter chose to rock out on a bright red Gibson Flying V guitar (just in case anyone had doubts about her rocker status).

Songs like “Look What We’ve Become” and “Empty Heart” showed that Potter has made a great transition into a solo act. She loves her sound, and that love radiates in her performance.

However, just because Potter’s gone solo doesn’t mean she left her songs from the Grace Potter & the Nocturnals days behind. Potter put new twists on “Turntable” and “The Lion, The Beast, The Beat,” songs that were more indie pop before Potter added her solo rocker sound. Potter also gave some well-deserved love to her band, the Magical Midnight Roadshow. Her lead guitarist switched to an acoustic for a soft, intimate duet with Potter that the crowd was too loud to appreciate, until they realized what was happening and listened up.

Potter threw on at least four different ponchos over her minidress during the night, which gave me serious boho outfit envy, but I digress. Potter is an artist first and a performer second. She really does care about her shows, and it’s a privilege to watch. Her signature sound doesn’t get old.

“If rock ‘n’ roll can ring through these beautiful mountains like this, then something magical is going on,” Potter said.

Something magical, indeed. Potter’s rich, sultry voice and her incredible energy made for a rare show that I’ll be talking about for a long time.

Grace Potter performs at Red Butte Gardens Thursday night as part of her first solo tour. Potter released her first solo album, Midnight, last year. Before going solo, Potter was the leading lady in the band Grace Potter & the Nocturnals. She teamed up with country artist Kenny Chesney for “You and Tequila,” a number that earned the duo a Grammy nomination.

Potter had a quieter indie pop presence back when she was part of a group, but now she fully asserts herself as part of the rock scene. She sports long, wild blonde hair à la Stevie Nicks with the killer vocals to match. Potter is a Red Rocks veteran and started her own music festival in Vermont with headliners like Old Crow Medicine Show, The Avett Brothers and The Flaming Lips. Her song “Something That I Want” was on the soundtrack for the movie Tangled.

The show is sold out. Show starts at 7:30; gates at 6:30.

Everyone knows that the first song ever played on MTV was The Buggles’ “Video Killed The Radio Star.” What most people don’t know is that Pat Benatar’s cover of “You Better Run” was the song played right after The Buggles. That’s right, it was the beginning of girl power in the age of the music video.

By her side in that video, on guitar, was her now-husband Neil Giraldo—who has continued to collaborate and tour with her since.

A little over a decade later, Melissa Etheridge burst on the scene with a sultry voice and sexy lyrics—and as a out-and-proud lesbian she was breaking through barriers all on her own.

On Wednesday night, the three will join forces for a co-headlining show at Red Butte Garden. The show is sold-out. Gates open at 6, the show starts at 7.