Concert Review: Lyle Lovett & John Hiatt

For a tall Texan with a worn face and a crooked smile, Lyle Lovett is not the man of few words that one might expect him to be. Taking the stage at the Carnegie Music Hall last night with his good friend, John Hiatt, Lovett was the first to speak, starting off slow with a simple “Howdy.” Hiatt jumped at the opportunity to play to the crowd early, and one-upped Lovett with a salutation more familiar around these parts: “How yinz do'n?” Of course, the audience approved.

With that, Hiatt kicked the night off with “Perfectly Good Guitar,” his fatherly reprimand of Nirvana and their penchant for destroying their instruments. Lovett followed that up with a lengthy ramble about Hiatt's personalized guitar picks, a friendly TSA agent in Denver, and the duty of rock guitarists to keep alive the myth that they lead the sort of lives the rest of us wish for. Finally, Lovett took to his own guitar on “Skinny Legs,” a great upbeat western tune to open his catalog.

This pattern—Hiatt song, banter, Lovett song—set the mold for the night and was rarely broken thereafter, giving the audience a special opportunity to observe two of America's best songwriters discuss and digress their way through a loose set of alternating performances. Sometimes two consecutive songs would share a common theme, sometimes not. Nearly always the banter was led by Lovett’s questions, which wavered between thoughtful and comic, sometimes both.

Several times during the 2:25 set, the discussion turned to food. Hiatt—whose daughter is a college student in Pittsburgh—is no stranger to local traditions, and explained to Lovett that around here folks eat their sandwiches topped with fries and coleslaw, an “economy of motion” as he called it. Hiatt compared it to the way southerners put peanuts in their RC Cola, while Lovett observed, "Of all the things you hold most dear in the world, why keep them from one another?" Later, they joined forces on “Keep it in your Pantry,” Lovett’s lighthearted lament about what Hiatt calls “infoodelity.” As Lovett explained, “At no time ever in a healthy, committed relationship should one person be having more fun than the other.”

Unlike Lovett, Hiatt took the opportunity to debut two new songs: “Go Down Swingin'” and “Kick the Tin Can Home.” The former was as heavy as its central character, and was decidedly more successful than the latter, a playful dismissal of modern technology. When asked by Lovett what he looks for when “trying out” a new song, Hiatt answered him straight: “Support.”

Between banter, the songs themselves offered a wonderful study in contrast, as it was apparent what very different songwriters these two masters are. While Lovett pens heavily literate verses and slyly clever choruses, Hiatt's lyrics are far more conversational and generally more decipherable. Hiatt, who borders on prolific, fills his songs with narratives and memorable refrains that come off as raw and unfiltered. Lovett, for his part, has released comparatively few original numbers over the years, but seems to have labored more seriously over each word, its motivations and meanings. Despite the differences, it was amazing how well their songs—and even voices—complimented each other's when juxtaposed and performed only with acoustic guitars. Hiatt's rockier tunes, when stripped down, fit perfectly against the southwest landscape of his companion's country blues, and his forceful playing added lively interludes to several of Lovett’s songs, including “Cute as a Bug,” “I will Rise Up,” and “My Baby Don’t Tolerate,” which featured an extended, meandering blues solo by Hiatt which was huge on feeling, even if somewhat less so on proficiency.

They closed out the main set with an impassioned duet of the Texas prison hymn “No More Cane” before returning for an encore of each man’s best known songs, “Have a Little Faith in Me” and “If I had a Boat.”

Setlist:
1 Perfectly Good Guitar
2 Skinny Legs
3 Seven Little Indians
4 South Texas Girl
5 Crossing Muddy Waters
6 Family Reserve
7 Tennessee Plates
8 Cute as a Bug (w/ Hiatt on guitar)
9 Go Down Swingin' (new song)
10 I Will Rise Up (w/ Hiatt on guitar and backup vocal)
11 Icy Blue Heart
12 North Dakota
13 Kick the Tin Can Home (new song)
14 Home Is Where My Horse Is
15 Drive South
16 Keep it in Your Pantry (w/ Hiatt on guitar and sharing vocals)
17 Tiki Bar Open
18 Nobody Knows Me
19 Thing Called Love
20 My Baby Don't Tolerate (w/ extended Hiatt guitar solo)
21 No More Cane (duet)

Encore:
1 Have a Little Faith in Me
2 If I had a Pony

Hiatt/Lovett

Lyle Lovett & John Hiatt Ride Into Oakland (or, Not All Country Music Sucks)

Photo: Rollin Riggs, NYT

For most of my life, I hated country music. I owned a Johnny Cash greatest hits collection I’d picked up at a truckstop back in high school, but beyond that I knew nothing of the genre except for the polished, twangy crap I’d encounter on the upper ends of the FM dial, and that never did it for me, and still doesn’t. Eventually I got turned on to Hank Williams, Loretta Lynn, and some other classics, but even those I saw as something separate from "Country" as I perceived it. Then I saw Lyle Lovett and His Large Band on Conan O’Brien one night just about ten years ago. I bought Cowboy Man a few days later, and have slowly been converted.

You still won’t find me tuned in to Froggy for more than a song or two at a time, and I still can’t stand most of what I hear when I flip past CMT, but—as with most genres of modern music—some of the best stuff misses the mainstream, and Lyle Lovett is no exception.

His songs are what I want American music to be. They speak truths to the suppressed vagabond in me, as if molded out of Texan clay and carried across prairies by horseback before being dusted off and presented with a crooked smile in a soulful timbre. He can write them funny or sad, shallow or deep, folk or western... he can write them as well as or better than anyone else trying their pen at country music these days.

It is perhaps the fact that his songs grow from something more than straight country roots that separates his music from that of his contemporaries who sell millions more records and hear endless airtime across most of the nation. Lovett draws on gospel, rockabilly, mariachi and more. When backed by his Large Band, his songs could hardly be called unpolished, yet there is something much rawer in them than you’re likely to find on a Kenny Chesney record. When accompanied only by a guitar, his songs at first sound simple, but develop into compositions far more complex than the ballads of the Keith Urbans and Brad Paisleys out there.

Sure, I paid to see Urban in concert last summer, and I’ve been known at times to slip a Toby Keith track into a jukebox lineup. But those songs don’t hold a farmhouse candle to Lyle’s, and it bears repeating that I would never have opened my ears to them at all had I not purchased Cowboy Man a decade ago.

When Lovett came to town on Valentine’s Day three years ago with Guy Clark, John Hiatt, and Joe Ely at his side, he swiftly stole the hearts of a few in the audience (possibly including my fiancé's) with his desert-dry wit and a heartfelt rendition of “In My Own Mind” that shook the air. So it is against all reason that tickets are still available for Thursday’s show at the Carnegie Music Hall in Oakland, but it's with good reason that I'll be there.

(And don’t think I’ve forgotten that the masterful John Hiatt will once again be at Lovett’s side tomorrow night. The New York Times had a great piece on him a few months back, which you can read here.)

Downloads:
Lyle Lovett – “I’ve Been to Memphis” (Live in Vienna, VA, 7/7/97) (Mediafire link)
Lyle Lovett – “This Old Porch” (Live in Vienna, VA, 7/7/97 w/ Robert Earl Keen) (Mediafire link)