Emmylou Harris Live At The
Fillmore
September 26, 2000
San Francisco
Great Show !!!!!!
Emmylou
Harris In Concert
Harris
Amazes At live Fillmore show
UNPOLLUTED
By all The Studio Excess, Emmylou Harris Showcased Her Fabulous Voice
During Her Show Tuesday Night
The
singer proves that all she needs is her remarkable voice to wow an
audience
Here’s some pop-music
heresy. I think Emmylou Harris 1995
album, “Wrecking Ball” is a bit of a snoozer. That’s heresy, because
the thing is generally considered a master-piece, the album that completed
her cross over from the country hipsterocacy to the rock hipsterocacy. But
we find my mind wandering whenever I listen to it. It’s just too
overdone. Producer Daniel Lanois, who did such amazing thins with Bob
Dylan’s “Time Out Of Mind” two years later, poured his shimmy,
textured shtick all over
.
Why can’t Harris trust her
talent? She’s determined to gild her already gorgeous lily. Still,
“Wrecking Ball” was much more accomplished effort than her latest “
Red Dirt Girl” She didn’t have Lanois prodigious if heavy-handed
talents for this one. So her lovely tunes are buried in echo, too many
electric guitars and even, God help us hip-hop beats. Which is why it was
such a pleasure to see her live show and scrubbed bare at the Filmore in
San Francisco on Tuesday night September
26, 2000. It was just her, acoustic guitar, the admiral Buddy
Miller on electric guitar, veteran Brady Blade on drums and a new
jazz-trained bassist doing, a quite amazing job, given that he’d joined
the band, according to Harris, just two days before.
What a great show. She
concentrated on songs from the two albums mentioned above , allowing the
enthusiastic, sold-out audience to hear how good the songs are without all
that studio folderol. That meant the title tracks to “Red Dirt Girl”
was a high, tear-jerking story-song in the folk tradition “My Antonia”
with Miller sharing lead vocal with (Dave Matthews did the job on the new
album) had the feel of an ancient old English folk ballad.
“Deeper Well” was an absolute scorcher of a haunted rocker,
with Miller’s molten electric guitar joined with Blade’s crushing
drumming on an instrumental break that recalled nothing so much as Led
Zeppelin’s “When the Levee Breaks”
Truly a Wonderful Album
Even the cover were spot-on,
especially a faithful homage to towns Van Zandt’s “Pancho and
Lefty”. It was a pretty much perfect concert. How many shows have you
been where the backing instrumentalists were able to join the lead singer
on a cappella hymn so astonishingly gorgeous it raised goose bump. But
Harris didn’t seem quite capable of trusting herself. She played just
one solo song, the stark ballad “The Pearl” with only her acoustic
guitar as a safety net. But she couldn’t just go with it. She had to
layer in some subtle but quite superfluous prerecorded strings. Trust
yourself, Emmylou. All you or your fans need is your pan-pie of voice and
your big-hearted talent.
Miller and his wife, Julie,
opened the concert. Lucky for Harris that she’s so talented. Otherwise,
her friends and frequent collaborators
would have stolen the
show right from under her. In a better world, the Millers would be major
stars. There’s nothing they can’t do in the world of roosty music.
Sweet folk Ballads, rowdy honky-tonk, heart-breaking harmonizing,
high-hick stomp, you name it,
they’re the best. The Fillmore was packed by the time the Millers took
the stage. That almost never happens for an opening act. It made one
wonder if they could have filled the place even without the heavy-hitting
headliner. That’s the kind of thing that makes you glad to live in the
Bay Area. Under-the-radar, deserving talents like Buddy and Julie Miller
might never get rich, but they’ll always have a warm reception there.O
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