By The Vibe Dog.
There are concerts, and then there are incidents.
After many years of voluntarily surrendering evenings to live music, I have developed a reasonably reliable system for determining which is which.
You arrive. You find your seat. You look around at the people who have paid an alarming amount of money to sit in front of, behind, or beside you. You wait for the lights to go down. Somebody eventually walks onto a stage and makes a noise loud enough to justify the entire enterprise.
Simple.
Civilized.
Predictable.
Then somebody tells you that Brandi Carlile is one of the greatest live performers on the planet.
That is where things become dangerous.
Because everybody I knew who had seen Brandi Carlile live said essentially the same thing: “Best concert I’ve ever seen!”
Well, that’s a hell of a thing to tell a man who has been going to concerts since dinosaurs were still arguing over whether arena rock was getting too commercial!
Expectations are dangerous animals.
So, I entered the Koussevitzky Music Shed at Tanglewood on August 18 carrying a crap-ton of years of accumulated concert baggage and one enormous question:
Could Brandi Carlile possibly be as good as everybody claims?
The answer arrived shortly after Jensen McRae and her magnificent band tore through a forty-five-minute opening set that this audience actually listened to.
That’s worth noting.
Opening acts are frequently treated like the musical equivalent of the safety instructions on an airplane: technically necessary, occasionally useful, and largely ignored by everyone who has already decided what they came to see.
Not this night.
McRae had the crowd.
Then Brandi Carlile walked onto the stage with her for “God Has a Hitman,” McRae’s track featuring Carlile.
And suddenly the evening had stopped warming up.
It had begun.
What happened next was less a concert than an extended demonstration of what happens when a world-class musician is given a microphone, a great band, several thousand willing accomplices, and apparently no obligation whatsoever to behave like a conventional rock star.
Carlile told stories.
Lots of stories.
She told stories before songs, after songs, during songs, around songs and, on at least one occasion, because a piece of stage equipment had apparently decided it needed its own moment in the spotlight.
She sat down at the piano.
The monitors weren’t working.
Normally, this is the point where the technical crew begins communicating in increasingly desperate hand signals while the audience stares at the ceiling.
Carlile simply explained that she couldn’t give the monitor guy too much crap because he was her brother-in-law. “His name is Jerry.” Jerry was now part of the show.
Eventually, Carlile switched the piano from Fender Rhodes mode to Acoustic Piano mode and – miracle of modern science – the monitors came alive.
She looked at the audience. “Should I just play this song on the piano?” The place erupted.
Then she confessed that she had actually wanted to play the song on the piano all along. She had played with us. Beautifully. And we thanked her for it.
This was the trick Carlile kept pulling all night: she made imperfection look intentional.
She made technical problems funny. She made forgotten parts entertaining. She made thousands of strangers feel like they had somehow been invited over for dinner and nobody had bothered to tell them there would be a concert afterward.
Then came the stories …
Her first airplane ride at seventeen: white-knuckle terror, destination Idaho.
Three years later, she and “The Twins” – bassist Phil and guitarist Tim Hanseroth – flew from Washington State to New York City.
Their expectations of New York had apparently been assembled by “Home Alone,” hearsay, and the imagination of three people who had never seen the place.
They expected snow.
They’d been told skyscrapers were separated by tiny slivers of blue sky.
And they desperately wanted to see cockroaches …
New York, being New York, immediately came through.
NYC had apparently rolled out the welcome mat!
Then Carlile talked about Elton John.
She had idolized him. To her, he was practically an angel.
Then she worked with him.
The angel turned out to have some human characteristics.
And that was apparently the best thing that could have happened.
Once she stopped worshipping him and started treating him like a colleague, the music got better.
They performed “Who Believes in Angels?” with Dave Mackay attempting the unenviable task of recreating Elton John’s piano work – work that, Carlile noted, Elton himself had approved.
There are moments when a piano player must feel that his career has become a hostage situation. I believe this may have been one of them.
Then came the audience requests.
Dangerous territory.
“Dreams” was selected, and suddenly Phil, Tim, and Brandi were conducting an archaeological excavation into their own memories.
Who sang the Beach Boys part?
Who had the Sgt. Pepper part?
Who was supposed to sing what?
Nobody seemed entirely certain.
Then, somehow, it all clicked.
The song happened.
The audience exploded.
“Turpentine” followed, and this time the crowd was drafted into active service. Tim taught one section their harmony. Brandi and Phil handled the others.
For a few glorious minutes, the Koussevitzky Music Shed became a giant human vocal instrument.
Then came the zipline story.
Carlile had built a zipline in her backyard.
And somehow convinced her wife to test it.
This is either marriage or a highly sophisticated insurance fraud scheme.
Her wife is British, she explained, and has a peculiar habit of answering questions with questions.
“Are the kids in bed?”
“That’s not appropriate for you to not know where the kids are, is it?”
Then came Bonnie Raitt.
Carlile spoke about seeing shows at The Gorge in Washington, including James Taylor, and about her lifelong admiration for Raitt. She had sung the same Bonnie Raitt song every night as a countdown to seeing her perform.
Then she sang it. “I Can’t Make You Love Me.”
And for a few minutes, all the jokes disappeared.
There are certain songs that remind you why you came to a concert in the first place.
That was one of them.
By then, I had stopped wondering whether Brandi Carlile could live up to the hype.
She had already backed the truck over it.
Twice.
Then came my own personal concert experience, with…
“The Mad Hatter”.
A couple in front of me left their seats. Two new people arrived.
No worries, right – I mean…concert seating is a fluid ecosystem.
The one who sat directly in front of me was wearing a hat so large it appeared to have its own weather system.
I moved left.
The hat moved left.
I moved right.
The hat moved right.
This was no longer a concert.
It was geometry.
Then everyone stood.
And I discovered that “Mr. Hat-Man-Dude” and I were exactly the same height.
But here’s the thing:
Everyone else was moving with the music.
“Mr. Hat-Man-nequin wasn’t.
His body remained perfectly still.
Only his head moved.
Up.
Down.
Back.
Forth.
Slowly.
Hypnotically.
Relentlessly.
I had discovered I was sitting behind “the human bobblehead”.
Then, everyone sat. Except him.
And suddenly I was staring at this enormous hat oscillating above a completely stationary human body like some kind of malfunctioning carnival attraction.
At some point, apparently having been sucked into his vortex, I lost control of my lower extremities – totally unaware that I was doing anything…I apparently began using my feet to attempt to make his empty seat touch the back of his legs.
My “Row-N-Seat-Buddy” looked over and asked:
“What are you doing?”
Excellent question.
“Um…I think I’ve been hypnotized. I have no control over my lower extremities.”
This seemed like the only reasonable explanation.
Eventually I escaped the gravitational field of “Hat-Man-Dude” and returned my attention to the stage.
And there was Brandi Carlile.
Still singing.
Still telling stories.
Still making thousands of people laugh, sing, listen, and feel something.
After all these years and all those concerts, I don’t throw this around lightly:
This was one of the best shows I’ve ever seen.
Not because it was flawless.
Because it wasn’t.
It was better than flawless.
It was alive.
The music was extraordinary. The stories were ridiculous and touching. The audience became part of the performance. The technical problems became punchlines. Elton John became human. Jerry became a character. Bonnie Raitt became a pilgrimage.
And somewhere in front of Row N, a man in an enormous hat became a challenge.
That is what a great concert can do.
You arrive expecting a performance.
You leave with a story.
I went into Tanglewood expecting the unexpected.
For once, I got what I actually came for.
And I still don’t know whether I was watching Brandi Carlile…
or whether Brandi Carlile was watching all of us.
Either way, Jerry got the monitors working.
And somewhere out there, “The Hat-A-Strophic-Dude” is probably still bobbling …
Setlist – Main Set
- Returning to Myself
- Human
- Mainstream Kid
- Looking Out
- A War With Time
- A Woman Oversees
- Right on Time
- Who Believes in Angels?
- Dreams (Live audience request)
- Turpentine (Live audience request)
- You Without Me
- The Mother
- The Story
- You and Me on the Rock
- No One Knows Us
- Church & State
- I Can’t Make You Love Me (Bonnie Raitt cover)
- The Joke
- Hold Out Your Hand
Encore
- Dear Mr. President (Pink cover, with Jensen McRae)
- Uninvited (Alanis Morissette cover)
- A Long Goodbye
- Sweet Baby James (Snippet)
