Warm Australian Reception for Lucinda Williams
- cutlercomms
- 11 minutes ago
- 6 min read
Lucinda Williams has taken a rare backseat on an 8-gig tour across Australia which ended in the first weekend of September with two sold-out shows at the Rod Laver Arena, one of Melbourne’s leading sports venues. She, somewhat surprisingly, played as an opening act for Paul Kelly - one of Australia’s most revered musicians - on his much-heralded 40th anniversary tour across Australia and New Zealand.
It was originally intended that Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit accompany Kelly, but when they pulled out for “unforeseen circumstances”, Williams and her band – Brady Blade (drums), Dave Sutton (bass), Mark Ford (guitar/backing vocals), Doug Pettibone (guitar/pedal steel) – were roped in for the Australian leg.
There was one notable exception to her supporting role and that was when she and the band gave a landmark performance at a somewhat landmark venue, the Sydney Opera House, on September 1. Titled Don’t Tell Anybody the Secrets I told You, it was first launched in 2023 to coincide with the release of her memoir by the same name. And the show, like the frank biography, reflects the various shades of her stunning 50-year career.
Given that Williams still displays symptoms from her serious 2020 stroke – she has stopped playing guitar and is gently assisted on-and-off-stage – her trek to Australia was somewhat admirable. But with her voice as good as ever and a hot band at its very best, her adoring fans soaked all she could give them, whether it was the eight or so songs on the Kelly-setlist or the 18 she performed in the two-hour show at the Opera House.
Her supporting gig was more contemporary – or “standup rock” as she described it. She mixed her standards, “Car Wheels on a Gravel Road,” “Drunken Angel” and “Joy,” with popular covers like Neil Young’s “Rockin’ in the Free World” and George Harrison’s “While My Guitar Gently Weeps,” a highlight of last year’s innovative album Lucinda Williams Sings The Beatles From Abby Road.
But Don’t Tell Anybody the Secrets I told You was more of a “sit down” multi-media affair. There are three elements to this intriguing event. There’s the visuals on a large screen directly behind Williams which displays photos and images pertinent to a particular song. Then there’s the monologue and here she endeavors to stitch together her life in somewhat chronological order between the 18 tracks. And, as one would expect, it is her selection of songs from her wonderful treasure-strove which provide the real grunt.
As might be expected the show opens way-back-when with a gentle rootsy acoustic song “Blind Pearly Brown,” which she wrote to remember one of the first artists she ever saw, a preacher-blues-musician Rev. Pearly Brown who busked in the streets of Macon. She was a young child when Lucinda’s father Miller Williams – an acclaimed poet and literary academic – took her her to see him when they lived in Georgia.
And to round off the 73-year-old’s legendary career, she and the band let rip with her 2001 Old Testament-inspired rocker “Get Right With God.” It would win the 2002 Grammy for Best Female Rock Vocal Performance and, despite her medical issues, her gutsy delivery is as good now as it was then.
There were only three covers, not surprising given her vast songbook. And they – Elizabeth Cotton’s “Freight Train,” Bob Dylan’s “It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry” and Hank Williams’s “Jambalaya” – all came within the first four songs.
She confessed to being smitten by Dylan and described in some detail how her life changed when one of her father’s students brought his 1965 album Highway 61 Revisited to her family home. The soon-to-be-teen would replay the LP for hour-upon-hour.
Williams wisely addressed two of the elephants-in-the-room, though indeed she had room for many more, given the space at the Opera House.
The first was her early reputation for being “too dark,” one critic even describing her output as “slit-ya-wrist music!” She confronted the issue openly, comically referring to it “my flair for darkness.” She added: “When I was starting out people were saying my songs were too dark. But my Dad always told me: ‘don’t censor yourself’ and I try not too”
The other shadow which hangs over her career actually involves her best-selling album. “Car Wheels on a Gravel Road” was released in 1998 and is now regarded as a masterpiece - indeed one of the greatest albums in Americana music. But it took more than two years to produce, reportedly leaving casualties on studio floors from Texas to Tennessee.
It was finally salvaged by two Nashville stalwarts, producer Ray Kennedy and singer-songwriter Steve Earle, who recut most of the original recordings made with long-time producer Gurf Morlix. Much has been made over the years of the studio-tension between Williams and Earle, who was also committed to touring at the time. (The album eventually ended up being fine-tuned with a third party in Los Angeles). But there was no hint of this in her reflections. And when she raised the issue, she left no doubts as who rescued the project: “I have much to thank Ray Kennedy and Steve Earle for that album. They were there when I needed someone.”
As in previous interviews on the issue, Williams put her procrastination down to “the perfectionist in me.” And she was quick to acknowledge the negative publicity at the time.
“As I expected there was much to do in the press and the label ‘witch’ was used from time to time.”
Despite the hullabaloo, Car Wheels on a Gravel Road is a wonderful example of Williams at her lyrically-inventive best. For she posses the rare ability to seamlessly stitch together words with music. And there is no better example than the title track which evokes memories of her upbringing across the southern states. Something of a reflective travelogue, it contains one of the most endearingly-beautiful stanzas in popular music:
Child in the backseat ‘bout four or five years
Looking out the window
Little bit of dirt mixed with tears
Car wheels on a gravel road
And it was this gem which produced the actual highlight of the Opera House show. For she told a delightful story of when she suddenly realized the song had painted a portrait of herself way back when. “I did one of the first live performances of the song at the Bluebird (café) and my Dad was there that night,” she said. “After the show he came straight up to me and said ‘that was you.’ I looked at him and he quickly added ‘the dirt mixed with tears – that was you.’ And he then said: ‘I’m so sorry.’”
She added: “It was only then that I realized I was singing about myself.”
Her back catalogue is laced with tribute songs, those dedicated to places and people from her past - some, of course, have themselves long passed! Two of her most popular got an appreciated outing at the Opera House. Both were tracks from Car Wheels …
“Drunken Angel” is dedicated to Texan singer-songwriter Blaze Foley, who, like many artists, not only found fame posthumously for the big-name covers of his work but also for the infamy of his early death. He was shot by the son of a friend after a domestic dispute. And she was motivated to write “Lake Charles” following the death of an old boyfriend, Clyde Woodward, and the endearing song goes someway to compensate for the fact that she was never able to say goodbye. Williams was born in Lake Charles and Woodward – a Texan – always wanted to claim the Louisiana city as his own.
And there were the expected family dedications. She wrote ”Little Angel, Little Brother” - itself a lyrical masterpiece – for her sometimes-troubled younger sibling Robert. Later in the set there was a song - “Heavens Blues”- for her “lost mother” who suffered from mental health issues over the years. And that number was immediately followed by “Dust” an inventive tribute to her father’s unique inspiration. “Dust” was a poem written by Miller Williams and Lucinda composed the music to his prose. The multi-media format came into its own during these songs which were illustrated on the big screen with warm, captivating family photos/videos.
But it was a tribute to a favourite city, New Orleans, which prompted the best out of her tight band - with some wonderful guitar interplay between Pettibone and Ford - and that in turn got the crowd truly enthused. “Crescent City” – off her 1988 self-titled album – is a singalong ditty covered by many artists over the years. The most popular rendition is by Emmylou Harris off her 1993 release Cowgirl’s Prayer and Williams made clear how delighted she was that Harris had embraced the popular song.
This in itself is somewhat significant given that it was Emmylou’s personal endorsement of Lucinda’s songwriting skills which prompted Time magazine to name her “America’s Best Songwriter” in 2002. Nobody listening to her both singing and relating her life story over two hours at the Sydney Opera House would dare to disagree!
Paul Cutler
Editor Americana Music Appreciation
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