Gillian Welch
Tuesday September 16, 2003 – 9:00 am
Fantastic show. It was just her and David Rawlings, what more do you need? Not even an opening band. She played a bunch of my favorite songs, including "One Little Song" and "My Morphine". Didn’t play "Paper Wings" though. They played two sets and two encores and got assaulted with requests from the audience, so I can’t complain! Her voice was spectacular, and with her and David together, it’s the sweetest sound on earth. So glad I finally got to see them live, thank you John!!
I really wanted to meet them afterwards, but I didn’t see any way to do that. I didn’t even know anybody there. Well, I spotted Peter Margasak in one of the box seats, and I’m sure if I’d bumped into him afterwards I would’ve said something stupid like… "Can you get me backstage please, right now? Um, yeah, if you could just do that, that would be super…" :-)
On the el ride home we got stuck in a car with some other folks who’d been at the show. They were talking about it and mispronouncing her name… I wanted to correct them but didn’t want to be a jerkoff. A couple of ‘em were singing different songs of hers one after another, in not-half-bad harmony. I thought it was pretty cool — you don’t hear that every day on the el!
When we got home I ate the fortune cookie I got at dinner earlier, with "Time’s the Revelator" still drifting through my head. My fortune? "The best profit of future is the past." Boy, you can say that again!
September 16th, 2003 at 7:08 pm
How is her named pronounced, anyway? I’ve always said it with a hard "G" sound, like the word "gill".
She’s playing here in pgh on Saturday night, but because it’s freaking expensive and I have a radio show, I can’t go. (I just found out that the show is sold out in any case. Meh.)
And I can’t seem to reproduce the snownews bug. Maybe if I have a lot of RSS feeds, and it reloads, but I didn’t see any discernible degradation in disk space by running multiple instances of it. And it doesn’t seem to open any files while running, except for libraries and the current directory. Interesting…
September 16th, 2003 at 8:51 pm
Yep, it’s with a hard G. At least that’s how she pronounces it, but then it’s her name so she can do whatever she wants with it. ;-)
I don’t know how I managed to crash my machine like that; it was fine after a reboot and hasn’t happened again. But leave it to me to find the one thing…!
September 17th, 2003 at 12:32 am
Hi Edith!
I’m feeling all better now, I’m so glad I didn’t die!!! (boy it felt like I was gonna!)
I’m writing because I’m so happy you got to see Gillian Welch and David Rawlings live. I saw them at Town Hall in NYC when they kicked off the Time the Relevator tour, and I’d been kicking around "Burn my Stillhouse Down" - still a favorite song of mine to play and…
SHE STARTED THE SHOW WITH THAT SONG!!!!
I was crying and so happy! I was such a frickin’ fan! I cried through so many of the songs! I just couldn’t hold back! They really get to me!
And there was one song where Rawlings sang lead and she backed him up and THEY ROCKED!!!
He has such a voice and in my Humble Opinion, I think he holds back too much… I wanna hear MORE in the backing vocal!!!
Of course, I’m not biased — I’m just a Holler Sister!
I’ve been kicking around her "Elvis Presley Blues" this week, which is actually a fantastic song when you really listen to the words, and the chord changes and all. I tended to kind of write it off as a novelty song before, but there’s nothing novelty about it. It’s art.
But what the hell am I going to do , if I learn that song? How could I play it in public? Even if I got the vocal down, which I can do, my playing is so lame compared with Welch/Rawlings that people would hear my tenor guitar and put their fingers in their ears and go "LA LA LA LA LA LA!!!!"
It’s like the Monroe Brothers, "Sitting alone in the Moonlight," you think you sound great doing it when you play it — until you listen to the record again, and you shake your head and cry, "Why bother!"
You can’t replicate perfection!!!! Uh, let me rephrase that, _I_ can’t replicate perfection!
Glad you saw the Welch/Rawlings show, and I’m so glad your daddy’s doing better!
Love ya gal,
Deborito,
Holler Sister
September 17th, 2003 at 4:09 am
another tour is passing through chicago, it includes the world’s second best theremin player… nicoletta stephanz.
she’s touring with edward ka-spel and they hit the double door on october 4th…
just in case you’re interested
nick