When Lady Gaga added this week another sold-out concert in Washington, D.C., to her tour, her mix of flashy pop spectacle and outrageousness still didn’t do much to bail out a troubled concert season this summer. She’s taken the music industry’s emphasis on dazzle and flash over great music that can last (despite her crafting danceable pop) to its ultimate extreme, when image trumps the music every time. Few acts these days are offering music that makes it worthwhile for people to pay the exorbitant prices that they’re charging, abetted by the gouging by the leading promoter and ticket-seller, Live Nation, recently merged with Ticketmaster.
In contrast, there’s another sort of showmanship that still endures, and it’s grounded in rich music delivered with passion and integrity by committed artists at reasonable prices. Bruce Springsteen, of course, is among the greatest live performers in the world, and he’s done what he can to make affordable tickets available for his shows, even though it has inadvertently led to more scalping. Yet this summer, Lyle Lovett’s tour especially offered a model of what a great show should be like, sweetened by the sort of sensible prices that were especially appealing on a recent August evening at Wolf Trap, the national park for the performing arts: lawn seats were just $25 and the covered orchestra seats $45, all under the warm summer sky.
All dressed in suits (who does that anymore?), his 15-man Large Band, including a four-man gospel quartet, put on a vibrant two-and-half-hour show that mixed the best American music can offer, from swing and folk ballads to gospel and blues to country and bluegrass. It was an eclectic gumbo of styles rivaled only by, say, Willie Nelson who also draws from across the American songbook. But even Nelson doesn’t play those varied songs in such differing styles as Lovett does.
It was his 19th appearance at Wolf Trap since his breakthrough albums of the 1980s, and the venue was packed. Will Lady Gaga be playing to enthusiastic crowds 20 years from now?
In truth, the pernicious trends that are wrecking the live music industry — stale music at jacked-up prices — just aren’t working anymore, despite Gaga’s current success, as shown by the cratering stock prices for Live Nation and its downgrading this week by a top analyst. As the AP reported on the same day that Lady Gaga sold out her concert:
Shares of concert promoter and ticket seller Live Nation Entertainment Inc. sank Tuesday after an analyst cut his rating on the stock.
THE SPARK: Benjamin Mogil, an analyst for Stifel Nicolaus, lowered his rating on Live Nation to “Hold” from “Buy” over worries that any gains from the improving concert business are going straight to increasing artist costs.
THE BIG PICTURE: The summer concert season was weak amid economic uncertainty this year. Live Nation says it doesn’t have a big-name lineup for the rest of the year. U2 has delayed a North American tour while its lead singer, Bono, recovers from back surgery. And major acts including The Eagles, Rihanna and Simon and Garfunkel, to name a few, have canceled or postponed tours due to poor ticket sales.
THE ANALYSIS: Mogil wrote that he thinks the concert industry’s problem is not one of low ticket demand — it’s that artists with limited appeal are booking too many tour stops to make up for falling record royalties. The analyst said he would like to see signs that the industry is committed to reducing artist payment guarantees.
Gaga’s success has been an exception to a grim concert season, noticed as early as July with the cancellations of at least 10 Lillith Fair concerts featuring women singers. While Gaga has to keep upping the ante with bizarre, skimpy outfits and lurid stunts to keep the customers coming, even though she’s also a talented singer and pianist, Lovett offers something else instead: heartfelt music spiced with his wry humor.
Much of the show was devoted to his last two albums, including his latest, Natural Forces, a sign that he keeps growing as an artist. He opened with a Vince Bell song, “Sun and Moon and Stars,” sung with quiet intensity backed simply by a cello, bass, fiddle and Lovett on acoustic guitar. His slightly strained tenor only added to the melancholy nostalgia of the song as he sang, “Lost to me is how the lives of friends go like autumn leaves in the Oklahoma wind.” But in fact, he didn’t forget Vince Bell, the Houston singer who got his start in the 70s as a follower of Guy Clark and Townes Van Zandt, and was a musical hero to the then-young Lovett. “He called me on the stage for no good reason,” he recalled. “When somebody like that says what you’re doing is okay, it’s a real help.” In fact, he graciously credited all of his phenomenal musicians and made sure to tell the audience who the composer was of each song he covered.
One of the show’s centerpieces was the latest album’s title song, “Natural Forces,” inspired while watching a beer commercial during a football game, and realizing he and other Americans were not sacrificing anything while troops fought overseas for them. It led him to craft a song, apparently from the point of view of a truck driver, recalling his trips across the American landscape. Now the trucker was watching a beer commercial and wondering: “Now as I sit here safe at home/With a cold Coors Lite an’ the TV on/All the sacrifice and the death and woe/Lord I pray that I’m worth fighting for.” It was a reminder of what the rest of us don’t often think about:
His range was stunning, from his classic songs, such as the ballad “If Had A Boat,” to powerful gospel numbers such as “Church” and “I Will Rise Up.” In fact, he showed that he’s one of the few white singers who has fully mastered the nuances of the black gospel idiom without ever descending to minstrel-like mimicry of a “black” accent to convey the power of the songs.
He ended the show with yet another gospel-style number,” Ain’t No More Cane,” drawn from the Southern work-song tradition, and it powerfully evoked some of the darkest eras of our history — as well as the sort of anthemic, epic songs that haven’t been performed since the heyday of Robbie Robertson and The Band. Almost each member of the band contributed a verse, but Lyle’s plaintive voice was nothing less than haunting: “There’s some on the building/ and there’s some on the farm/and there’s some in the graveyard/and there’s some going home…And there ain’t no more cane on this Brazos/They done ground it all into molasses.”
After taking us through a rich tapestry of of styles and emotions, Lyle chose to end the show with a gripping song like this that shows that you don’t need smoke machines and pianos shooting fire to reach people with your music.
Read more: Country, Pop Music, Folk, Lyle Lovett, Bluegrass, Lady GaGa, Ticket Sales, Live Nation, Blues, Wolf Trap, Entertainment News
