THE VOTE FOR CHANGE TOUR

Bruce Springsteen/R.E.M.

WACHOVIA CENTRE, PHILADELPHIA

Friday, October 1, 2004

James Taylor/The Dixie Chicks

THE STATE THEATRE, CLEVELAND

Saturday, October 2, 2004

As anybody who can remember Red Wedge will confirm, being battered around the head with a wad of rolled-up political slogans at a rock concert is enough to get you running for the exits long before half-time, whichever side of the political divide you’ re on. All the artists involved in the multiple interlocking tours gathered under the Vote For Change banner were acutely conscious of this danger. As John Fogerty put it before going on stage at the opening night in Philadelphia on October 1, “Speaking for myself, I will vote for John Kerry. There’s no other option for me. But I’m not going to tell people what they should do once they get to the ballot box.”

Perhaps he hadn’t had time for a chat with Conor Oberst, gangly lead singer with opening act Bright Eyes. The band is basically Oberst plus some sidemen, and to prove the point, he opened their set with a lengthy solo performance on acoustic guitar. Bright Eyes play a kind of cranked-up folk music with lyrics about political repression and the evils of consumerism. The band seemed nerdish and anonymous, and could have been criminally dull were it not for Oberst’s obsessive stalking around the stage and a voice which trembled with nervous intensity. The mere thought of Dubya makes him seethe, and he expressed his fervent wish that Vote For Change would mean “we don’t have this madman running our country any more” (in Cleveland the following night, he went so far as to observe that “a vote for Bush is like shitting in your own bed”).

The evening’s elder statesmen adopted a more measured approach. Bruce Springsteen, dropping comfortably into the role of a benign master of ceremonies, went light on the speechifying, restricting himself to a brief mission statement about wanting “a government that’s open, rational, forward-looking and humane,” then later adding a plea for “a deeper patriotism” in an America that lived up to its promises. He was well aware that a sizeable chunk of his audience vote Republican, and quite a few of them had stumped up for tickets even though they knew that proceeds would be donated to America Coming Together, a voter mobilisation group aiming to rustle hordes of dithering Democrats to the polls on November 2.

Introduced by Bruce as “one of the greatest American bands of the last 20 years”, R.E.M. strode purposefully on stage and launched into “The One I Love”. It was the curtain-raiser to a set which ranged across back-catalogue highlights including “Losing My Religion”, “Begin The Begin” and “Walk Unafraid”, alongside a salvo of tracks from the new album Around The Sun. The most pointed was “Final Straw”, pitting the frustrated rage of Michael Stipe’s lyric against an urgent protest-singer strum. Yet, as if to defuse any accusations of suffocating high seriousness, Stipe’s performance scaled new heights in flamboyance as he whirled around the stage in a pristine white suit, unfurling glittering dance routines and extravagant semaphore gestures. When Springsteen joined them for “Man On The Moon”, Stipe’s exaggerated Presley-isms on the “Andy, are you goofin’ on Elvis?” line had the Boss choking at the microphone.

The conversations between Springsteen and his manager Jon Landau before they took the decision to sign up for Vote For Change must have been fascinating, but despite the stalwart liberal credentials of fellow subscribers like R.E.M., Pearl Jam and Jackson Browne, there isn’t anybody who could have played the Big Daddy role as convincingly as Springsteen. Having spent 30 years carefully not aligning himself with a specific political candidate, Springsteen has accumulated a kind of moral prestige possibly matched only by the likes of Johnny Cash or Henry Fonda. That he should have opted to expend some of his hard-won capital at this particular juncture gave the loudest possible warning that this year’s election wasn’t merely a matter of squabbling over the small print but a moment of real crisis in the body politic.

For a man whose sartorial ventures rarely run far beyond jeans and a T-shirt, Springsteen has an advanced flair for the dramatic. His new arrangement of “The Star Spangled Banner” was as striking in its way as Hendrix’s version from Woodstock. He played it solo on an acoustic 12-string guitar, letting the theme emerge gradually from a maelstrom of thrumming and droning chords, as if he were digging it out from under a pile of rubble. Then the E Street Band lashed into the opening of “Born in The USA”, launching Springsteen into a customised set that stressed the “ties-that-bind” dimension of his catalogue rather than homing in on his bleak and solitary vein. They thundered through throttle-open versions of “Badlands”, “No Surrender” and “The Rising”, while Nils Lofgren took an extended guitar interlude in a turbo’d-up “Youngstown”.

But it was the collaborative nature of these shows which has doubtless made them a bootlegger’s delight. Springsteen made room for a mini set by John Fogerty, who rattled through “Centerfield”, his anti-militarist new single “D

Elvis Costello & The Imposters

BARROWLANDS, GLASGOW

Wednesday, October 6, 2004

Which Elvis are you? Stark-staring, sparrow-legged, bilious Buddy Holly? Speed-guzzling soulboy? Whiskey-soaked, beers-and-tears country lover? Thesaurus-thrashing purveyor of perfect conscience-pricking pop? Soul-shredded red-and-black revenge machine? Mutant balladeer with weird beard ideas? Classical cognoscenti? Friend to the glossiest stars?

All these Elvi enter Glasgow’s holiest building with The Imposters for their only UK gig?their only European gig?and rip into “How To Be Dumb”, the astonishing 1991 stream of invective apparently battered out after Costello read former bassist Bruce Thomas’ less-than-flattering memoir The Big Wheel. The Imposters, of course, are The Attractions?whirligig keyboard wizard Steve Nieve, tonight sporting a fetching kilt of uncertain tartan, and Powerful Pete Thomas, pounding his drumkit with arms that defy time?minus B Thomas, whose place has been taken by Davey Faragher (dressed like Chas, Dave and the supporting cast of Only Fools And Horses, and pulling it off). They make an imperial, whirling, battering noise; yet Elvis still seems stung by Thomas’ gang betrayal. And that’s key. No matter how many Vanity Fair articles or string quartets he writes, somewhere inside that tight purple suit still lurks the brilliantly twisted suburban computer-programmer with a churning brain and chip on his shoulder, capable of hanging on to hate till his fingers bleed.

Costello’s place in the punk wars which liberated him remains open for debate, but he seems intent on structuring tonight as four-to-the-floor Ramones tribute. The first five songs are a furious rush, opening chords crashing in before closing notes fade. Flashing across the decades, “Doll Revolution”, “No Action”, “The Next Time Round” and an enormous “Radio Radio” go tearing past, making clear how consistent his core, thick, wild mercury sound has been.

Things slow in the most surprising way with a rare outing for Leon Payne’s schizo-Nashville “Psycho”. As intensely, sweetly screwed-up as it ever has been, it leads into the corrupted gumbo and bleeding Americana of the new Delivery Man album. That Costello has chosen Barrowlands to showcase the record is not so surprising: he picked Scotland as safe haven to premiere Almost Blue when ‘going country’ was enough to get you lynched, and has racked up fistfuls of epic stands in Glasgow. Still, the most frustrating element of tonight is how half the audience seem to have turned out for greatest hits, and take the jet-black psychodrama of the title track, a sublime “Country Darkness” and extended, clanking, curdling, rumbling reworkings of “Button My Lip” (a summary of the Costello catalogue) and “Needle Time” as chat-breaks, flattening out the night.

An entirely unexpected “Blame It On Cain” demonstrates how the big wheel’s still turning in Costello’s head. The crowd is brought back to heel with “High Fidelity”, “I Can’t Stand Up For Falling Down” and a singalong “Good Year For the Roses”. I stopped counting at 25 songs. Biggest surprise: Costello chanting “We Want You As A New Recruit” Village People-style during “Uncomplicated”. Least surprising realisation: we need him singing “Oliver’s Army’, “Shipbuilding” and Nick Lowe’s “(What’s So Funny ‘Bout) Peace, Love And Understanding” more than ever?and continuing to hunker down with all his internal Elvi to write a few hundred more, growing older outraged-ly.

Willy Vlautin’s luck is fast looking up. It’s doubtful the singer-songwriter would agree—bitterness and regret have never figured in his personal scheme of things—but it’s about time. Ten whole years and five albums into their career, Portland, Oregon’s Richmond Fontaine are now being acknowledged—alongside Wilco and the recently revived American Music Club—as the standard bearers of a deeply empathetic, casually confessional strain of contemporary Americana. Latest album Post To Wire paints an emotionally blasted landscape inhabited by the lost, the luckless, the bruised, bewildered and the plain broken, many of them inspired by Vlautin’s own dark past spent hanging around the roughneck bars and low-rent casinos of his home town, Reno. His songs are postcards from the edges of experience and the bittersweet vignettes they describe—which have more than a touch of the Raymond Carver to them—neither pity nor ennoble their subjects but simply tell their stories, straight. Life, Willy Vlautin knows, comes with no guarantee. There’s little else to do but get right on with it.

It’s this sleeves-rolled forthrightness which makes Richmond Fontaine so engaging live. With his neat jeans, blue workman’s shirt and slightly shy manner, Vlautin makes an unlikely star, but the sell-out crowd make it clear he’s their hero. “I love you, Willy!” cries a (male) disciple, while down the front another plays enthusiastic air guitar to almost every tune. The band (with touring guitarist Dan Eccles standing in for pedal-steel recording champ Paul Brainard) range across familiar enough territory—the highly-charged bar blues/boogie of Vlautin’s beloved Blasters (Dave Alvin gets a name-check tonight), Springsteen’s impassioned urban’n’western, the righteous, literate punk of Hüsker Dü, Uncle Tupelo’s bourbon-soaked epiphanies—but Richmond Fontaine are adding to the canon, not milking it dry.

They open with “Out Of State” from the recently re-issued Winnemucca LP—a sweetly urgent snapshot of the peculiar emotional limbo that so often accompanies physical escape—and then dip into the languid swing of “Barely Losing”, its title as neat a summary of Vlautin’s life philosophy as you could hope for. Picking highlights from the set is nigh on impossible, but the twanging “Northline” (in which Vlautin makes the phrase “her bloodshot blue eyes” sound like love’s most tender elegy), a roisterous, full-tilt “Montgomery Park”, the malevolent “Hallway” and a divinely sombre “Allison Johnson” linger well after lights up. Floor-stamping demands for an encore see them producing “1968”, “Winner’s Casino” and, finally, “Polaroid”, in which Eccles’ lugubrious guitar and Vlautin’s keening vocal belie his lyrical optimism. “Not everyone lives their life alone, ” he reminds us, “not everyone gives up or is beaten or robbed or always stoned.” It’s that nudge toward hopefulness we all sometimes need. Richmond Fontaine are one of the few bands who can convincingly supply it.