unsuffer her

I first saw Lucinda Williams perform 17 years ago at Slim's, a small club in San Francisco, as part of a singer-songwriter showcase. She was one of five performers, on a bill with John Doe, Dave Alvin, Butch Hancock (a member of the Flatlanders), and Syd Straw (hullo!). Lu was painfully uncomfortable on stage back then. Back in 1990, I had already been listening to her music for a year or so, thanks to a prescient friend who had her finger on the pulse of all things alt country.

Lucinda has long ceased to be a reticent performer. Though Lu will never be tapped to host SNL or the MTV Awards (well, why would that ever be the case?), she seems like she's enjoying herself on stage and is relatively relaxed. She's not big on patter, but I don't necessarily want to hear musicians talk. When she does talk, she's pretty funny and dry (and this fuels my fantasy of one day getting to interview her. Now that would be cool).

Just compare Lucinda with Kelly Joe Phelps, her boring opening act, at last Thursday's show at Oakland's Paramount Theater. After my friend Dawn and I suffered through too many of his meandering songs, we skipped out to hang in the theater's beautiful lounge and bar area. The Paramount, by the way, features incredible art-deco architecture and is truly a thing to behold. Maybe it was the sound system, but I couldn't make out some of KJP's lyrics. Not so with Lucinda -- though longtime fan that I am, most are etched in my brain after repeated listenings to her CDs. In concert, Lu spits out her words, and is often powerful, raw, and vulnerable within a single song.

Thursday's show featured songs from Williams' latest CD, "West," along with tunes from "World Without Tears," "Essence," and "Car Wheels." No Lucinda oldies, i.e., "Passionate Kisses," "Sweet Old World," "Changed the Locks," or my favorite from the eponymous CD, "Side of the Road." She started things off on a mellow note with a string of four or five ballads, and I wondered if this was going to be an uncharacteristically low-key concert.

One thing I found unnerving: Lu was packing extra pounds, like a prize fighter whose muscle had gone to fat. She's always been rail thin, but no more. She had a poochy gut, and more than a bit of booty. Superficial stuff, since Lucinda proceeded to rock and rocked hard. Highlights included "Everything Has Changed," "Come On," and "Unsuffer Me," from "West," and "Righteously" and "Ventura" from "World Without Tears." With these recent CDs, Williams has simplified her songwriting (well, to my ears). There's more repetition within some songs, and the lines are often short. When Lu sings them, the effect is often incantatory, like a Southern gothic preacher who's delivering her version of gospel for the pissed off and heartbroken. Or maybe it's a countrified version of rap? When I first listened to "West," "World Without Tears," and "Essence" (the post-Car Wheels recordings), I wasn't always initially taken with what I heard (hell, I thought she might be suicidal on first hearing "Essence"). Some of the songs' lyrics felt unnaturally stripped down, but with persistent listening, their simple beauty and genius became apparent.

Other highlights: A Delta-blues tune by Little Willie Jackson and "Marching the Hate Machines Into the Sun," with lyrics by Flaming Lips' Wayne Coyne and music by Thievery Corporation.

Another aside: Dawn was seeing Lucinda perform for the first time, and was quite impressed. She thought Lucinda was much more compelling on stage than on CD.

Williams told the crowd at the Paramount that she's now content and in a relationship (apparently, she's engaged to be married). Then she played a couple of new, unrecorded tunes that inspired by that happiness ("Honeybee" and "Tears of Joy"). There were some slightly nauseating lines in the former (the new love's honey dripping on her stomach), but I can deal. Lucinda has shared so much heartbreak through her songs. (Imagine being her new guy and knowing that if things go south, your idiosyncracies will be immortalized in song.) Well, I hope that this time Lu stays happy. She deserves it.