Last night we went to see the Indigo Girls.
Let me repeat that. Cause holy crap. Last night, October 27th, 2016, Kristen and I went to see the Indigo Girls at Rams Head Live in Baltimore.
She’d never seen them before and I haven’t seen them in a LONG time – since they played Musikfest about a billion years ago. Is that right? One billion years? When I was dating Nicole? Is that possible? Did I drive my Volkswagon bus to go see them? I think I did. “Ghost” was interrupted when a bug flew in Amy Ray’s eye and she screamed “FUCK!!!!” It was awesome.
Now, I have no idea how much they’ve been touring over the years, but we HAD to go see them because our friend Avril was part of the opening act with Nashville’s Becky Warren and that was just that little push we needed. I threw the Weasel in the car and rolled on down. Let’s avoid the tangent of griping about the $15 surcharge for buying online – we avoided it by buying the five dollar up-charged ticket at the door – and then getting charged a $2 surcharge for the honour of THAT… but let’s move on.
They’ve been playing together for 30 years. And it shows. Spectacularly tight, precise… I’d never seen them without a band and at Rams Head Live we were close enough that I could mostly read the setlist – so even in a crowd of thousands the setting had an intimacy to it. (this ruined SOME of the surprises, but it also meant that a) I knew when to head for the exit because I didn’t care THAT much about the song slated for the second encore, b) knew when the requested song would fall cause there was one slot that read “???” and the person yelling “Chickenman” was very loud c) it didn’t ruin ALL the surprises cause I couldn’t read ALL of it, nor do I know the names of most of their catalog past the 90s… which is a lot of catalog)
And the crowd…. I think I’ve never been in a crowd this loud before. It was a wall of noise that should’ve been in an arena, but packed into the relatively tight confines of a single massive room – and when they sang the words – it was a single entity joined together with one massive voice, on pitch and word-perfect. Amy Ray continues to be one of the most powerful performers I’ve ever seen, projecting power and passion and energy – even in what I felt like was mostly a rote performance of studio-perfect renditions of mostly-the-hits. Emily was a little more off, I feel like her voice hasn’t aged as well, and some of her shredding was a little shredded (though I LOVE sloppy playing and after “Go Go Go” which was kind of chaos surrounding the central riff Amy through Emily horns and I knew that I’m not the ONLY person who appreciates when passion outweighs precision). But when their voices twined, it’s still that more-than-the-sum-of-their-parts that gives lie to their chorus “you learn that one plus one is one plus one is never more or less” (“Learned it on Me” was a new-to-me tune that I really Loved last night) and watching Emily buzzsaw and rage through the music of “Chickenman” was an orgasm into and of itself…
But every song went :
1) instruments handed to performers by bearded guitar tech
2) crowd roars at first recognizable strain
3) song performed JUST as I remember from the disc (If I knew it – there was plenty of stuff I didn’t know) with rare exception – Chickenman had an additional jam, Galileo had some additional trills in the solo, there was a song where I’d never noticed a particularly aggressive walkdown before – maybe they’d drop out and let the audience sing for a sec – I sound overly cynical about this, and yet it was also stunning how polished it all was. Emily was a little warbly, Amy Raw was if anything even FIERCER.
4) end song “Thanks y’all” and hand guitar to bearded guitar tech.
There was one bit of banter. Halloween costumes were discussed. Amy’s family is going as astronauts and they’re looking for an alien to go with them. Emily asked her wife if they could dress up as Hillary and Trump. Her wife said no.
There was one call for action. Amy Ray brought up something about the Indian Point Power Plant which I’d never heard of. She stumbled on the name, didn’t remember it, an audience member caught it. Apparently it’s a New York nuclear power plant that developed a leak this winter…. But this is actually were I started getting a little in my head about things. There was brief mention of the get-out-the-vote table.
This audience was hungry, they were amazing. The room was intense. And I’m not sure it was all JUST rabid fanbase – I feel like Baltimore NEEDS heroes right now. AMERICA needs heroes right now (not saviours). Prophets, wisemen (and wise-women), guidance and people to lay our passions and fears out in front of us and roar through them in multiple– but how do you come to BALTIMORE and not address Baltimore? How do you come to Baltimore and NOT say anything about the riots from last year, NOT say anything about the election, NOT say anything about #BlackLivesMatter?! There are plenty of places you can go and play and not have an immediate cause – between now and the election they play South Orange, NJ, Concord, NH, Albany, Port Chester, and Westbury, NY – there are no battlegrounds here. WE are a battleground. And maybe they’d have just been preaching to the choir, but they are the first main-streamed social justice warriors (I mean this POSITIVELY) that I remember on my radio dial. The first artists that I remember referencing being gay in their lyrics – and they stuck mostly to their self-help catalog (I DON’T mean THAT positively) and to have them just treat Baltimore like any other city – well, they’re heroes. They should do hero shit.
Like the sticker says, I BELIEVE in Baltimore. I believe things are getting better all the time. We stumble often but we get back up and anyone who thinks things are as bad as they were in the 60s does generations of HEROES an injustice – and don’t know history. It was like Superman showing up at a crime scene after everything had wrapped up, too late to help out, and just nodding and moving on. You want your heroes to say “man, that looked tough, good job” or “keep up the good fight” or… or SOMETHING.
Probably everyone else in that room got what they wanted out of the show. And I teared up and wept singing along and sometimes screaming along because god DAMN it Chickenman hold MY hand and GO GO GO and YEAH! SHAME ON YOU! and yes you KNOW I KEEP FUCKING UP!!! Musically, the only thing that could’ve been better would’ve been if Kid Fears had been on the set list – and this is weighted by having listened to these two women for about two and a half decades of my Life – but I think I wanted a bigger nod to that election table working so hard to make sure people were registered and knew where their polling place was – and maybe I wanted to hear someone bigger than me say “we’ve got problems, but we’re going to kick the ass of one in a couple of weeks!”
And I Loved it more than I thought I would. I just think a little too much – and damn it – if *I* had that voice I’d have said something with it. Of course, it might’ve involved Dune and Star Wars…but I would’ve also said “Baltimore, I Love you, but we can all do better together”.
