We went to a rock ‘n’ roll show tonight:
Which means there’s fuzzy video from a dark room, but the sound is pretty decent. Well, the performance was great; the recording of the sound was not bad. I’ve been listening to the Indigo Girls for more than 20 years now, and so have most of the people in the audience. We’re all aging together, people! Except for the young people. They are somehow not moving at all.
Anyway, this song is almost 30 years old and who knows how many times they have played it over the years, but Amy and Emily still put a lot of energy into it:
I think they’re singing the “time is not on my side” line with a bit more emphasis these days. Who isn’t, though, right?
Look! This song is only 20 years old and I have no idea how that happened!
While you play that, a little story. I don’t sing in front of people really at all. I sing a lot, in private. In public I’ll sing in church and that’s about it. I’d rather stand in front of hundreds or thousands of people and give a speech — hey, I have! — than sing in front of four people. It’s just a shy, privacy, thing.
When The Yankee and I had just started dating we sang this together on a road trip. And I always think about that when I hear that song, that part of the song, when the shy singer was trying to pretend to hit a note. Voice, just like anything else, can be a great vulnerability if you choose to see it that way, but there I was, sharing it out loud, on a supremely sunny springtime day somewhere in south Georgia. I still don’t sing around people. But I sing with her. (She sings Emily’s parts because I can’t.)
Yeah, it is a banjo and a mandolin, and yet the back half of that song is some of my favorite rock ‘n’ roll. It’d be pretty high up on a folk list, too.
Speaking of rock ‘n’ roll shows … The Yankee has seen the Indigo Girls something like nine times over the years and I’m at six, I believe. Chickenman is still crazy good:
You could get into whole essays on who, or what the Chickenman is. This is the Internet, of course people have launched into historical allusions, literary metaphors and references to Springsteen lines and 1960s radio programs and all manner of things. I met a Chickenman once. I’ll never not think it wasn’t The Chickenman.
(Aside: I felt a tiny bit let down that they didn’t do the Mountain Top medley.)
Isn’t it weird how things can become biographical, even if you didn’t consciously intend for that to happen? There was this one 12-mile stretch of road, an almost-home road, where I’d pop this in play it three good times before the drive was over.
Each of the three times I’d sing it differently. All were probably sung poorly, but they had feeling. A loud and noisy and jangly feeling. It makes for a good show.
