Live Music (Gillian Welch and David Rawlings)

I first saw Gillian Welch (and David Rawlings) perform in 1998 at the Towne Crier Café, which was then located in Pawling, NY. The capacity there couldn't have been more than 150 or so, and as I remember I was seated with some friends at a table right next to the stage. I had heard at least one of the two records Welch had out at the time, and had liked it well enough to buy a copy, but even so I wasn't prepared for what I heard. Her singing and songwriting were brilliant enough on record, but seeing the two performers up-close, with David chiming in with tight harmonies and the extraordinary sounds he got out of a little Epiphone archtop acoustic guitar, was nothing short of a revelation. (Rawlings doesn't simply play brilliantly; he plays inventively, with wit.)

In time, the couple became too popular for tiny clubs like the Towne Crier, and though I bought most of their subsequent records I didn't have a chance to see them alive again until this week, in a sold-out show at the Portsmouth Music Hall in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, a venue that seats almost 900. In the ensuing twenty-eight years their repertoire has grown and broadened (a bit), but they still perform in basically the same manner, with the same or similar instruments and no additional musicians. The only major difference is that Rawlings, who has released a few records under his own name, now takes lead vocals on roughly half the songs, and the couple are billed, as they should be, as a two-person collaboration.

As far as I could tell, the lone song they performed from their first two records, the only one that would have been in the 1998 set, was "One More Dollar." Other than that they performed a mix of new material and songs from their 2001 album Time (The Revelator) through last year's Woodland. There were several songs from the David Rawlings Machine album entitled A Friend of a Friend, and I have to say I enjoyed those a lot more live than I did on that record. There were several encores, notably a rousing sing-along version of "Look at Miss Ohio" from Soul Journey, and, at the very end, a lovely cover of "Long Black Veil" for which the sound system was switched off and Welch and Rawlings stood at the edge of the stage and performed without a mic to a hushed and delighted house. From what I understand they play Portsmouth regularly, and I'll make every effort to catch them next time around.

Notes for a Commonplace Book (31)

Gillian Welch:

About a month ago, my eye was drawn to a book that has sat mostly unread on my shelf for some time, ‘The Book of Disquiet’ by Fernando Pessoa. I picked it up and randomly read a passage of such beautiful poignancy, such exquisite human precision, that the wonderment of creative expression flooded me. I told no one about it, but kept it to myself, and the impulse to write, the need to grapple with this moment has returned to me and grown from that little seed.

(From a 2020 interview with Hanif Abdurraqib)

Woodland (Gillian Welch & David Rawlings)

For whatever reason I've been listening to Gillian Welch a lot the last few weeks, and as it turns out she has a new record that has just been released. Woodland is officially credited to Welch and her longtime partner David Rawlings, probably because he takes lead vocals on a few tracks, but in any case their work has always been a collaboration.

I took a spin today to run some errands on a beautiful fall New England afternoon and put the new CD in the drive, this being probably the last car we'll ever own that has that capability. It's a pretty impressive record. Gillian's vocals are as good as ever and David's maybe better, the songs are interesting, and the instrumental textures are just gorgeous. Below is a sample track:

Woodland is available from Gillian and David's own Acony Records, as well as, of course, the usual sources.

On Robyn Hitchcock

I have loved you from a distance
Loved you from up close
Like the tiny frog that breathes
I can nestle in your cloak

I'm a bit of a latecomer to the Robyn Hitchcock party, having discovered him in 2004 (i.e., some thirty years into his career) as a result of Spooked, which he recorded in collaboration with Gillian Welch and David Rawlings. I played Spooked regularly for a while, but I hadn't listened to it all the way through for years until I dusted it off again after seeing Hitchcock perform live a week ago (he was great, by the way, polka-dot shirt and all).

Hitchcock is also a painter, in a surrealist vein matching his songs; the image above is the full version of the piece that was cropped to serve as the cover art for the CD.

Hard-core Hitchcock fans don't necessarily like this collaboration (too brooding), but I think it holds up. He played only one song from it ("Full Moon in My Soul") at the gig I attended; I like that one well enough, but I think "Television" — the ultimate ode to the seductions of the medium — and "Flanagan's Song" are my favorites. Here they are:

Billy (Dylan, Rawlings, Welch)

Well, they say Pat Garrett has got your number
So sleep with one eye open when you slumber
'Cause every little sound might be thunder
Thunder from the barrel of his gun.

This Bob Dylan song first surfaced on the soundtrack of Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, a 1973 Western I've never seen (and in which Dylan has an acting role). The song has a number of verses, but this much later live cover by Gillian Welch and David Rawlings pares it down to four, in keeping with the starkness and simplicity of the performance (and the black-and-white cinematography). Rawlings's guitar work, in fact, is anything but simple, but he plays, as always, with such unassuming, seemingly effortless command of his instrument (a vintage Epiphone archtop) that it never jars or interferes.

Four verses, four plain-spoken lines each, scraps of a tattered tale about a long-dead gunslinger, it's almost enough to reconcile one with a world that is, more evidently than ever, far too much with us. Hopefully there's a quiet corner of the future where things like this still matter.

This version of "Billy" is available on a DVD entitled The Revelator Collection, which can be purchased from Gillian Welch's webstore.

Update (November 2017): The New York Times reports on a newly-discovered tintype that may show Pat Garrett and Billy together.