I wrote this up back in the spring but it never got published anywhere. I'm surprised that intro still works. Enjoy.
To someone who has never left the halogen embrace of the
suburbs, it can be hard to explain just what driving through a rainy backwoods
night is like. Darker than dark, as if
the world is being unmade just outside the rim of your vision, as if you might
pass one bend and simply cease to be.
Any point of light becomes distracting, blinding, as if it were an
aggregate of all brightness that could be and manifests itself by sucking every
ounce of illumination out of the blackness, leaving the dark a vacuum. When you approach a city the lights play on
the clouds for miles, and you climb glacial hills and suddenly come upon it,
streetlights spread out below like an open pit mine, rows of stoplights leading
to Walmart, Bed Bath & Beyond, Lowes.
If you have ever driven through the emptying center of the country you
undoubtedly came upon other places like this, towns who decided to ditch
property values and substitute jobs instead, serving as the economic hub for
zipcodes in every direction. Sitting
flat upon the plain or in the foothills like a half-loved, half-feared
stepchild. And then you pass the
livestock exchange or final block of fast food restaurants and emerge back into
a landscape of in-ground concrete silos, rotted-out barns, great cowsheds with
shit and horror at their hearts.
Onrushing darkness filling the place light once was like a wind or
sudden sound.
Venues like
the Smith Center for the Arts dot all of upstate New York, vestiges of a time
when, to the outside world, these towns were worth a damn. The Smith Center has done better than most,
given that most are hollowed-out and boarded-up, and reminds me more of
Ithaca’s State Theatre than the crumbling castles of the St. Lawrence. It’s a grand theatre of the opera house kind,
illuminated false stars on the ceiling and backlit busts of Shakespeare
flanking both sides of the stage. It has
succeeded partially due to the presence in Geneva of Hobart and William Smith
Colleges, and I drive past the sprawling campus on my way into town,
floodlights turned up high on the empty football field.
The Finger
Lakes region has done better than most because the towns have repositioned
themselves as something of a relaxing playground for those that can afford it,
offering wine tours, expensive restaurants, and vacation homes (on Skaneateles
Lake there is no longer a single piece of public land for swimming). In this way, I am reminded of Woodstock’s
relationship with my native Upper Hudson Valley: a dark spot of wealth that
proves increasingly incongruous the further you get from its bubble. It makes sense that some of the most fervent
opposition in central and western New York to hydraulic fracturing (hydrofracking)
has been in his region; they just don’t need the money.
But it is
hard to begrudge success in such a sapped economic landscape, especially when
it provides events like the one I am attending.
Jason Isbell may have just had the best year of his life, recently sober
and receiving just enough critical praise for Southeastern, his new album, to pry him free of the ever-present
“formerly of the Drive-By Truckers” introduction. Of the 1400 seats in the whole of the
theatre, I’d guess two-thirds to three-fourths were full by the time he and his
band the 400 Unit went on, and the crowd stood in an ever-expanding bunch by
the front of the stage, somewhat obstructive in the seated room.
Planning
concerts in a town as far removed from normal touring circuits as Geneva is a
tough proposition, and the Smith Center supplements its income by showing
movies like The Hunt and The Broken Circle Breakdown, as well as
hosting speakers and children’s plays.
The women at the box office smiled and asked how I was doing and as I
entered the theatre every usher made eye contact to say hello. The men seated next to me marveled that
Springsteen had played on this stage in the early-70’s and swapped concert war
stories: KISS booed off-stage by Queensrÿche fans, losing several pounds of
sweat while crushed to the barrier at a Bon Jovi show. The crowd even gives opener Holly Williams
(of grandfather Hank) a standing ovation for her slick three-part harmonies and
songs about moonshiners and family.
I will
always remember Isbell for warning the crowd at the 2013 Clearwater Music
Festival that his song “Elephant” featured “a big fat f-word,” and apologizing
for it: “If I could have used any other word I would have, but nothing else
fit.” And he is no stranger to playing
in out-of-the-way towns: his 2013 touring brought him to Jackson Hole, Wyoming,
on the outskirts of Yellowstone National Park, as well as all throughout
Alabama and the south. In markets
starved for outside entertainment a ragged allegiance forms, in a way you
wouldn’t see in New York City, for example, though truly the difference between
Manhattan and Geneva is of a great many worlds.
Hence the crazed dancing to the Hold Steady in Bearsville, NY, or the
packed thousands in North Adams, MA, to see Old Crow Medicine Show at the base
of the Berkshires. As compared to the
effervescent movement and sound of a big city, in the backcountry cults of
fandom die slowly or never hang up their cowls, a loyalty born out of love, and
maybe desperation.
Or maybe
out of pure admiration, and it helps when you put on a fiery, personable live
show like Isbell does. Exuding
appreciable charm and intensity, he opens the show by telling the audience, “We
hope you have a good time,” and doesn’t let up on that promise. While often silent or thankful between songs,
when he gets a verbal riff going with his bandmates they stretch the exchanges
out any which way. He jokes about
country music (“We love Garth Brooks, Chris Gaines, all of that shit.”), allows
the audience to sing for his thirty-fifth birthday after he takes out his
in-ear monitors to hear them, and congratulates his guitarist on the man’s
first-ever female call-out, remarking that he looks like Peter Frampton and,
after all, “everyone loves Peter Frampton.”
And together they make a controlled racket, blowing through cut after
cut, beginning with “Flying Over Water” and touching on his highlights as a
member of the DBTs (“Decoration Day,” “Goddamn Lonely Love”) and as a solo
artist (“Alabama Pines,” “Elephant,” “Traveling Alone”). They turn ballad “Codeine” into a stomping
dance number and Isbell and violinist/vocalist Amanda Shires whisper through a
cover of Warren Zevon’s “Mutineer,” husband and wife harmonizing on a single
microphone.
In the way
of all good country singers Isbell is sincere and honest and maybe just a
little bit corny, but never in a way that removes his bite. In Geneva the crowd echoes this back at him,
the 40- and 50-somethings (and some of the 20-somethings like me) shouting out
happy birthdays, dancing in the aisles, and sending out a huge cheer on the
following line from “Cover Me Up”: “I sobered up/and I swore off that
stuff/forever this time.” With his mind
on the in-ear feed, I don’t know if he heard them, but it would be hard to
mistake the catharsis of that lyric breaking over his grown-up baby face. Whatever it could mean to them, a
thousand-fold for him.
And maybe,
when it came to this concert, vice versa.
Typically bands, unless on their fourth or fifth round of touring, don’t
make it to towns like Geneva, if ever.
To look at a touring map is to see several major dots and nothing but
highways in between, spread out over the inside of America. For most artists, this makes sense; the space
between those points may as well be outside of their headlights on a rainy
rural night, utter blackness full of nothing but looming monuments. But for Isbell and others like him, these are
not just breaks between major engagements, and from those in the crowd nothing
less has been asked. They dance and
cheer like for life itself.
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