“Thank You For Everything, Emmylou!!!”

Emmylou Harris is a national treasure.  She has given us all so much over such a long period of time, she has conducted herself with consummate grace and class as a performer and public figure through highs and lows, and she is still at it, crisscrossing the country in a bus, playing shows every night, and giving each one her all.

This spring, Emmylou came to the Vic Theater in Chicago —a very modest venue in terms of both size and style, more often inhabited by up and coming bands— on a Tuesday night.  I actually don’t go to see live music as much as I should— in my dotage, I’m less willing to battle the crowds, expense, and other hassles, especially since so many great live performances are available on video through various outlets nowadays.  A few performers will still bring me out, however, and a few years ago I failed to go see Paul McCartney and realized that I’d maybe missed my last chance to see a true international treasure who had changed the world and made my life a better place.  I felt I should have brought my kids to see Sir Paul, and that I wanted to say thank you to him personally, but that I’d missed the boat.  I drive by the Vic on my way to work, and when I saw Emmylou’s name flash across the marquee one morning, not wanting to repeat the mistake I’d made with the Paul McCartney show, I snapped up tickets online as soon as I got to my desk.  Alas, the Vic is a 21-and-over venue, so I couldn’t take my kids (who have been raised, in some ways, by Emmylou, her presence has so thoroughly suffused our homes, cars, classrooms, and every other damn place we go), but this was a show that my wife was as excited to go see as I was.  The Queen of the Silver Dollar did not disappoint, and, indeed, the show proved to be a glorious catalog documenting all she has given us.

Arriving early at the Vic and standing in line waiting for the doors to open, as always I looked longingly at the entourage’s tour bus, dreaming the young man’s dream I still dream of going on tour in a band myself.  Older now, though, I know that I tire more easily, that my body makes funny creaks and groans, that it scrapes and rattles, that it aches and refuses requests, that it needs more time and care and creature comforts to make it comply with my needs, and as I stared at the bus, I realized that Emmylou is at least 15-20 years my senior, with, no doubt, all of these phenomena magnified.  And yet: she had played a gig in San Francisco 4 days ago on Friday night, played a gig somewhere in Oklahoma on Sunday night, and was here now on Tuesday night in Chicago—a road warrior still, living in the cramped make-do confines of a bus for weeks or months on end, logging thousands of road miles a year, playing towns and venues large and small, fancy and ramshackle.  Considering this, I was struck by something else:  I was one of the younger people in the line.  This is kinda unusual at this point in my life.  Hmmmmm.  Since I’m short to begin with and now also not so young, upon entering the Vic I headed upstairs for seats in the graded balcony, rather than a spot on the flat main floor—standing for 2-3 hours looking at the backs of tall people’s head never has been my idea of a great concert experience, and even less so now as I have gotten older.  Looking down from the balcony, however, I saw something I had never seen in over 25 years of seeing shows at the Vic: rows of chairs covering the floor.  The age demographic on this night was clearly very different from that of a typical Vic show.  Elated, I hustled downstairs and snagged a pair of seats closer than I ever been for any concert in my life— in the 4^th row, 15-20 feet from where Emmylou would be.

This particular tour was a celebration of her Wrecking Ball album as it approached its 20^th anniversary.  The album had been produced by Daniel Lanois, who opened this show with his elegant combination of atmospherics and twang.  More on the present and past of Wrecking Ball later, but Lanois’s set was a terrific mood setter: laying the foundation for the similarly ethereal but rooted sonic palette of the record showcased in the Main Event, Lanois and his band (this ensemble also serving as Emmylou’s band for the rest of the evening) drew sonic pictures with echoed pedal steel and fingerpicked electric guitars, over solid, sinewy backbeats anchored by bass and drums which morphed back and forth between aural soundscapes and elegant country rock and roll.  The crowd was warmed up and ready to greet the Queen…

Someone from another country once commented to me that they found the tradition of applause as a performer enters—BEFORE they have given their audience anything— strange.  An interesting point, but Emmy had given us all plenty before she started playing that Tuesday evening—really about 45 years worth of gold— and the crowd rose as one in acknowledgement of this fact as she walked on stage.  Working her way through the opening tracks of the Wrecking Ball record in sequence (as she worked her way through large cups of tea), she and her voice warmed as they rolled on.  At first scratchy, straining, or dropping out at points in the midst of “Where Will I Be” and “All My Tears,” by the time she hit “Deeper Well” she was in the groove and in full flight.  I’m more familiar with the tunes on this record through live renditions on the “Spyboy” album, which features the more aggressive flatpicked electric guitar of Buddy Miller, but Lanois more understated fingerpicking work was hypnotic, particularly as it enveloped the crowd with set-closer, “The Maker.”

As she played and sang her way through the record, she also told its story between songs, the story of her collaboration with Daniel Lanois: as “New Country” music (ugh) began to break in the early 90s, she found herself out of commercial and social favor with the new crowd in Nashville.  In her words, “I was definitely NOT invited to the party.”  To their credit, Elektra / Nonesuch Records stuck by her, continued to release her work despite sluggish sales, and, rather than cutting her loose or demanding that she hop on to the “New Country” bandwagon by reworking her sound, asked her what she wanted to do.  At the time, explained Ms. Harris, the thing she kept listening to on the tour bus was a record by Daniel Lanois, a producer known for developing multilayered dreamlike sound architectures for a variety of artists and an accomplished guitarist in his own right.  In a meeting with the record company, she mentioned this recording and, in what she described as almost comically stereotyped fashion, the record company exec yelled “Somebody get Danny Lanois on the phone NOW!”  Somebody did so and, according to Emmylou, Mr. Lanois appeared at the door of her home 2 days later with a guitar and a Bob Dylan song anthology the size of the New York City phonebook saying, “OK, so what songs are we gonna put on this record of yours, Emmylou?”  The rest, as they (and Emmylou) say, is history.  Wrecking Ball was the first of a set of several records— Red Dirt Girl, Stumble Into Grace, Spyboy, and others followed— that fused Emmylou’s haunting voice and old-country-music traditionalism with rock and roll and Afro- and world-beat influences to create a music which still defies categorization.

As the evening progressed, Emmylou also dug deep into her back catalog, acknowledging the tragic loss of her friend and collaborator Gram Parsons in the early 1970s as she introduced Parsons’ “Love Hurts,”  ripping out searing renditions of “Ain’t Living Long Like This” and “Queen of the Silver Dollar” from her 70s classics Quarter Moon in a Ten-Cent Town and Pieces of the Sky albums, and wrapping up the encore with longtime fan favorite “From Boulder to Birmingham.”  About the only thing she couldn’t do was sing backup vocals with herself, as she has done for so many other musicians over the years on so many wonderful tracks over the years, but her reading of Steve Earle’s “Goodbye” from Wrecking Ball evoked his original version of the song upon which she sang backup.

The crowd, on their feet and, like Emmy, still going strong, continued howling after house the lights in the Vic were turned on.  The lights went out again, and Emmy returned to the stage for “Green Pastures,” which, she explained, she had been playing since before she entered the business as a professional.  Biding for time as she tried to tune her guitar, she recalled playing it at coffee houses, open mics, and parties as a teenager.  The guitar, alas, wouldn’t stay in tune, and so she turned to self-mockery: “45 years in this business and 50 playing the song, you’d think I could tune the damn guitar by now.”  As a white-haired guitar tech walked onstage with another guitar (“Is this one in tune?” asks Emmy.  “Beats me,” answers the tech.  All laugh), all I could so, wanting Emmy to know how much I appreciate her spending the last 45 years of her life creating great music,  was yell out “Thank you for everything, Emmylou!”