Flashes of Panic

Post-marathon, last night, A and I went out to see Dar Williams at the Wellesley College campus center, partly in acknowledgment of the fact that I am no longer a teenager, even in hex.

Considering the mobs who turned up when Dar played nearly anywhere in Northampton, largely coming down in packs from Smith, I was a bit surprised at how sparse the audience was, but maybe it was because the opening acts drove them away. They weren’t bad, they were just very unlike I would have expected; when we’ve seen Dar before, the openers were a bit more… laid back. And quiet. Kris Delmhorst, say, or Ben Taylor. The first band, with a name I never figured out, looked like college students themselves, and didn’t really have their stage manner down, though their music was OK. The second band was much more “professional” in appearance and musicianship… but they were playing seriously heavy metal. (The lead guitarist looked like Axl Rose with a goatee.) We were old fuddy-duddies and went upstairs to wait them out in the more relaxed section of the campus center.

There was a long wait for Dar, which was a bit funny considering that there was no stage to set up: it was just her and her guitar, so two mics and an amp. I think four different stools came out, were placed on the stage in varying configurations, then shuffled to something else. Of course, when Dar finally came out, she rearranged them. Most of the audience sat on the floor, the exceptions being those who stood by the walls. The room itself is apparently a model of modern architecture, but it reflected noise in very odd ways; we had good sound from the stage, but our occasional whispers earned us at least one very dirty look from a woman who should’ve been out of earshot.

Dar’s talent is really her skill at telling stories, both in introducing her songs and in their lyrics. She’s so open and disarming when she starts out that the listener gets completely drawn in to the stories, and then she’s ready with the knockout punch line, flipping the mask around to show the other side. A wondered if she gets tired of telling the stories, but I haven’t heard the same one twice yet.

She didn’t play much from her newest album last night, but she did play “Teen for God,” which starts out sounding like sarcasm and satire of self-righteously-religious teenagers a la Saved until it skips forward four years to the agnostic and depressed college student—there’s the punch line. Then she toured all the old favorites (“I thought you’d say, ‘No, no, not Iowa again!’”) I still think the guitar part she plays with “As Cool As I Am” sounds weird by itself, but maybe I haven’t listened to the recording closely enough. That was enough to get everyone up and dancing for a few minutes, anyway; it was interesting how the sound in the room changed immediately.

She also told a story about “Are You Out There” which was interesting; I’d always assumed the song was about Northampton (given the name-checks of two WRSI personalities, Johnny Memphis and Jim Olsen,) but she described a weak signal from a New York station (sounds more like the Velvet Underground’s “Rock and Roll”,) and imagining the city fathers in her town standing at the town borders with sheets of tinfoil trying to block it. Hence the “walls of static.” Huh.

It was definitely the unwinding I needed at the end of that day.

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