| December 11th, 2005 02:19 PM |
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| FPM C10 |
As an early Xmas gift I took Miss Youngblood to see Fiona Apple at the Tower Theater Friday night. We had an excellent and occasionally surreal time.
We left work early and hopped on the turnpike - the big snowfall we'd received during the night was mostly under control, but I drive like a little old lady so it was good to have some extra time. We got to Upper Darby after dark and drove past the Tower, relieved that finding it was so easy. I'd been there several times, but I'm also bad with directions.
We found a restaurant - we looked for a Mexican restaurant that started with an "X" that we saw on the internet, but quickly got into a bad part of town and turned around. We settled for one called Galapagos, which I thought I'd been to before. Turned out I was thinking about a nightclub in Brooklyn of the same name. This place had Ecuadorian cuisine (funny - the guy they just killed in the Miami airport was returning from Ecuador), two waitresses who spoke no English, no customers and no heat. As we waited for our meals we watched a TV tuned to a Mexican variety show featuring an endless stream of mariachi music. We tried to decide what the restaurant was a front for because they sure as hell weren't in the food business, with no customers on a Friday evening. Our entrees came and were edible - we were starved so we ate fast, paid and left. We drove down the street to the Tower and parked in a nearby parking garage.
The Tower is probably the best venue I've ever been to - a classic pre-depression marble-faced Vaudeville theater with 3500 seats - and every show I've seen there ranks among the best of my long concert-going career. The Clash on the London Calling Tour (life-changing, even from the balcony) - Elvis Costello & the Attractions on the Trust tour in '81 (almost 3 hours long, my entire band sitting in the fourth row taking notes) and of course the Rolling Stones in '02, again viewed from the balcony. The balcony is pretty far from the stage, and up there you find yourself watching people experiencing the show a bit more than experiencing it yourself.
We entered the theater. All of the staff who we spoke to were friendly and seemed like they were glad we were there. Two men at the door said in familiar conversational tones “you know, of course, we have a no flash photography policy, and I guess Fiona threw a hissy last night about it so we have to ask you please no flash photography. OK? OK! You folks have a great evening!” We had read that the night before Fiona had freaked out momentarily, throwing her hands over her face, when a wave of flashes erupted from the front rows. We paused to buy an autographed copy of her new CD/DVD, and as we found our seats we were reminded several more times that there must be no flash photography.
The seating chart on ticketmaster showed our seats in Row BB to be in the 2nd row, but there were 4 rows ahead of us. Those seats were the "pit", I guess, although there was no delineation. Actually, our seats, which were in the sixth row, were darned near perfect. And no one sat in the two seats in front of us. We settled in and laughed at the pre-show music, a Frank Zappa collection - "Titties and Beer", "In France", "He's So Gay" - which struck us as hilarious given the generally serious tenor of Fiona Apple's extraordinary music.
I saw Fiona open for the Stones at MSG six years ago and was won over in a setting where the cards were stacked against her. She had started her set by saying she took the gig because it was near where she lived (she wasn't touring) and she wasn't doing anything else that night - I thought "who the HELL do you think you ARE?" but by the time her set ended with a cover of Hendrix's "Angel" I was impressed. Still, I would've passed on seeing her again if she wasn't a big favorite of Miss Youngblood's - and I am forever thankful for that. I wouldn't have missed this for the world.
After an usher told us for the ninth time that there would not only be no FLASH photography allowed, but no photography at all, the lights dimmed and the opener, David Garza, came out, solo with an acoustic guitar. Soon after he started, a guy who looked like "The Dude" from The Big Lebowski came out and started playing a melodian (you know, one of those plastic keyboards you blow into). It was cool at first but he played it in EVERY song. The second song was pretty cool, a fast-strummed bluesy thing, but then Garza started playing stuff that sounded EXACTLY like the mariachi music from the Ecuadorian restaurant! We laughed and shook our heads at the bizarre synchronicity. Garza, and the melodian, became annoying after 2 songs.
During the set other musicians wandered out and started casually playing along - they turned out to be Fiona's band. A bassist and a keyboard player, and finally, for the end of the last song, a drummer. We both immediately focused on him - he was obviously a master. A little crazy too, with dramatic pauses in his playing and a muscular swing. Here's where the real Stones content comes in - it was Charley Drayton from the Winos! I knew he was the drummer on this tour from stuff I'd read on the net, and I'd also discovered that his GRANDFATHER, Charlie Drayton, had played with Billie Holiday.
After a break, and a return to the Zappa tape, the same musicians returned and manned their posts, and then Fiona walked out without fanfare and sat down behind the piano. We could see some of her face and her feet. She said "Hi you guys" and they kicked into the first song.
The first two songs, “Get Him Back” and “Better Version of Me”, were good but a bit tenative. The third, “Shadowboxer”, was a crowd favorite from the 1st album which she seemed not to want to do. She sang it roughly, her voice sounding bruised and harsh; some of her vocal arabesques veered off into discordance. That approach, however, worked for the song. The next song, “To Your Love”, was brilliant, and you could sense her finding her voice. A few girls in the front rows who couldn’t see her stood on their tiptoes to peek at her over the piano, until an usher made them sit down.
Then Fiona came out from behind the piano. It was obvious, immediately, that the waif-on-the-verge-of-a-nervous-breakdown image that was conveyed by her first few videos and public meltdowns of her late teens and early 20s was not an overly dramatized persona constructed to differentiate her from other “girl” singers of the late 90s. That’s who she is. She is immensely talented, totally unique in a way that reminds me more than a little of Tom Waits (not that she sounds anything like him), but she also has, um, issues and is ill at ease in front of an audience. The audience – predominantly female – loves her, and shouted about it frequently from the balcony. High-pitched waves of soft shrieking washed periodically through the theater.
She began the next song, “I Know”. She balled her hands into fists and paced around the stage when not singing, sometimes all the way back to the curtain that colors and moving shapes were being projected on. Although in some photographs she can look like a heroin-chic era model, in performance there was nothing conventionally attractive about her. Her face seemed genuinely pained. She seemed like she was likely to burst into tears at any moment, or collapse, or fly into a rage. Was she mad at us, or her band, or the guy she wrote the song about? It looked like she couldn’t possibly make it through the song, but she did – in fact she delivered a perfect version of it. By this time her voice, a wonderful instrument that she frequently pushes past its limits to startlingly emotional effect, was limbered up and the show really started to get out into deep water. She moved on to one of my favorites, “Sleep To Dream”. The “Dude”-looking guy, Jebin Brunit, had replaced her at the grand piano, which he attacked in a style reminiscent of Mike Garson on Bowie’s “outside” album. The song ended with him pummeling the keyboard madly as the other band members – Dave Palmer on a wall of keyboards and her producer (as well as Eminiem’s and 50 Cent’s) Mike Elizondo on bass - fell silent. Then they began “Limp”, a song Miss Youngblood and I have performed in our band. Since I knew that one better than most of the songs – I’m really a neophyte – I began to realize how perfectly these guys were reproducing the studio versions of the songs. A funky rhythm section, no guitar, and a pair of keyboard players who sound like they could do note-for-note versions of “I Am The Walrus” or “Strawberry Fields” if they needed to, they seemed like a perfect support group to allow Fiona to work out her issues.
As a surprise she brought out Philly native ?uestlove to play drums on two songs - “Fast As You Can” and “Not About Love”. (His presence explained the presence of several gangsta-looking guys in the audience who stood out sharply from the rest of the crowd.) He brought a different swing than Charley, as well as humor that lightened the proceedings and made Fiona laugh. He was sporting a huge ‘fro with a pick sticking out, and he would move the pick from one side to the other in the middle of a song without missing a beat. ?uestlove, who Fiona called “Ahmir”, tried to get her to speak more. She didn’t talk much between songs and then explained that she wasn’t mad, she just didn’t want to embarrass herself by saying something wrong, as she often has in the past. And when she DID speak she sounded tongue-tied and awkward.
At one point a middle-aged couple spontaneously left their seats , went down the aisle to the front of the stage and began dirty dancing. It was incongruous and hilarious and obviously Fiona thought so too, although as they continued the humor of the situation quickly wore out. The usher went over and said something to them, and they started to return to their seats – but they just couldn’t help themselves, and resumed bumping and grinding until a larger usher came and escorted them out. I thought about how bizarre the whole incident was, and how funny it was to get kicked out of a Fiona Apple concert for dirty dancing.
The 2 hour show moved at a brisk pace and was over before I knew it. She performed songs from all three of her albums. Although given the timing of her two-night stand in Philly I had hoped to hear her version of “Across the Universe”, she is playing the same setlist every night without variation.
As an encore, she returned with David Garza on guitar and Elizondo on bass to do the sprightly “Extraordinary Machine”. Garza moved to tambourine and ?uestlove returned to the drumset as the band returned and launched into Fiona’s biggest hit, “Criminal”. The crowd was finally allowed to leave their seats to dance, and a dozen or more people began taking flash photographs. This immediately enraged her, bringing even more venom to a venomous song – in between lines she swore at the photographers off-mike. It was again a bizarre moment and illustrated the strange bond between this artist and her audience. They knew photographs bother her, they profess their love of her, yet they weigh the odds and decide that if she stomps offstage now they’ll only miss one song AND they’ll be able to tell people they were there when Fiona had a meltdown. Odd.
When the song ended, everyone began leaving the stage, and I thought it might be over, but she returned to the piano alone for a calm, intense “Parting Gift”, said goodnight, and left.
It was a totally remarkable evening, and while it doesn’t surpass any of the other evenings I’ve spent in the Tower Theater, it does stand firmly alongside them. I think Fiona Apple is a major talent – a superb pianist, an inventive singer with a voice reminiscent of Nina Simone, and a remarkable songwriter. Of course, she isn’t writing for me – the songs are almost all breakup songs from a girls point of view, and songs of personal empowerment. I’m a fan of the way they sound and her incredibly intelligent facility with language. The screaming girls get it on a different level and feel she’s singing FOR them, as perhaps she is. But the really amazing part is seeing an artist confront her demons, which is what the performance seemed like to me. Sometimes she mastered them, and sometimes they momentarily got the best of her, but it was all riveting. It certainly rose above mere entertainment and reminded me of the great line in “Performance” – “The only performance that makes it, that really makes it, that makes it all the way, is the one that achieves madness.”
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| December 11th, 2005 02:38 PM |
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| monkey_man |
FPM, this is a very detailed and eloquent review. I saw this show 2 weeks ago in SF at the Warfield (a very similar venue to the Tower). I'm not a fan of Fiona Apple's but I have to admit she has an extrordinary voice with a great range! |
| December 11th, 2005 06:15 PM |
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| the good |
Well written post, FPM. Yeah, the tower is great. We saw Robert Plant there over the summer. No better place in America to see a show. |
| December 11th, 2005 09:04 PM |
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| sirmoonie |
Another brilliant post FPM. |
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