Newport—On Saturday, June 26 the Sunset Music Series at Newport’s Yachting
Center began its summer cast of performances with a red-hot show by eleven-time
Grammy-nominated musician John Hiatt.
The setting, a wide white tent at near full capacity, reminded the
heartland rocker of an “old revival.”
And what the mostly silver-haired audience lacked in cartilage, it made
up for in energy. Cheers roared and
lovers briefly danced as Hiatt’s love of rock ‘n’ roll charged an adoring
crowd.
The concert was in promotion of Hiatt’s
new and twentieth album, “The Open Road.”
The title track at first seems an easy gesture towards an American
cliché. Writers from Jack Keruoac to Cormac McCarthy have taken us on lurid
journeys through the continental interior before. So have Robert Frank’s photographs, Walt
Whitman’s poetry, Edward Hopper’s paintings, and Romantic ditties from Willie
Nelson to Bob Seger. But Hiatt’s open
road is not a free and expansive path for an easy rider, it’s the setting for a
mad rev of futility—a last effort to escape the hopelessness of a world that is
“burned and dead.” One of his song’s
various characters has “seen enough to kill
anyone’s soul” and speeds desperately ahead “keepin’ her eyes on the open road.” With other titles like “Haulin” and “Movin’
On,” the album is a musical testament to writer Norman Mailer’s anxious
statement: “In motion, a man has a
chance.”
The Hoosier
Hiatt was born in the vast plateland of the American Midwest, a region where
trips are calculated in hours, not miles.
He has said that all his previous albums are about a return home. Perhaps “The Open Road’s” new restlessness
and desire for escape come from the emotional ache of middle age or a
realization that there is more behind him than ahead. Whatever the reasons, Hiatt’s album is as
powerful and alive as the best of his past work and can be placed only slightly
below his imperishable Grammy-nominated 2000 folk album “Crossing Muddy
Waters.” In that album’s title track, a
“sweet brown girl” (a slave?) sets out alone from the tobacco fields like a
“rusty shot in a hollow sky.” Hiatt’s
new fervent journeys are as somber, moving, and endlessly repeatable.
Hiatt is a
performer who needs to be heard live.
The walled remove and tameness of the studio is no place for his band’s slamming
drums and whining guitars. Saturday’s
performance was reliably entertaining and his tracks were predictably
chosen. Wearing a salmon shirt he smiled
toothily through popular songs like “Cry Love,” “The Tiki Bar Is Open,”“Master
of Disaster,” and “Perfectly Good Guitar.”
And during the night’s slow songs like “Feels like Rain” the blue lights
lit Hiatt’s pained grimace, an expression akin to the face of a child forced to
down old cough syrup. But the night’s
loudest applause for Hiatt. It went to
his “Combo” bandmate and electric guitarist Doug Lancio. The stoical, rubber-shouldered Lancio picked
his way from guitar to mandolin, receiving ever-rising applause with each
transition.
But if the
night’s opening was a howling success, it was eclipsed, however slightly, by
the over-zealousness of the venue’s dour security. Passionate patrons were given a talking-to if
they even attempted to move with rhythm in the tent’s wide aisles. Hiatt encouraged the crowd to express their
“personal liberty” by moving to the beat of his drummer. But the evening’s blackshirts would have none
of it. Perhaps, in the summer’s
remaining shows, the Yacht Club could encourage a little less New England
reserve and a bit more spirit of the heartland revival tent. With six dollar beers and forty-five dollar
tickets, an active groove is the least a host could allow.
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