Lucinda Williams
Live @ the Fillmore
(Lost Highway)
Who killed the live album?
Was it the MP3? Online traders regularly traffic in entire shows, some very well-recorded and often with the artist's approval, making high-dollar bootlegs a thing of the past.
Was it home video? First cable TV started pumping filmed concerts into our living rooms, making it seem a little silly to just listen to the audio portion of a show while staring at an immobile album cover. Then came DVD, with its razor-sharp picture and surround-sound mixes.
Was it Pearl Jam? In 2000, the band made the unprecedented move of releasing each and every show from their tour as a double CD, muddying the very definition of a "live album." (It didn't help that each one of these was better than the band's "official" live disc, Live on Two Legs.) In the years since, artists from KISS and Duran Duran to the Pixies and any number of jam bands have begun offering terrific-sounding, fully authorized complete shows on CD.
So whodunit? They're all guilty, of course, and perhaps they were justified in taking the irrelevant, antiquated live album off life-support and sending it to its gatefold grave. But it's hard not to be a little sentimental about the things, even if most concert discs sounded like little more than the studio albums rerecorded in a cave, then overdubbed with crowd noise from Nuremberg. That's a lot of junk to wade through to find the occasional revelation like the Allman Brothers' At Fillmore East or Neil Young's Rust Never Sleeps, works that offer a quicksilver spirit and improvisational verve that no sterile studio recording ever could.
It appears that Lucinda Williams is pretty attached to those rare beauties, because she chose to record her first ever live album at San Francisco's Fillmore, a venue with classic-rock history echoing in every corner. From its double-disc format to the old-school poster art gracing the fold-out cardboard packaging, Live @ the Fillmore is designed to feel like a classic concert album from the moment you tear off the shrink-wrap.
If it seems odd that it's taken Williams 26 years to get around to making a live record, well, she's never been one for hasty artistic decisions. Besides, all those imprecise notes and imperfect acoustics would be anathema to her legendary perfectionism. Williams' recent studio work, though, has found her loosening up, and the very existence of Live @ the Fillmore signals a further relaxation in her M.O.
Given her newly easygoing frame of mind, maybe it's only natural that the set list here is given over almost entirely to Williams' last two albums—over half of 2001's Essence and almost all of 2003's World Without Tears are accounted for among these 22 tracks. Williams has said that she had intended to make Fillmore a greatest-hits style retrospective, but wasn't happy with the versions of most of the older songs captured during the recording in November 2003. No matter the intent, the decision to put her latest work at the forefront (and it was a decision—after all, she could have taped more shows if she'd wanted better takes of her classics) plays like a defiant declaration of faith in the continuing vitality of her muse.
That assertion is justified, at least to some extent. Songs like "Essence," "Lonely Girls" and "Those Three Days" would stand up perfectly well alongside the time-tested likes of "Passionate Kisses"—if it was here. And that's exactly what is lost with Fillmore's track selection. After all, one of the greatest values of a live album is in the sequencing—the way the songs play off one another, speak to one another, recontextualize each other.
In the few cases where vintage Williams songs do crop up on Fillmore, that's exactly what happens. After a way-long suite of moody, quiet numbers opens the album, a rampage through 1988's "Changed the Locks" comes off like an explosion of the frustration that simmers through the preceding explorations of messy sexual politics and communication failures. "Changed the Locks" is followed by an all-out flaying of World Without Tears' "Atonement," and the two songs immediately begin redefining one another. In the former, the singer obsessively avoids confrontation, while in the latter she is all confrontation, as if she has violently snapped. On the second disc, the sweaty "Righteously" is transformed by its proximity to the elegiac "Pineola" into a song about two people using sex to make themselves forget the specter of death.
It's in that second half that Fillmore finally makes a grab for its live-album lineage, as Williams, guitarist Doug Pettibone, drummer Jim Christie and bass player Taras Prodaniuk (who doubles as co-producer with Williams) finally depart from the original arrangements and gleefully untie the knots in her careful compositions. "Joy" unfurls over eight minutes, as Pettibone finds new kinks in the melody and Williams digs into the elliptical lyric with a guttural growl. "Essence" is similarly exploratory, with the players locking into a yearning, sinewy groove before pulling apart the song's rubbery dynamics in a way the studio version only hinted at.
After that peak, Fillmore cools off again, winding up in much the same contemplative vein in which it began. The arc of Williams' programming feels careful and deliberate, rewarding the listener's patience and giving the constricted song selection a needed sense of purpose.
That, finally, is what justifies the existence of Live those bits and bytes may have the songs, but Live @ the Fillmore has soul.
