Erykah Badu Casts Her Spell at The Pinnacle

There are all manner of signs to let you know you’re in the right space for wherever your evening is going to take you. If you’re at a show and the DJ drops a song that makes the Chicago contingent in the crowd start stepping, you’re going to be OK. It was punishingly cold outside Monday night, but the heat from the crowd and the warmth of the grooves turned The Pinnacle’s angular spaces into a summit. Frankie Beverly and Maze’s “Before I Let Go” is one of those jams that makes magic. I don’t know if the 15 or so folks who were showing out are all friends, or just individuals who let muscle memory take over when they were turned by the music and Windy City throughlines, but it was beautiful and set the stage for the night even with all the lights on.

That was the vibe even before Erykah Badu and her eight-piece band took the stage for The Return of Automatic Slim Tour. The tour marks the 25th anniversary of her 2000 album Mama’s Gun, one of those transcendent records that you don’t even realize is changing the game until several years down the road. Coming off her debut Baduizm and one of the most essential live albums of the ’90s (if you don’t know, I think you better call Tyrone, he’ll let you know), Mama’s Gun was an earthshaking moment in what would retroactively be assigned the rubric of neo-soul, and it still goes hard today.

Unfolding on a minimal set with an exceptional sense for using lasers and video effects to expand space — and wearing a costume that periodically subtracted elements, reconfiguring itself throughout the show — Badu began with a smooth build. The band worked through a couple of grooves against a minimal but visually striking red backlight, until we saw the Alejandro Jodorowsky hat come forward and she took the stage surrounded by what from our vantage point looked like a bank of Akai MPC1200s (shades of Grace Jones’ array of crash cymbals from the One-Man Show). These samplers would define the between-song spaces for the first half of the show, with Badu working a mood that would coalesce into the next song. 

We would get all of Mama’s Gun and a couple of choice covers, as well as “Black Box,” a taste of Badu’s forthcoming album with The Alchemist. But this was a complex and evolving ritual. And as for one of the recurring motifs of the night, if the unseen Jaime is in fact her no-good brother-in-law who got fired onstage, it was a Schrödinger’s crew member situation — never not hilarious and troubling in equal amounts.

“Penitentiary Philosophy” kicked asses and minds into gear. As far as anniversary shows go — this being my second of the year, following Deltron 3030 in New York City during Film Festival Foolishness exile month — this was occupying multiple psychic spaces. You’re not just re-experiencing a record on headphones or in your car or on your phone. You’re having that collective moment with hundreds and thousands of other folks, and you’re tripping out on it with the mind and hands and breath that made it. It’s like graduation day for a person you were there for the birth of, sharing a point of focus with all manner of folks. And the vibe worked in contemplative and triumphant modes all night. When Badu did a quick generational breakdown of the crowd, it really felt like sociological call-and-response, with old-heads and new bloods finding that common space.

Mama’s Gun is a hell of a ride, with the itchy groove of “Didn’t Cha Know” and the smoove defiance of shouda-been-a-smash single “Cleva” getting exceptional vocal participation from the audience. When “Bag Lady” hit, it became something epic, a dialogue in chant that gathered the audience closely (and introduced a hand-crocheted hat made by an audience member that left Badu visibly moved). But the beauty of this kind of album-focused retrospective is that it allows everyone to have their moment with the parts that always spoke to you. Having all those 2000 feelings be invited out to dance after the intervening decades was its own kind of reckoning: Mama’s Gun dropped after the 2000 election but before the Supreme Court, in Bush v. Gore, broke representational democracy in this country. “A.D. 2000,” a plaintive and deeply real tribute to Amadou Diallo, was like a punch in the solar plexus, robbing your body of whatever breath you thought you had in there.

And then the closing suite of “Green Eyes.” You make the journey of an album, calling down the feelings from the ether, getting real with the shit you thought was settled, and you have a moment that shakes you on a cellular level. Badu’s voice may have a bit more grit (and don’t we all, those who were there). But you feel it just as, if not even more so, real as you did the first time you heard it. I sure as hell couldn’t have asked for more from my first Pinnacle show (though I would ask that they incorporate some form of reuse or recycling for their frozen drink cups, because talk about a clashing note for the evening). And even the piercing cold outside seemed just a little bit diminished from before the show, as if even the elements had to pay tribute to the spell Badu had cast.