Cliff Eberhardt, Guthrie Center
[GREAT BARRINGTON, Mass., May 7, 2000] - –
A genial performer, a gifted musician, an astute writer and a dynamic
vocalist, Eberhardt is a master at grabbing a roomful of listeners and
taking them with him wherever he wants to go. From the moment he takes the
stage and smiles at them and goofily says, “I’m going to play a few songs,
and then we’re all going to leave, and that’s pretty much tonight’s
program,” he is in control of his crowd, and from that point on, everything
else is gravy.
In this case, that was a lot of gravy, as Eberhardt’s set was an emotional
roller-coaster, veering from bittersweet songs of lost love to incisive
character studies to witty in-between song patter about polka music and the
loss of short-term memory.
Eberhardt concentrated on songs from his most recent album, “Borders,” and
also dipped into his earlier catalog for his program. His songs ranged from
the rollicking “The Long Goodbye,” a bitter look at the paranoia of intimacy
taken twice as fast as the recorded version, to “Your Face,” a heartbreaking
ballad of lost love.
Eberhardt performed several songs from “The Long Road,” including “White
Lightning,” about the dangerous mixture of love and alcohol, “My Father’s
Shoes,” and, at the piano, “Voyeur,” the best Randy Newman song Newman never
wrote.
Eberhardt shares several things with Newman: a gruff vocal delivery, an
unusual sympathy for assuming the sensibility of often undesirable fictional
characters, and a gift for classic-style pop songwriting. All these were in
evidence on “Voyeur” as well as on “The Wrong Side of the Line,” about a
Civil War-era Southerner unable to make a choice about whose side he was on.
But there are other sides to Eberhardt too. There was the depressed
romantic; at one point he described the contents of his five full-length
albums as one long study in heartbreak. It’s obvious in his song titles, in
tunes such as “No One Ever Went to School For Love,” “Is It Wrong to Feel So
Good at This Time in My Life,” and in “The Long Goodbye.”
Eberhardt tempers any deep-seated tendency toward self-pity with a healthy
self-deprecating streak. As serious as he is, he is only serious when he’s
singing his songs. As soon as he’s done, he’s a silly goofball, wiggling his
hips and strumming a polka beat, or playing riffs from cheesy ‘70s pop tunes
like “American Woman,” “Smoke on the Water” or “Stairway to Heaven,” and
contemplating life in an old-age home with other like-minded baby-boomers
singing the tunes of their youth.
He’s also a powerful blues singer and player, and he alternated acoustic
guitar with a resonating steel instrument for some slick slide playing. And
he shares a love of rootsy music and imagery with Bob Dylan, about whom he
told an amazing story involving six weeks of shared rehearsals for a
collaboration that never happened. What came out of it, however, was a great
version of Dylan’s “Down in the Flood.”
Since this was the first show in a new series, a few words about the venue
are in order. As one might expect from a former church, the Guthrie Center
is well-suited to performances, with good acoustics, great sight lines, and
a comfortable ambiance. The crowd was seated coffeehouse-style at small
tables, and Eberhardt performed on a stage high enough so everyone had a
clear view.
Presumably the few kinks in the program will be ironed out in coming weeks.
These included poor lighting around the church, which made finding one’s way
back to the already dubious parking lot difficult, and what has to rate as
one of the cardinal sins of concert promotion: not having some sort of
flyer – even just a list of performers and upcoming dates – available to
hand out to concertgoers.
[This review originally appeared in the Berkshire Eagle on May 8, 2000.
Copyright Seth Rogovoy 2000. All rights reserved.]
Seth Rogovoy rogovoy@berkshire.net music news, interviews, reviews, et al.
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