Steve Forbert makes lemonades out of lemons at Clark Art Institute, 3/6/99

by Seth Rogovoy

(WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass., March 7, 1999) -- It was a night of overcoming adversity at the Clark Art Institute on Saturday.

First, the dire if ultimately overwrought weather forecast scared away a substantial portion of the audience expected to turn out for Steve Forbert in the last of the Clark's "Different Voices" winter concert series.

Secondly, Forbert himself was under the weather in a manner of speaking, suffering from a chest cold that turned his usually colorful rasp into a faint, hoarse whisper.

In the end, however, with over two decades of steady work behind him, Forbert was the ultimate professional, making the most of adversity and turning negatives into positives.

A small audience? All the more suited for a show featuring delicate intimacy.

Strained vocal cords? An opportunity to emphasize Forbert's considerable skills on guitar and to communicate through sheer personality and visual cues.

And so Forbert took what could have been a recipe for disaster and turned it into what, if somewhat short of absolute triumph, was at the very least a victory for the good guys -- those being the sincere, honest, hard-working heroes of his carefully-etched story songs, guys who if they find it hard to get an even break, never give up and give in to despair, but rather keep plugging away because it's all they know how to do, and because if they lose sight of their dreams they will have nothing left to hold onto. Or as his role-model Bob Dylan once put it, "When you ain't got nothing, you got nothing to lose."

In black jeans and boots, and with the sleeves rolled-up on his white, button-down shirt worn over a black T-shirt, playing the entire show standing up and with a harmonica holder around his neck, the singer-guitarist looked like he could have just skipped out of one of the Greenwich Village folk clubs from where he launched his career in the mid-'70s. And while rootsy folk and blues were at the foundation of much of the original material he played, he delivered his songs with a bit of sexy, rock 'n' roll swagger that brought out the latent friskiness in some of the thirty- and forty-something wives and mothers in the audience.

This isn't to suggest that Forbert was a showy performer by any means. In fact, it was his good-natured sincerity and his emotional investment and commitment to his songs and characters that put his show over the top. As raspy and hoarse as he was -- and it wasn't so far from his usual voice -- Forbert plunged himself into his material with naked abandon, scrunching up his eyes and face and wringing every last phrase and nuance for whatever kernel of passion, humor or emotional truth it contained.

This, if you'll pardon the expression, is what separates the men from the boys -- what divides the would-be or aspiring, if somewhat tentative, singer-songwriters, those seemingly afraid of their own honesty or emotions, from the masters, who have learned from the blues, gospel and rock 'n' roll that ecstatic performance of one form or another is at the heart of the music. To aim short of ecstasy, in this case, is to fail from the outset. This is a lesson from which all who labor in these fields must learn.

Forbert was a responsive performer, too, giving fans what they wanted in terms of requested numbers and old favorites. He interpolated local references into "What Kinda Guy," gave "Mexico" a dark, haunting spin, began "Goin' Down to Laurel" with a quick run through "Moon River" and sang "Big City Cat" as if he'd just arrived in New York from his native Meridian, Miss., only last week.

Many of his songs were populated by dislocated dreamers and working-class stiffs. Forbert doesn't pander to either, but rather invests them with simple dignity. They take their responsibilities seriously, as in the aptly-titled "Responsibility," but they also don't lose sight of their goals, as in "Everyone's Got to Have a Dream." They face down mortality with a vengeance, as does the wife in "Your Time Ain't Long," and they try to get by without suffering a life of needless complication, as in "Thinkin'."

In his songs and between-song patter, Forbert also exhibited a social and political conscience. He rambled a bit about a proposal by the Greens in Germany to ban driving on Sunday, invoking the tariff dispute over bananas and the emission of greenhouse gases by sport utility vehicles into his tirade, which he put to music in "Good Planets Are Hard to Find." It could be wrong, but one got the impression that this latter-day romantic is also a regular reader of the New York Times.

Accompanying herself on guitar, Boston-based singer-songwriter Janet Feld warmed up the audience for Forbert with a set of her original songs, drawn mostly from her new CD, "Tick Tock World." The title track was a perfectly drawn portrait of life's daily grind featuring an aptly clock-like ostinato, "Spring Train" was a piece of Patty Larkin-like modal-folk, and "The Journey" was a showcase for Feld's considerable gifts as an instrumentalist.

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