Review | An Evening With Robert Hunter In New York City

Words by: Chad Berndtson

Robert Hunter :: 10.10.13 :: Town Hall :: New York, NY

I mentioned to a good friend that I was seeing Robert Hunter and his response was “Hmm. Why?”

It wasn’t meant to be sarcastic or flip. As an inquiry, it’s legitimate: the Grateful Dead songs that bear his unmistakable stamp – not the entire point of a Hunter concert but impossible to de-couple from any reasonable discussion of it – are being performed with serviceable guitar and vocals and a bare approximation of the full-on, Dead-on-all-cylinders intensity. Where, I think he was asking, would the music be?

That’s one way to look at it. Another way to look at it is that it’s a concert concerned with stripping away what surrounds, getting these legendary songs down to their poetic essence, and taking a guided tour by the writer of what moved him to craft such ageless lyrical beauties in the first place.

Robert Hunter concerts are spare and at times a little awkward – definitely not everyone’s cup of alligator wine. But if you’re a lover of the songs he helped create, they’re both moving and comforting, often in unexpected ways.

Hunter played the last show of this brief East Coast tour at New York’s Town Hall, and throughout it proved he’s the best – the freshest – he’s sounded a decade or longer. The last time I’d seen him perform was as a solo opener for Phil Lesh & Friends more than a decade ago: sun-baked amphitheatres, barely touched seats because it was so early in the evening, Hunter himself seeming a little hassled, walking back and forth across the stage singing songs like he wanted to get through them versus celebrate them, only managing to capture a majority of crowd attention when he played “Ripple,” then disappearing backstage.

This was something different: a true folk concert with an intimate, attentive, loving, oft-celebrating audience, about three-quarters full if we’re being generous. Hunter himself didn’t engage much – he’s not the warmest stage presence – but he wasn’t businesslike, either, pouring energy, astute phrasing and even goofy charm into the songs, briskly moving through some, spending more time with others, lingering in their mythology.

He’s a reliably quirky performer. Sometimes he’ll jump vocal octaves or punctuate a turn of phrase with an abrupt yelp or growl. Sometimes, as he himself admitted during a shaky reading of “Sugaree,” he’ll get a little “lost in the jungle,” fingerpicking with gusto yet hitting brown notes and projecting uncertainty in his destination, so dropping un-smoothly back into verse.

But this was a confident performance – Hunter seemed legitimately buoyed by such an adoring audience, even when he admitted he’d rather let the songs do the talking during repeated requests to “tell us some stories.” When he was at his best, he sung cleanly while caressing certain words and phrases, letting his vocalization wander a bit during a tender “Box of Rain,” or steering “Franklin’s Tower” into troubadour territory, relishing its meter, or blending two journeys to Fennario with an on-point mash-up of “Dire Wolf” and “Peggy-O.”

At times his pacing made the show a challenging investment. The Bob Dylan-associated “Silvio” felt labored, for example, and “Jack Straw” stuttered, with stabs of harmonica making is pace choppy. “Reuben and Cerise” didn’t so much flow as spill out. “The Wind Blows High,” a gorgeously epic Hunter composition, stalled momentum by coming too late in the show, the audience largely unfamiliar.

But he was so often in command that on several occasions – the delicate “Stella Blue,” or the journey of “Cruel White Water,” or “Wharf Rat,” with its resignation and lament, or a fiery street-poet reading “New Speedway Boogie” – you were compelled to go deep with him, hypnotized as he unspooled the narratives.

Hunter clearly relished the moment, and said at the end of the show – a 45-minute first set and a generous 70-minute second – that he’d be returning to the road in the spring. His is a leap worth taking; consider that in an aggregate two hours of unaccompanied solo performance, he never once consulted a lyric sheet or paused for anything more than a request to up the guitar volume. For a guy that’s built his life around words, that’s a lot of them to keep straight, let alone bring to life.

Robert Hunter, Town Hall, New York, NY, Oct. 10, 2013

Set 1: Franklin’s Tower > Standing on the Moon, Box of Rain, Dire Wolf > Peggy-O > Dire Wolf, Ship of Fools, Deal, Silvio, Candyman

Set 2: Jack Straw, Cruel White Water, Brown Eyed Women, It Must’ve Been the Roses, Reuben and Cerise, Stella Blue, Wharf Rat, Brokedown Palace, Sugaree, The Wind Blows High, Talkin’ Money Tree > Friend of the Devil, New Speedway Boogie

Encore: Scarlet Begonias, Ripple, Boys in the Barroom

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