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BECK
Lincoln Theater | Washington, DC | 08.18.02
Beck at the Lincoln Theatre in Washington, DC...
First off, history lesson: the Ford Theater is the one where Lincoln was shot, not the Lincoln Theater. The Lincoln is just North of all the postcard parts of DC. The neighborhood seemed as if it wasn't exactly across the tracks, but that you could probably hear the train going by. We were a little off put by the line stretching around the block when we pulled up, but it turned out that the doors had just been opened. Extra tickets were plentiful and tough to get rid of, particularly since the show wasn't sold out. While I was in line, holding my ticket that had been purchased a month earlier, a guy walked up to the box office and paid for two third row seats.
My seats were in the last row of the orchestra, parallel to the soundboard (so much for advance planning). Fortunately the theater was so small that the view and the sound were still wonderful. The theater opened in the mid-1920s and for two decades was a hot spot for the black acts touring the country, most notably Duke Ellington. (The one name that the usher I spoke to could remember. Beck also mentioned the Ellington connection, a little shout-out to the ghost of concerts past.) It lay dormant for about 20 years before being reopened as a movie theater, then was eventually restored and converted back to a theatre proper. A beautiful building; not ornate at a Fox Theatre level, but gilded and plush nonetheless. I purchased a pair of eight-dollar Crown and gingers (the line was long and the price steep, but the pour was as stiff as it needed to be) and settled in to wait for the magic. At 20 minutes to showtime, Joe Perry and entourage strolled in from the backstage door and took up second row seats, prompting wild rumors among myself and my friends that there would be a kickdown acoustic Aerosmith medley, but it was not to be. Someday, someday...
The house lights went down at about 20 minutes to 9. The stage was a mess of instruments, multiple guitars, keyboards, an upright piano and all sorts of trinkets that Beck would wander amongst, almost indiscriminately, for the entire evening. His bass player, Smokey, sat in on probably half of the songs, primarily on guitar. I didn’t bother to keep a setlist (Beck.com has all of them up anyway), opting to let the experience wash over me rather than try to dissect and quantify it as it happened.
Beck is an artistic force, a consummate showman, and a full-on performer with the ability to hold a thousand seat venue in his hand and make every fan feel like they’re watching him play in their living room. Emotionally he was all over the map: his acoustic material is primarily introspective, moody without being dark. The foil to all these cathartic melodies is his sense of humor, which couldn’t be more off-the-wall if it was a Michael Jackson album. This show (and the rest of the tour, I’m sure) is worth seeking out simply for the stories that he told: the tribulations of being a “protest singer” in the early nineties (“Tough gig… there wasn’t much to protest. But we made do”), the “last flight to Rio” which involved him and Axl Rose having a run-in on a red-eye flight to South America (Axl assaults him, then recants and offers a back massage)… At these points of the show he seemed less an acoustic songsmith and more an improv comedian, but it worked, and the crowd ate it up. The crowd, incidentally, was largely well behaved throughout the evening, sitting and paying close attention, often waiting ‘til the last note of a song before the hoots and shouted requests began (“Beercan” being the most common of these).
The bipolar nature of the performance reached its high water mark during “Debra,” a song that Beck announced he hated but would play anyway. Unaccompanied at the piano, he turned the porno-soul number into a dirge, singing with so much pathos that even the phrase “Zankou chicken” sounded as if it would be at home in the diary of the most self-pitying teenager. Once he had established the radically altered mood of the familiar tune, however, he veered off into the loony, spinning a tale in which Debra was the star player on the high school football team, looking good in her shoulder pads and making the game- winning catch (“Cut to the parking lot after the game. I’m standing by my car as she walks up to me in the rain… she still has the greasepaint under her eyes”). Hilarious and genuinely affecting at the same time, which was the spirit of much of the night.
Not to imply that the entire evening was a tragicomic farce. There were plenty of moments of naked emotion with no humor to mask the sting. The new material in particular was emotionally supercharged to the point that one could wander off into self-examination for moments at a time, forgetting that the concert was even going on in the room. The Mutations tracks that he played (“Cold Brains,” “Dead Melodies” and “Lazy Flies,” to name a few) were all well executed, but felt timeworn – scars that linger after the healing is over. The Sea Change material was still raw and painful, “Lost Cause” and “The Golden Age” in particular, inspiring speculation that someone might have been involved in breaking this self-proclaimed diva’s heart sometime recently.
The tone for the entire evening was cemented with the second encore, “Nobody’s Fault But My Own,” for which Beck played sitting on the floor center stage in front of a tiny pump organ, working the bellows with his left hand and holding chords with the right. The antiquated instrument lent a plaintive, wheezing harmony that was overwhelmed by his voice as he opened the floodgates, pouring his soul out onto an empathetic audience. A simple, almost casual and completely spellbinding way to end the evening. Then he stood, took a bow, and up came the lights. A fitting end to an overwhelming performance, and the only regret was that Joe Perry slipped out of the theater before the final number, perhaps feeling too jaded to stick around.
Eric Kesler
JamBase | Washington, DC
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