Lovett travels time with KPFT benefit at Anderson Fair
On a recent Saturday night, Lyle Lovett performed at Anderson Fair, the tiny Houston venue that proved formative in his early career. He really got his start there as a professional songwriter, opening for Eric Taylor on a Thursday night.
The venue seats about 75 people, so it’s also notably smaller than the sorts of theaters Lovett typically plays.
“Standing here on this stage,” Lovett said before playing his first song, “brings back my whole life to me.”
Then he proceeded to play a song about getting out of a place in a rush.
Seeing Lovett in this space, rather than a theater, reminded me of a day I spent 15 years ago with the country music legend Ray Price. Price reflected on his life during an interview. The Perryville native was 82 and living in Mount Pleasant.
“People ask how far I’ve gone in life,” Price told me. “About 20 miles.”
Price’s career took him around the country and around the world. But his comment nevertheless stuck with me, as did the thought that for all our movements — all manner of adventures and retreats — we often find ourselves back where we started, even if for just a short while. Price’s comment rattled around my head moments before Lyle Lovett returned to the Fair.
Anderson Fair Retail Restaurant was a proving ground for Lovett decades ago, as it was for so many songwriters. A little space in Montrose, it was a platform for songwriters like Nanci Griffith, Guy Clark, Lucinda Williams and Lovett, who’d move onto larger venues. It’s also the lone survivor of that scene, still operated by volunteers. More than 50 years later, it remains a place that puts an emphasis on songwriters, and it continues to ask for an entry fee lower than just the fees tacked onto tickets for other concerts.
Lovett happens to be among the best-known of the venue’s alumni. And his return was to raise money for KPFT, 90.1 FM, Houston’s listener-supported radio station, which also began more than 50 years ago. (Author’s note: I serve as guest host for KPFT’s Saturday night show “50 Years After.”) Both Lovett and show opener Jesse Dayton repeatedly put the light on both of these institutions for listening and lifting their music when other outlets weren’t quite so welcoming.
Dayton expressed appreciation that KPFT operates without breaks for “truck commercials,” a note Lovett later picked up comically before playing “Truck Song,” which he said, in jest, that he’d written with a truck commercial in mind.
Lovett’s set opened with an old song and closed with a new song but the show didn’t feel like a linear thing. It didn’t feel like a guy playing a set of songs, one after the other, start to finish. Rather, it felt unmoored from time, a swirling of forces new and old that tumbled like the TARDIS on “Doctor Who.”
Just seeing Lovett working again with percussionist James Gilmore was a throwback, as Gilmer retired from Lovett’s Large Band a few years ago. More than a collaboration, theirs was a sort of living history of two guys who can play without having to discuss it beforehand.
Gilmer played percussion with Eric Taylor, before he offered to back Lovett at Anderson Fair around 1978. The two share a fair bit of history.
They also can present a Taylor song without having to break a sweat, in this case, “Understand You.” They also doubled back to the Before Times with another storied Fair regular, Denice Franke, who added her lovely harmonies to a few songs, starting with “Dress of Laces.” Once again, the song wasn’t one of Lovett’s but rather by John Grimaudo and Saylor White, both musicians with roots in Houston and Anderson Fair.
These are the kinds of artists who entertain, certainly, but they also inform. Sometimes, a lyric can prompt a bit of reflection in the listener. Other times, they can tell you something you didn’t know about something you thought you did know. Dayton performed a few songs from his not-yet-released album “The Hard Way,” including
“The Ballad of Boyd Elder.” Elder is not a household name, yet his work has infiltrated nearly 50 million households. The greatest-selling album of all time — the Eagles’ “Their Greatest Hits” — has as its cover one of the painted skulls for which Elder was renowned.
Dayton, during his set, recalled being driven to Anderson Fair as a kid by his brother and made to catch a set by Townes Van Zandt, whose “White Freight Liner Blues” closed Dayton’s set. He said he wanted to keep his time on stage short so he could have a beer and play the part of audience member for Lovett’s set.
But Dayton wasn’t done. Though he’d only met Lovett an hour or so earlier, Lovett brought him back to turn the duo with Gilmer into a trio. Dayton threw some slide licks into Lovett’s “Pig Meat Man” and bluesy figures into a cover of “White Boy Lost in the Blues.” He was also there as Lovett worked through “Fat Babies,” a co-write with Taylor prefaced by an amusing story about a close call with an 18wheeler on a two-lane highway.
If the stories on this night ran long, it’s because they were part of the interconnectivity between the musicians, the venue, the radio station and all the history shared.
Lovett, fittingly, ended his set with “Closing Time,” a funereal song about the end of something. Then, for an encore, the four players — Lovett, Gilmer, Dayton, and Franke — ended the night for good with “12th of June,” a more recent and funereal song about the end of something.
But that song — informed by both a family cemetery and the birth of his two children — is also the beginning of something. Sometimes, we travel afar and end up close to where we started.