“This is a song dedicated to Tom Petty,” Lucinda Williams drawled before she and her band Buick 6 launched into ‘Stolen Moments,’ a standout track from her most recent record Stories from a Rock and Roll Heart about missing her musical comrade.
Sitting in the backseat
Of a downtown taxi
Speeding across New York City
Somewhere between First Avenue and Second Street
I think about you
It's like a heartbeat
I think about you
The day of the show, August 8, would have been my dad’s 98th birthday, and Williams’ song seemed to sum up my moment. I had spent the two days previous plowing through Ann Patchett's latest book, Tom Lake, and its idyllic scenes of a farm and a tightly bonded family seemed to have roused my memory bank of fruit trees and farms, rural living and gravel roads.
All things of my Dad’s house in Corralitos, the place I grew up, reared up in my memory in vivid detail: The sun on the gravel in the driveway. How the weeds grow in clumps in the middle of what used to be the lawn. How the apricot tree would get so full of fruit some years it would seem to glow. How loud the Scrub Jays called from it high branches on those warm mornings, as if alerting the flock to the feast How the air around the bottlebrush hummed with bees and hummingbirds flying to the combed flowers. How the amaryllis were blooming to the last. Every year, that incongruous pink against the sun-browned hillside. Summer. Hot, dry air, the hum of insects.
My dad's spirit is likely haunting that place, still. Maybe haunting isn't the right word. But I think of his ashes under the oak tree where he had his hammock, the light slanting through the leaves. It’s hard to imagine he would have been 98 if he were alive today, but he's been gone more than 22 years. So long now, I forget what it was like to have him in the world. But he's there, if I just turn my attention so, “like a heartbeat…”
Lu and Buick 6, the band that's backed her for nearly a decade, along with guitarist Doug Pettibone, took the stage promptly at 7:30, played three songs from her newest album and rounded out the crisp hour with a greatest hits selection including songs from Car Wheels ('Drunken Angel' and ‘Joy’') and closing with a spirited versin of 'Honey Bee.' She sounded great despite still recovering from the stroke she suffered a couple of years ago. It was a moving performance. And it was too short. But technically she was the opener for the very young and very popular Big Thief.
Big Thief were no fools however, and they brought Williams back onstage to do two moreof her songs — 'People Talkin’' and 'Metal Firecracker' — together. Williams was beaming as she soaked in another round of deserved applause, and I thought, yes, bring Lucinda all the flowers.’
After Lucinda left the stage, Big Thief’s lead singer Adrienne Lenker talked about how hugely important Williams’ music was to her own path. What songwriter today hasn't Lucinda Williams influenced? I wondered, if not in style then simply to be better, dig deeper, keep going.