Stevie Nicks And Billy Joel

We accompanied the Lady de Gloves to see Billy Joel and Stevie Nicks (One Night Only!) at the US Bank Stadium in Minneapolis. Yes, it was last week but we’ve been busy and Billy’s tour (some with Stevie) goes on until July so you’ve got opportunities. And it is a great opportunity because Stevie has a really good show including a duet with Billy and Billy’s show is great.

Here is Billy’s set list and Stevie’s. If we were grading the concerts, Stevie would be an A/B and Billy would be an A+. Stevie’s voice is still great and she has great songs like Landslide and the duet with Billy on Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around is worth the price of admission and more. Two things keep Stevie’s show from being great. First, there is the patter. For about five songs in a row she started out, “The next song ….” Come on Stevie! You are a song writer. Try some variations. The second reason is in part a comparison to Billy’s show. The only real new thing Stevie does is cover Buffalo Springfield’s For What It’s Worth. There is also another Tom Petty cover but the point is there is not much adventure. You will enjoy Stevie’s performance but it will not amaze you either.

Billy’s performance might amaze you. It did us. As we said, his duet with Stevie was great. It was a risk for Billy to join her on one of her great songs. Billy’s set has almost all of the songs you expect like My Life, Innocent Man, and Piano Man and he does them with great gusto. We’ve seen that before but there are many adventures and letting the band take the white, hot spotlight.

Sidebar: For baseball fans, Billy has updated the lyrics of the song Zanzibar. Part of the lyrics on the 52nd Street album released in 1978 were:
Rose, he knows he’s such a credit to the game
But the Yankees grab the headlines every time
The Yankees, Billy’s Yankees had just ended a long drought by winning the World Series in 1977. There was lots of melodrama in NY from 1963 through 1976. Rose was Pete Rose who, in 1978, was 16 years into a 24 year career that ended with him having the most hits of any MLB player ever. Most people thought Pete was a sure thing for the Baseball Hall of Fame. And then Pete’s gambling problem came out. Billy has updated the lyrics in the first line to something like: Rose he knows he’ll never get in the Hall of Fame. We thought it was great baseball touch. End Sidebar.

Billy does a brief cover of the Rolling Stones Start Me Up including a Mick Jagger imitation. Really. Billy and the band do a number of old harmonies including The Lion Sleeps Tonight. One of the band members does the vocals on an excellent cover of Led Zeppelin’s Whole Lotta Love. And then there is the Puccini bit. We did not see the opera coming.

A fair criticism of Billy Joel was that he does them well but he does the same old songs. That is no longer a valid criticism. If you are a fan you should really go see Billy again. And if you get to see Stevie, even better.

Eric Clapton: Across 24 Nights

We dusted off our Clapton 2006-7 North American Tour t-shirt and the Lady de Gloves was outfitted in her Clapton-Winwood shirt from a few years later and we went to see Eric Clapton: Across 24 Nights (24) at the local theatre. It was excellent, surprisingly excellent as the Lady put it. Why was the excellence a surprise? Because music documentaries are often talk, talk, talk. Talk about things long past where the subject’s drug use makes us wonder about what really happened. Often the video doesn’t have the detail you want and spends too much time watching the crowd. Instead, 24 is just great concert footage lovingly reconstructed and well organized that shows what actually happened on stage. 24 is what you would see if you were up close to the stage and nobody was in your way. If you have ever been to an Eric concert you know he isn’t big on patter. About all you hear from Eric is, “Thank You!” And when he gets really wordy, “Thank You! Thank You Very Much!” He lets his music speak and 24 does too.

24 uses footage from 24 nights of Eric concerts during 1990 and 1991 at the Royal Albert Hall in London. One of the reasons we went is we saw the Concert for George in that venue just over twenty years ago. During 24 nights, Eric had very different concerts including a small four-piece band with Phil Collins on drums, a larger (we think) fourteen-piece band, a blues review including Buddy Guy, and being backed by an orchestra. The show starts and finishes with the orchestra and the rest of the versions are spread around as Eric performs seventeen (again we think) of his hits in concert. The footage is great. We see close-ups and cut aways to all the individuals. The directing, cutting, and original footage are all impressive. We don’t know why they waited thirty years to make 24. If you are an Eric fan you must see him at the height of his powers. If you are a music fan you should see it.

Music And Senators

We were listening to the Sirius XM recently and the DJ asked, and yes we know that human memory is unreliable, if we thought Jackson Browne was putting down the common man in The Pretender. As DJs want to encourage listeners to listen, it was a rare moment on the radio making our memory less suspect.

Then we were reading Sarah Isgur’s post at The Dispatch, The Party Centrist Extinction Is Upon Us. You should read it all. With Sarah, Scott, and Kevin D., The Dispatch is well worth a subscription. Pretty Sarah produces this chart of the senators with the lowest popularity in their home state.

She quite reasonably concludes:

Manchin, Collins, Sinema, Murkowski, and Romney are the senators most likely to break from their own political parties and all of them are in the 10. 

Fair enough. We would emphasize a different but related priority. We don’t follow the senate for a living but even we recognize that most of the folks on the list, certainly, Cocaine Mitch, Joe, Ron, Kyrsten, Lisa, and Mitt are senators that already have accomplished something in the senate. We’re not suggesting that everyone likes their accomplishments.

So, coming back around to Jackson, we think that it is a fair assessment that the first verse puts down the common man:

I’m gonna rent myself a house
In the shade of the freeway
Gonna pack my lunch in the morning
And go to work each day
And when the evening rolls around
I’ll go on home and lay my body down
And when the morning light comes streaming in
I’ll get up and do it again
Amen
Say it again
Amen

And surely Jackson is a leftist. We are closer politically to Ten Years After’s I’d Love To Change The World

Sidebar: Your milage may vary but we see Ten Years After’s song recognizing the knowledge problem when they say they don’t know what to do. Our take is that you they are leaving it up to is plural. It is some approximation of the market. End Sidebar.

but we think Jackson has put a problem we all face memorably:

Caught between the longing for love
And the struggle for the legal tender

As we see it, Jackson is telling us we take actions for economic reasons and we take actions for love. For a lucky few, these actions coincide but usually they are at odds with each other. Because time is our most precious commodity, tension often develops between love and economics.

Diversity has become a curse word to us conservatives in recent years but intellectual diversity in music and the senate can teach us something. Even Jackson sees the need for trade-offs. We need for the Congress to take some actions and then evaluate those actions honestly. We’d love for Congress to leave those changes up to the market but our best hope is that they do it in part.

The current system of do-undo-do often through executive orders is getting us nowhere. We need to find majorities and sometimes super-majorities to set the direction for the country on issues like entitlements and energy production. Yes, the market is the best solution but we need to find widespread support so it won’t be entirely market driven. If not, we are going to be stuck in the cycle we have seen since 2009 where the president or small majorities try to make big changes only to see the next president or small majority undo those changes and try to enact big changes of their own. Everyone, but especially those of us at the political edges like MWG needs to appreciate the importance of elected officials nearer the center. One of the many problems in politics is that we don’t vote for a portfolio but rather one office at a time.

We need to come to some political agreement to set the stage for big issues like entitlements and energy production. Neither MWG nor Jackson is likely to be enthused by such agreements but the economic actors need to know what the constraints are now and in the future. Pretty Sarah is right, the deal makers are likely to be at the center and if we lose those folks then deals are going to be even more difficult to make than they are now. Conservatives should be able to appreciate Jackson, Joe, Kyrsten, and the less conservative members of the GOP. Those on the left should be able to appreciate Ten Years After and the role of the less progressive senators. We need to go from what about complaints to how about deals. It is not going to be easy.