Saturday, March 3, 2001
POP MUSIC REVIEW Plain-Spoken, Expert Lyrics From Clark
By RANDY LEWIS, Times Staff Writer
The Newport Folk Festival touring show barely hints at the scope of the
grand-daddy of folk-music celebrations, but the three performers with
the edition that visited UCLA's Royce Hall on Thursday gave a healthy
sampling of the quality that is the Rhode Island event's hallmark.
Alt-folk/country darling Nanci Griffith is the headliner, and she got
the longest set on the three-hour show's second half, but the deference
she and opener Rodney Crowell displayed to fellow Texan Guy Clark made
it clear who the musical figurehead is. Four years after the death of
singer-songwriter Townes Van Zandt, Clark stands as the dean of Texas
troubadours, and not merely by default. His songwriting is masterfully
plain-spoken, the result of his knack for making expertly crafted lyrics
sound as though they'd just tumbled spontaneously from his lips.
* * * Crowell leaned heavily on his strongly autobiographical new album
"The Houston Kid." His writing skills are at their peak on a one-two
punch of "I Wish It Would Rain," about a gay hustler with AIDS, and
"Wandering Boy," the response from the hustler's once-homophobic twin
brother. It's an invented scenario he made deeply touching, never
maudlin. His and Clark's sets brimmed with the levity, irony, gravity,
stupidity, greed and compassion that define human existence, dimensions
that brought welcome balance to Griffith's overwhelmingly serious-minded
performance. She lightened things a bit with some banter with her
longtime keyboardist and bandleader James Hooker, but the majority of
her set was so unremittingly weighty it almost sank under the burden of
her good intentions. That set, however, like those that preceded it,
ended with one or more of the other performers called out to
collaborate, which heightened the show's refreshingly chatty,
living-room ambience. * Nanci Griffith, Guy Clark and Rodney Crowell
play tonight at the Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts, 15700
Center Court Drive, Cerritos. 8 p.m. $30 to $40. (800) 300-4345.
Copyright 2001 Los Angeles Times