Last night, I overcame a whiskey hangover (water is a miracle) to deliver 3 hours of quality at the Red Lion! My friend Silbin Sandovar called me in to sub for him while he gets over some kind of death cold, but it felt to me more like he was doing me a favor than the other way around, because I love playing the late shift.
The 1-4am slot at the Red Lion is a gift: you get three hours in the middle of the West Village, after the peak bands have played, to be your solo self, and wind the place down. Normally, the Red Lion favors cover artists, but a few of us (notably Silbin and my friend Niall Connolly) do our best to keep the spirit of Bleecker Street alive in there by highlighting our original material. Sometimes it goes a different way — it certainly did last night — but even then it can be pretty great, especially when the audience agrees with my stance on covers. Here are my highlights:
“Not Giving Up” yielded me two couples slow dancing, who I kept on the floor through the Bangles’ “Eternal Flame,” “Calling You Out,” and Van Morrison’s “Crazy Love.”
One lady asked me then to play a “bigger” song, and I honestly couldn’t figure out what she meant by bigger than Van Morrison, but I tried to oblige with Fall Out Boy’s “Sugar, We’re Going Down,” which got a rousing “HELL YEAH!” from the corner.
Later on that night, about three fourths of the way through Patty Griffin’s “Forgiveness,” I got the greatest of compliments that you can get from a late-night bar crowd, when a woman spun around on her stool and said, “Holy shit, this is LIVE?!?” I get now why comedians like my laugh so much.
For the last hour, I pulled out the iPad, in response to a request for Sam Cooke (“Bring It On Home To Me” is one of my faves, but it has soooo many verses, y’all), and a fun activity ensued of the remaining dozen people proposing covers for me to try on, while I responded in kind with some stuff I was pretty sure they’d like. From memory, the set included:
Bring It On Home To Me (Sam Cooke)
God Give Me Strength (Elvis Costello/Burt Bacharach)
High And Dry (Radiohead)
Sullivan Street (Counting Crows)
Baby Can I Hold You (Tracy Chapman)
Three Marlenas (Wallflowers)
Wildflowers (Tom Petty)
6th Ave Heartache (Wallflowers)
Riot Act (Elvis Costello)
Missing You (John Waite)
Into The Great Wide Open (Tom Petty)
I know there was more in there somewhere, but I can’t access that material. Still, how great is that list? Who wouldn’t want to play through that? An asshole, that’s who.
An asshole.