July 17, 2024

About last night’s show at Levon’s.

Good morning, my dear friends.

Happy Wednesday.

No show is ever really like any other show, but some shows do something that no other show has ever done, and last night was one of those shows.

If you missed it, the full show from last night – live from Levon Helm Studios in Woodstock – is now archived at https://www.crowdcast.io/c/july16th2024 for patrons only.

You can still chat there forever, so go ahead.

……..

Here’s the setlist, and time markers:

start-12:45: Welcome to the Show, tech stuff, Story of the Dress

12:45: Ampersand (from Who Killed Amanda Palmer)

28:15: Backstabber (Dresden Dolls/ from Yes, Virginia)

discussion about a tick

37:22: People Ain’t No Good (Nick Cave cover)

46:17 – Ukulele check, “After November”

48:20 – In my Mind (from Amanda Palmer Goes Down Under)

58:20 – Astronaut (from Who Killed Amanda Palmer)

1:09:02 – Between the Bars (Elliott Smith cover)

A bit about Levon Helm

1:22:03 – The Runner (unreleased Dolls)

1:31:26 – Sing (Dresden Dolls/ from Yes, Virginia)

THE END

….

I’ll never forget this little micro moment in my life. When Trump was shot, and we had gone to bed early, each with a Geraldine Brooks book in our hands, never to open either book because we checked our phones, and that was that.

When the Republican National Convention gathered together a viper pit of frightened souls, including some flat-out liars, all puffing and preening and aggrandizing one another for their prowess in treating cruelty and sadism like a varsity sport, and I sat down at a little wooden piano in a little wooden barn built by the drummer of The Band and played “Sing” to a tiny group of people huddled around the virtual campfire screen.

You just don’t forget these things.

The show was attended by about 400 of you from all over the world, and I’m so grateful to every single one of you for coming on such incredibly short notice. And the venue and crew, too, who all agreed to take the gig with less than a weeks’ notice. I’m a lucky artist. It takes a lot to make a show like this look and sound stunning, and we had our fair share of problems to troubleshoot before going live. We got there in the end.

Liz took these Polaroids…

I am allowing myself to call it a “show” as a kind of a chess move in my head. Usually I’d call it a webcast, or a livestream, or a web stream, or a virtual concert….anything other than just a “show” to indicate that it wasn’t quite, y’know, the real deal. Not a SHOW show.

I think I am going to need to rethink that.

It’s a performance. It’s a live transmission. I still cried. From the looks of it it, so did you. So is it a show? I think so. I think so. I think it’s allowed to be real if it feels real.

As I drove home from work at around 9:30 or 1pm with Anthony to do the post mortem and to tangle out the problems and the next steps for next time, I noticed that my body was more relaxed than it’s been in a few weeks. Playing these songs actually healed and unlocked something important inside of me. I don’t know why I’m always a little shocked at the alchemical magic of music and how it can calm, and erase, and transmit the impossible, and whatever. But it can.

I wasn’t even looking at the feed, which was disorienting and a little disconnected, because Anthony was already logged onto my account, and I’d forgotten that I couldn’t be logged into the account at the same time. So, 2 minutes to show time, I pulled my laptop up onto the music desk of the piano and expected to see all your comments and applause and questions and thoughts, only to find myself blocked out of my own account because it was in use.

So, instead, I just had to trustfall, and especially trustfall into Liz, who moderated and manned the comments and acted as my eyes over behind the camera.

That job is, if I may give a huge and important shout out to Liz Grammaticas, an extremely strange job…to pull the emotion out of thousands of comments on a screen and somehow try to explain and transmit them to me between songs, from 12 feet away. Liz had such a beautifully expressive face and wide open heart. All I had to do was look at her and see her gazing at the screen with her hand over her heart to be able to feel the basic gist of it all. Maybe it was even better this way. I couldn’t get distracted by the chat: I just felt the love, and it was delivered, so you know, by one of the most heartfelt people on earth. So to Liz, especially…thank you.

The crew was in the room, but I also had ONE sole audience member. I sent out a little missive to the high-tier patrons to see if anyone was close enough to the venue to want to attend the show, and Damian Masterson, one of my favorite old-school post-card tier patrons, showed up and watched the entire thing while leaning against an old wooden beam post.

I love you, Damian. Thank you for coming and holding the space as an audience of one.

Quick history:

The venue we chose – Levon Helms Studios – is a very special to me, and I say in the show, I’ve never played a proper concert at Levon’s.

It’s spiritually fitting to explain to you what this place is.

Levon Helm was the drummer for The Band – that The Band – in the 1960s. The were a beloved Dresden-Dolls level indie band, but shot to global Taylor-Swift-level fame when they worked with Dylan and became his road band. Of course, it was the 1960s, and all artists got screwed by all labels and deals and all other artists. When Levon got older, he had very little legacy income to fall back on, and he was facing unpaid bills and health issues, so his peeps convinced him to pull a musician Field of Dreams stunt and build a barn venue effectively in his backyard. He built it, and they came.

Modern drummer has described Levon suchly: “If there ever was a drummer who undeniably embodied the concept of playing for the song, that drummer would have to be Levon Helm. Perhaps the greatest singer/drummer to ever play a backbeat, Helm has dedicated his entire career to playing for the song.”

He started his Vegas woods residency, called it “Levon’s Midnight Ramble”, and he basically just set up shop Vegas-style in Woodstock and let friends, players and audience come to him. It worked. It was a decades long hootenenny and it still lives on, even though Levon left these plains in 2012 at age 71.

The venue chugs on. I’ve played there 5 or 6 times, but never as a headliner, always part of a larger shoe or benefit cause and that seems….fitting.

We are going to do a lot more of these.

Maybe here at Levon’s, maybe in NYC, maybe in Boston, likely close to home. I’m domesticating myself.

We are gonna try to find a way to wind in more of a studio audience, made of patrons.

If you’re subscribed here for free, consider knocking yourself into the paying pile. This stuff costs real money to produce, I like paying my crew well, and the nicer the feed, the tighter the profit margin. But the more patrons we have kicking in even $3-5 a month, the better we can make it. So thank you. Cap your pledge. $3 a month for constant access to really well-produced content feels like a fair ask.

And –

This is the antidote I need right now. The songs themselves. The business of show.

The music itself.

In the run-up to November, my loves, I feel like we are going to need more songs than we have ever needed in our lives. Songs with all utility: to fight, to mourn, to rally, to reflect, to laugh, to bask, to despair, to do whatever we can’t do in normal-space because we can’t, because songs are magical this way.

That’s why we humans have been gathering around campfires strumming guitars and banging rocks together since the dawn of time.

Let’s do more, let’s do more. And I’ll try to give you a little more warning next time.

Always here for feedback. I’m listening.

I said it at the show, but I’ll say it here, too. Liz was manning the question box and I asked her at a certain point what the top question was, and the question itself brought tears to my eyes when I heard it. It was:

You’re doing it.

This is it.

You’re doing it.

I love you, so much.

Thank you for being my patrons. Thank you for listening.

PS, Anthony Mulcahy, who filmed, also took these stunning photos.

He’s a keeper, this genius. And now you know what the LEVON means…