Wednesday night I was invited to see Ray LaMontagne with my friend Jeannie, who had an extra ticket.  I’m not super familiar with Ray’s music, but I do have one of his CD’s, and I enjoy it, and I’m certainly not going to pass up a chance to see him live.

We started the night by going to dinner.  We had a few choices for happy hour places, one of which was Kenny & Zuke’s.  We started there, and a quick perusal of the menu revealed that it was a total meat-a-thon.  We asked the waitress what their vegetarian choices were, and she checked over the menu and replied, “Well, there’s. . .an egg-salad sandwich. . .and, uhhh. . .tuna fish. . .?”  We thanked her and decided to go elsewhere.  We walked around the corner to Saucebox, which neither of us had been to before, but we both now agree that for happy hour it’s one of the best deals in town.  We’ll definitely be going back.

The show was awesome.  Leona Naess was the opening act, and she and her band were multi-talented and excellent.  She still seems fairly new to the game, but it’ll be interesting to see where she goes from here, and how she progresses.

Ray and his band took the stage and absolutely owned the audience the entire time, despite hardly saying a word until about three-quarters of the way through the show, when he talked about the sense of relief he felt after the election, and how he felt like partying and celebrating instead of singing his quiet, introspective, sad songs.  It was very endearing and funny.

I wasn’t terribly impressed with his band, though.  They were each good players individually, but it seemed to me that they just sort of plodded through every song, without many dynamic changes.  I would have liked to hear much more from the piano player especially, and the two or three times he finally got to take a solo, the audience really appreciated him.  The guitarist was unexciting (as are the overwhelming majority of rock guitarists), but he was absolutely stellar when he sat down to play the pedal steel.  Don’t know what a pedal steel is?  You’ll recognize the sound, for sure.  Here’s a video.  (No, this isn’t the guy from the show.  I couldn’t find a video of him.)  See if you can figure out what song he’s playing:

I will say, to be fair to Ray’s band, that they are phenomenal at playing quietly and keeping the energy level high while ‘holding back’, if you see what I mean.  A standout song for me was “Shelter”, which I was able to find a video of from his show in NYC a month ago.  Notice the awesome pedal steel solo, too.

So Ray and the band finished up their set and left the stage.  After a couple of minutes, he and the bass player came back out to do a heartbreaking version of the song “Jolene”, which an audience member had been loudly and drunkenly requesting before almost every other song of the night.  Incidentally, he didn’t even yell ‘THANK YOU’ after Ray finally played it, by which I think we were all a bit surprised and disappointed.

After he finished that song, the audience gave him a standing ovation, and then stayed on their feet to put their coats on and leave.  Probably a third of the audience started streaming out of the theater.  I told Jeannie, “That can’t be it.  The house lights aren’t even on yet.”   After a wait of almost ten minutes, the lights came back up and the band walked back out onstage.  The remaining crowd roared, and Jeannie and I took the opportunity to run down to the front.  We sat down in the aisle as he and the piano player started the introductory chords to John Lennon’s “Imagine.”  It was breathtaking, and those were the best two encore songs I’ve ever seen.

Great show, and just another great night in an incredibly full week.  More to come.

OneYearAgo