Rodney Crowell / Hugh's Room / Toronto, Canada / March 7th, March 8th

Reviewed by Joe Montague

They came to hear the music of Rodney Crowell, for two nights on March 7^th and 8^th at Hugh’s Room in Toronto, Canada and his fans got more than just his music; they had an opportunity to genuinely visit with the Texas singer-songwriter. With the exception of the two songs for which he invited his daughter Chelsea to the stage, Rodney Crowell was alone with his guitars, mostly his black Gibson and he created an ambience that suggested you were sitting with him in a living room swapping old stories, while through his songs and reading passages from his new book Chinaberry Sidewalks, he shared photos from his life.  

Rodney Crowell began to finger pick his guitar gently as he told the story of “Highway 17,” from his 10^th album Houston Kid, released in 2001.  The story is a ballad chronicling what Crowell refers to as, “a good example of a bad example,” a bank robber, who is caught, goes to prison, is released after serving his time, and finds that his family has grown without him and a new road had been built burying forever the money that he thought he had safely hidden.

He moved on to singing and playing “Moving Work Of Art,” an ode to a beautiful woman and then he read from his memoirs. He is such an accomplished storyteller that he is able to bring to life the images of his grandfather, a sharecropper who moved to Houston to take a job at the Hughes Tool Company as a night watchman and who loved to dress up in his gray wool suit. He also like to imbibe at the local bar, while perching a young boy named Rodney up on the counter and before his Pentecostal wife and Rodney’s Pentecostal mother would find him, rebuking everyone in the establishment. He followed the reading with a song that has a poignant line, “I’ll never forget how grandma loved that old man.”  

By this point in the evening the charm of Rodney Crowell and the ease with which he interacts with his audience produced an interesting dynamic seldom witnessed during a concert with a Grammy Award winning artist, for it ceased to be a concert and became much more like a group of friends who had gathered to share stories, music and memories. It was not just about Rodney Crowell’s memoirs, as both young and old appeared to have special memories attaches to his songs as well.  

He rolled out his classic song “Til I Can Gain Control Again,” which preceded the reading of another passage from Chinaberry Sidewalks, this time an account of some revivalists from a town twenty-five miles west of Houston, who when Crowell was a little boy, tried to convince his mother that she was possessed by the devil and that was at the root of her epileptic seizures. Although, some of these accounts that Rodney Crowell relates from his childhood, might be distressing in any other setting, his ability to weave a yarn prompted much laughter from those who packed out Hugh’s Room and at times Crowell appeared as though he was barely able to contain himself as well.

Perhaps it is his age, or the southern charm of being from Texas and then moving to Nashville that permits Rodney Crowell to keep things humble and reflective or maybe it is simply that he is so comfortable in his own skin that he does not feel the need to impress, and yet he does impress you. Watching him following the concert as his fans lined up, waiting for him to autograph his book, one notices that although each person only spent a few seconds with him, Crowell was always focused on the person in front of him and he was both sincere and charming. A few feet away, sitting on the stairs was his daughter Chelsea, a good singer – songwriter in her own right and one with whom this writer had an opportunity to spend a few minutes, but that is a story for another day a future review and interview.

Feeling the need to follow-up the casting out of the devil by the Pentecostal revivalists, with what he referred to as a spiritual song, “I’m Closer To Heaven,” has both humorous and yet important lyrics, ones that may seem cantankerous at first, “I don’t like humus / I hate long lines / nosey neighbors and venetian blinds / chirpy news anchors, alter my mood / I’m offended by buzz words like awesome and dude,” until you listen closely and you realize that these are really the words of a man who is content and that comes through with the later words of the song, as Crowell shares about the little things in life in which he takes delight. This was not a concert intended to get you all hyped up, Rodney Crowell left us with something far more meaningful. He gave us a glimpse into his life and the warmth that flowed from the stage was returned to him in spades by his fans.  

He shared a wish for if he is reincarnated, “Oh Lord please don’t make me come back as a white boy, because then I will never be able to sing like Lightnin’ Hopkins or Ray Charles,” and then Crowell offered up this prayer, “Please Lord let me come back as Lightnin’ Hopkins.” 

Rodney Crowell’s gifts as a poet were showcased with the song “Still Learning How To Fly,” then it was time to read once again from his book, this time an account of his parents’ marriage, a mother and father who both grew up as sharecroppers and who left school in grades seven and eight to go work in the fields.

Crowell then asked his audience for a couple of requests, but he kept it orderly, by pointing to sections of the venue from which the requests should come and one of the crowing jewels of the evening was when he sang  his number one hit song, “I Couldn’t Leave You If I Tried,” from his 1988 Gold album Diamonds & Dirt. The song was just one of five songs from the album that made it all the way to number one on the American Country Music charts.  

This evening however, was full of memories and highlights, as Rodney Crowell invited his daughter Chelsea to join him on stage and they sang a duet, before Chelsea performed one song by herself, “Where The Hell Is Robert E Lee,” from her self-titled 2010 album.  This is definitely a southern song that retells the story of the Civil War from the perspective of a southerner witnessing Sherman’s destruction of the south.  Chelsea Crowell is an excellent songwriter and she is blessed with the vocals of her father and of her mother Rosanne Cash, which makes Chelsea, Johnny Cash’s granddaughter. Once she gets over being a bit nervous performing in front of audiences, Chelsea Crowell is going to be a singer-songwriter to be reckoned with.

Rodney Crowell closed out the evening with three encore songs, a humorous ditty that he wrote with Vince Gill, as well as the song “Glasgow Girl,” from his album The Outsider and the Townes Van Zandt song “Pancho & Lefty,” which Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard turned into a number one hit on the Billboard Country Music charts.

The Rodney Crowell Chinaberry Sidewalks tour continues throughout the United States during March and April, ending May 1^st in Napa California. You can check the tour schedule on his website. It is not a question of if you should buy a ticket to Rodney Crowell’s  concert, it is more a question of how many you should purchase.

Riveting Riffs Magazine would like to thank the management of Hugh's Room in Toronto for making it possible for us to review the Rodney Crowell concert

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