Recharging me ol’ Batteries with Billy Bragg
Once in a while, the Upcoming robot drops a reminder on you that lights the night up like a light bulb. So it was with Billy Bragg’s show at the Fonda last night - I was on my way somewhere else but decided to drop by and was “miracled” by the bouncer when I asked if the show was sold out. I wandered in just in time to get a beer, work my way up to the footlights, and watch the curtain rise on a shuffling working-class griot who would get my vote for a Macarthur “genius” grant if they gave them to foreigners (and if I had a vote).
Billy Bragg has been an integral part of my soundtrack for years, especially since living in England. “There is no real substitue for a bull struck squarely and firmly”, indeed. I just fell years ago for his ability to connect the emotional and the political, and I’ve been a believer ever since. He’s passionate about his beliefs, and those beliefs — in the common denomitators that connect humans to one another, and that our political systems and the people atop them too often lose sight of that - radiate from his jangly, soulful pop songs. There’s also something about his permanently unrequited adolescence & imperfection that appeals to me.
Last night he played unacommpanied electric guitar for the whole set (until the encore, when he switched to acoustic), doing bang-up takes on a number of my favorites like “Greetings to the New Brunette”, “A Lover Sings”, “World Turned Upside Down”, etc., as well as a couple of his terrific Woody Guthrie covers and a Leadbelly song. He sounded fantastic.
Equally enjoyable were his rants about everything from starbucks to a hamster eating a biscuit on youtube - and he was by turns serious as well, telling us about his book and sharing a powerful view on the importance of singer-songwriters in bringing together like-spirited people (I’ve written about this before) to recharge our collective batteries. I guess it’s social networking the old-fashioned way - though he did invite us all to join his Myspace, and changed a favorite lyric of mine to “If you’ve got a website / I wanna be on it”.
If you don’t know Billy, go buy some.
