GILLIAN WELCH AND DAVID RAWLINGS – LIVE: REVIEW
- 5 hours ago
- 3 min read
GILLIAN WELCH AND DAVID RAWLINGS
State Theatre, Sydney, February 17
TIME IS, AS GILLIAN WELCH and David Rawlings told us, a revelator. It tells us about what has come (that maybe we missed in the tumult), what that has done to us (if we look closely enough), and what may yet be (if we can discern the patterns and take heed). And it shows on us all in ways that seem obvious but at the same time, well, revelatory.
Take this duo, this couple, this two-as-one, a pairing where the standard thing to say is that sometimes their voices are almost indistinguishable, so closely are they aligned. And that is true. But like saying Rawlings’ guitar is a lead instrument of brilliance that defines their sound as much as the plaintive curls of Welch’s voice, it underplays the role of the counterpoint and shadow of the other voice and the other guitar in work as special as theirs.
The “other” grounds and gives body, it is the flesh on which the image is drawn by the lead, it is the echo sometimes and the presager at other times of the characters and stories being weaved. As shown in Back In Time, a firmer turn in the second set where his solo felt simultaneously virtuosic and unshowy while she was both dancing and tiptoeing around it, you do not have one without the other because they are of a whole.
For so many reasons then there is a sense of permanence about them. Not so much carved out of rock - though Rawlings’ is ageing marvellously into a Willie Nelson cragginess - as shaped by the waves of that very time.
As in Bells Of Harlem which sits at the intersection of Dylan and the Stanleys, like the old buffalo nickel to be found in the bottom drawer of their nifty stage-tools box, alongside, as Welch showed us, the inside tag of a pair of boots, a saint’s memento, a tiny replica gun and potpourri. In so many ways they are a repository of bits of the culture that weren’t expected to make it to the future, surely superseded by something bigger or flashier or louder or just plain new.
You can hear it in the way Hard Times (“ain’t gonna rule my mind no more”) could rise like smoke, seemingly slight and likely to blow away, but its shape remained tangible, a strain of hope and pressing immediacy against which a heart held. Or how Guy Clark’s Desperados Waiting For A Train harnessed the wind, not as a force, in the way a rock band might, but as a companion, an acceptance.
But it was there too in the way Ryan Adams’ To Be Young (Is To Be Sad, Is To Be High - which Rawlings co-wrote) with its jaunty clip clop, and That’s The Way, coming over as some kind of land-based sea shanty, fluttered high, while the merging of I Hear Them All with This Land Is Your Land, anchoring work, workers and unity, and What We Had, a solemn realignment of Neil Young, felt like foundations.
For those of us who saw some or all the Sydney shows last year (three nights of quite varied sets, all with an individual mood, that were deeply satisfying in different ways) it may have felt likely – quite reasonably – that barely a year on, with no new releases in the interim, we’d be seeing a show that heavily tapped into those selections and those sequences. And no one would have complained: the joy, the sadness, the sheer beauty of it all – “a boxcar blue, showing daylight clear through/Just an empty trainload of sky,” to borrow from the second song of the night – is a reward at every one of their shows.
But Welch and Rawlings are restless as much as inventive travellers, finding entry points into both their catalogue and their connections, including not just the Clark and Adams songs but Brokedown Palace from The Grateful Dead, a band whose ability to mix the solidity of roots with the soaring quest of experimentation clearly hums within this pair, or the serenity of their own North Country, where the guitar was like rain pitter-pattering on the surface of still water.
As the third encore stretched out like a tape unspooling in measured pace and no need to end, it did feel that some wisdom was being shared, already worthwhile but not wholly seen. No rush. “All the spindles whine/And every day is getting straighter/Time's the revelator”
READ MORE
SEE MORE
Gillian Welch and David Rawlings play Newcastle Civic Theatre tonight, February 19.
Comments