Dar Williams, The Fiddlers, Bedminster, Bristol, 30/9/98
Dar Williams on stage at the Fiddlers (Picture Susan Cane)
'Who invented roses?'
The last time Dar Williams performed in England was nearly two years ago. On the release of a third album, End of the Summer, Razor and Tie preferred the performer toured her own country before coming to Europe again.On Wednesday night she came back to Bristol. Back to the Fiddlers who had received her so warmly on that first tour.
Dar Williams visit, this time, will be all too brief. Just a handful of dates, Bristol, Dublin, London, Chester, Edinburgh. I had to choose between Bristol or London. Dar Williams has an affinity with Bristol. So do I. It also gave me the opportunity to check out the Fiddlers too.
It's one rainy late afternoon in England. Buckets of it tipping out of the sky. I am being driven by a friend of mine, Dawn, who has never seen Dar Williams. The tape player is playing both an old sixties album by Pentangle alongside something called Celtic Wastelands. The windscreen wipers are beating time to the music. Renbourn and Jansch trading steely guitar motif's, Danny Thompson's deep, reasonant double bass lines and Terry Cox's military parade ground drum beat. And out of the misty rain comes Jacqui McShee singing as soft as velvet. Let No Man Steal Your Time.
Back to back with Pentangle comes the Celtic Wasteland CD with one of those spiritual Gaelic voices set off by slip jig violin breaks and campfire trance beat. The lady sings half a verse in Gaelic then slips into English for the choruses. Stunning. As stunning as the Maligo countryside from Warminster to Bath that we are slipping through.
The rain is down on the horizon, gathering in misty swirls to shut out the sun. By the time we come to that long winding road down the gorge to Bath, the light has failed completely. 'Starless and bible black' as Dylan Thomas's Under Milk Wood. The music still painting pictures on the windscreen as we speed through Bath's Victorian architecture, along by the railway viaduct and finally on the road to Bristol.
My romance with Bristol began with Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island. It continues tonight hopelessly lost, without a road map, looking for the Fiddlers Night Club. Dar Williams said from the stage tonight that she loved Bristol. Not hard to realise why. Bristol people's natural twins come from Austin, Texas.
Tonight a guy at the petrol station with his young daughter both insist that we follow them right into Bedminster. It's all Victorian architecture rather than full of corporate glass. Unable to find us the Fiddler's our man suggests we try at the Masonic Arms. To a man and a woman the bar turns to help. A couple of them know the Fiddler's well. The big bearded Bristolian builder in the bar, still in his clay stained cowboy boots with his jeans stuffed haphazardly in, pushes his pint aside, calls the barman for pencil and paper and begins to give directions.
After much debate between the regulars and the barman, he firmly decides on the best route. Not until he is sure I have understood, does he pass me the piece of paper. By then another regular has fetched his Bristol road map from the car. "Don't show him that," laughs the builder. "You'll have him confused again . . ."
If by this diatribe you guess that the Fiddlers is one difficult place to find. You will be right. It's close to a little pub called the Barley Mow, another pub, that looks like the Masonic Arms, little havens from the march of Brewery refits and bent nosed bouncers. Once you find the Barley Mow pub, then the Fiddler is up the side street, left at another little pub then right into an industrial estate. Out of the way. You could say that.
The Fiddler's appears to be a family run concern. The lady on the door tells me I can write to her regarding booking an American artist. She is apologetic that the bar snacks won't be available to around nine thirty, and the barman, probably her husband will catch me on a second visit to the bar to say that the cook has turned up so we can order.
I have no doubt why Dar Williams finds this club as welcoming as I do. Bristol people have a charm of their own. The Fiddler's is a capable of holding 450 people or more. All wood floors and tables around a stage large enough to get a six piece on and intimate enough for a solo performer.
By the time we had arrived there every table in the long bar and into the performance area was occupied. Two chairs put against the back wall by the side of the sound man still gave a fine view of the stage and the sound carried well.
This is about as solid Dar Williams audience as you will find in England. I've had time to say a brief hello to Graham Gudgin who channels information to Dar Williams UK fanbase; Susan Cane whose knowledge of obscure Texas songwriters is enough to knock the smart suits from the magazines dead; and a guy I remember from that Reading gig two years ago, Simon. I thought I had travelled a ways to this gig. Graham is on the road from London, Simon has driven the two or three hours from Gatwick.
What I heard in that Salisbury Church and the next night in Reading nearly two years ago has brought me here tonight. Since then the albums The Honesty Room and The Mortal City have been regulars on the old CD player. But CDs are one thing, having Dar Williams right in front of you performing is the top brick off the chimney.
The first set will be chock full of material from the End of the Summer. I am only familiar with a few songs from the last time she performed here. I'm not one to run right into HMV and pick up a copy. I just prefer to buy one off the performer the next time she comes around.
So Wednesday night was Dar Williams and her guitar paring the songs right down to their floorboards. The CD adds the full force of orchestration. Kicking drum beats, slap bass and streams of evocative guitar and choirs of vocals.
After nine, maybe 9.15 or later, the sound man whipped to the front of the stage to announce Dar Williams. She came dressed in black, her hair looking blonder and sun bleached than I remember it carrying her acoustic guitar, applause cascading like flowers thrown at her feet.
Dar Williams has a stool to perch on, some water, a microphone. A lone stage, a bare canvas. From the opening questioning lines of Your Ageing Well to a final encore, The Babysitters Here she filled the room, a room hushed for her with real music. A direct communication. No need to sign up for scam Satellite TV or endure deadbeat DJs. Just pay your 5 quid at the door tonight and treasure two sets from this very singular songwriter.
The first set tonight is strung all over with new material from Dar Williams third album The End of the Summer. My particular favourite has got to be that opening song from it, Are You Out There? Even without the glorious orchestration it still comes at a force:
"Are you out there?
Can you hear this?
Jimmy Olsen, Johnny Memphis,
I was out here listening all the time . . ."Another one of Dar Williams potent images of teen Americana. All drinking at the parking lot, listening to the late night radio, losing virginity and asking:
"And whats the future?
who will choose it?,
politics or love and music,
underdogs will turn the tables,
indie versus major labels,
there's so much to see through
like our parents do more drugs than we do."Dar Williams rarely pulls her punches in her introductions or her songs. Which, no doubt, like Ani De Franco, is why she hasn't been adopted like Alanis Morrisette to a major label. "When I was last here I warned you about therapy, now I have two things I want to warn you of . . ." then she throws a punch at the Starbuck coffee emporiums that have swung in behind the chains of corporate hamburger malls. "Be warned no smoking indoors is coming . . ."
Dar Williams has this thing against 'the corporate schemata' of things. When she tells how a recycling campaign began in her home town before being swept up by McDonalds or someone. "Look they tell us, we gave you recycling . . ."
What makes her a great artist is her humility. She bares her heart, doesn't push anything under a carpet. So she can perform a song like If I Wrote You, a tender ballad written in an Austin motel room, alongside a piss take of a stupid pothead and student love, then deliver her telling As Cool As I Am. A song that deals with how men line up women like statuettes to admire:
"So I watch the way you take your fear and horde the horizon,
You point, you have a word for every woman you can lay your eyes on,
Like you own them just because you bought the time,
And you turn to me, you say you hope I'm not threatened."So tonight is rather like an exhibition of Cezanne or Gaughin proportions. Open songs like the Ocean, sharing the deep introspection of I Love I Love with this audience and delivering two songs in the first set as deftly as Monet's brushstrokes:
She alludes to Pierce Pettis in Natchez, Mississippi, speaking of two authors down there, whose books breathe with the tangled, lizard infested, strangeness of the area. I don't hear the sounds of Natchez, Mississippi that she finds in this song but I can appreciate how she is drawn into its haunting beauty.
I do, however, share her songs for the seasons. The End of the Summer paints the sombre mood of Autumn time as her song February draws its breath from the end of Winter and the start of Spring.
All the songs are graced by Dar Williams individual way of playing guitar. Sometimes just framing a song in a series of unhurried guitar arpeggios. Often driving the pacy ones with belting riffs. The tack piano against the saloon wall invoked by her guitar playing on When Sals Closed Down kills me everytime.
Then there is her voice, an instrument, "violins, basses and woodwinds and cellos, singing" to quote Your're Ageing Well. I've no doubt when she gets to play England with a band she will knock all those young pretenders stone cold. Because her songs stand up with just voice and acoustic guitar but have a depth to fill out an orchestra with.
She has opened the second set by singing a snatch of a Loretta Lynn song. Dar Williams declares her admiration for the late singer who had managed to upset the church with a telling line about life in a song. "She was the Helen Reddy of her generation," she reckons. A song, possibly from End of the Summer follows. Road Buddy I think it is called. Fit for a hard Fender lick and a whining pedal steel. Apparently from a movie soundtrack.
Dar Williams continues on the country tack telling a story about playing the All Women's festival up in Canada I think. Tells how Robert Earl Keen, Fred Eaglesmith, Steve Earle plan to turn up and play in the car park for next to nothing with good barbuecue, drink and fine music. Uses this as an intro to a Fred Eaglesmith song. Eaglesmith another of those truck driving, cadillac riding, outlaw songwriters, still out there on the borderline, ripping out the music in small bars rather than playing corporate theme parks.
It might be easy to conclude that there is a line that can be drawn from Joan Baez to Dar Williams. Maybe, if we are into intellectual coffee bar debate on the importance of who carries the torch as we stumble towards the millenium. Better to say that Dar Williams is gobsmacked and honoured by Joan Baez covering her February. Perhaps it's just a case of What Do You Hear in These Sounds?
Clearly the Bristolians tonight have heard everything they came to hear. They are shouting like Texans at the top of their voices for Dar Williams to come back for an encore.
She is not too sure what to do as she climbs back on stage again. Someone shouts from the bar for "The Babysitters Here". She smiles and says 'Good choice, I'll do that but first . . ." First she falls into the familiar intro of When I Was A Boy before finally ending on another song from The Honesty Room, The Babysitter's Here. Diamond songs, a diamond performance.
Afterwards fans will hang around waiting for the songwriter to come out to sign CDs, posters and chat. This is when you realise that Dar Williams is one grade A human being. She'll take time to chat. This is not a "lovely to meet you" insincere gathering. Rather she'll recall names and faces and chat enthusiastically. That night she would be journeying back to London before a performance in Dublin on Friday night. A whole lot of songwriters would have been out that door and up the road, hustled by unsympathetic road managers and record company ilk. Just faces in teen magazines.
These days you can buy your eggs over easy breakfasts and sit down with glib politicians but you can't put a price on what Dar Williams is capable of. She is simply out there, asking who invented roses, and filling venues like The Fiddlers in Bristol with very fine music. Who invented roses? Who indeed.
Mike Plumbley
A set list of sorts: Your Ageing Well, Are You Out There, If I Wrote You, As Cool As I Am, I Love I love, The Ocean, The Family (Pierce Pettis), End of the Summer, The Pointless, Poignant Crisis of a Co-Ed, Snatch of Loretta Lynn song, Fred Eaglesmith cover, Road Buddy, When Sals Burned Down, Iowa, February, What Do You Hear In These Sounds? Encore: When I Was A Boy, The Babysitters Here.