Concert

One of the bennies of our Denver Botanic Gardens membership is discounts on tickets for concerts held at the amphitheater there. So, last evening, we went and saw a double-bill of Loudon Wainwright III and David Wilcox.

Though we were about half-way back in the lines or more (even having got there a half-hour before the doors opened), we still scored a place on the lawn directly adjacent to the stage (left), which gave us a great view. Margie had put together some burrito fixings and some nummy desserts, I’d brought a bottle of Peach Canyon Zin, and we were all set. There were a few spates of rainshowers, but by and large it was quite the pleasant evening.

Wainwright, whose style is what I’d call “sardonic folk,” was in his usual amusing form, alternating silliness and scatology with scalpel-like dissections of family life and the imminence of death. Which actually sounds a lot less amusing than it was. The dichotomy, though, is part of his appeal, as he gets the listener in mid-shift, gloom being wrenched into laughter, and smiles turning into glaze-eyed winces.

Most of his tunes were from more recent albums, though there were a few that seemed even more newly minted. He wrapped the evening with the de rigeur anti-Bush tune, an unfortunate capstone; the song (“Presidents Day“) was nicely done and all, but it shifted the tone of the evening, and provided at least some division amongst the audience.

Nonetheless, it was a fine time. We were at Wainwright’s last DBG outing, five years back or so, and hopefully will be for his next.

Wilcox was by turns overly-earnest (in an annoyingly pseudo-profound way) and bouncy, car-loving fun. When at his best, he showed a lot of enthusiasm, joy in music-making, and a catchy sense of humor. Starting out, though, he seemed to be more into “New Age pop/folk,” jarring after Wainwright’s gadfly-like barbs. He eventually broke out of that, though, into some tunes that made the match-up a good one, and made the second half of the evening an enjoyable one.

Like Wainwright, a lot of what he does is acoustic guitar, though he brought up a recent song-writing collaborator who lives here in Colorado to join him on the keyboard for a couple of tunes. He also had his wife join him on stage a few times, and the two duet quite nicely together. And to his credit, he shifted his orientation on the stage-in-the-round between each tune, so that everyone got to see him sing toward them. Nicely done. I’ll certainly be putting a few of his albums on the Wish List.

All in all it worked out to 3+ hours of live music (including the intermission), a nice picnic dinner, and a generally enjoyable time. Big props to the Testerfolk for watching Katherine. We’ll almost certainly be back there next summer.

UPDATE: Katherine evidently had a fun time, too.