Marc, Ed, Stu, Shawn- and a Pair of Marys

That beats a full house, even though neither of them, strictly, was. They were my two music experiences of the week, from Sunday afternoon to Friday night. Someone commented after last night's show, Don't you ever stay home?

to which I replied,

 I’m done until January….oh look Sally Schaefer is playing this afternoon….

Probably will skip that one, as we skipped poetry and another friend's new band Wednesday night and an artist's open house Thursday night. Gotta pick your spots.

Yesterday, the plumber arrived and capped off the water line to the sink under the dis-bar. Now that the steady drip-Drip-DRIP is out of there, we're in less of a hurry to finish the demolition downstairs.

It was a reasonably productive week at work, where in the past seven days I filed as many bankruptcy cases (two) as I had all of 2023 to date, and several others are warming up in the bullpen. Speaking of bullpens, the Bisons are going to be hosting one of those goofy Savannah Bananas games next July, and I’ve entered the lottery to win tickets to it (there are also games in other cities next year).  I have nothing else right now officially on my baseball or music calendars until January, but the two events of the past week more than cover me for a while.

Mary Ramsey, long time lead singer of 10,000 Maniacs, stepped down from that microphone over the summer, with the full appreciation and blessing of the band. I think it was a matter of not being up to the grueling tour schedule anymore, and being about her age I definitely appreciate that. She still sings and plays, though, with a trio of other string players at local venues. I missed out on three opportunities to see her and friends after her “retirement,“ the first of them at our beloved local Americana venue Sportsmen's. They had a few other gigs in the months since them which I wasn’t able to make it to, but then I saw they had a Sunday afternoon show at that same Sportsmen's stage, and the Bills game wasn’t even until that night.

Mary and the trio put on a much better show than the Bills did later that Sunday.

Seating at Sportsmen's is general admission and first come first sit, and I’ve gotten used to having to get there at least an hour early to have a chance of even leaning against a pole. Much of their usual crowd was probably out getting drunk in a parking lot someplace before the 8:20 kickoff, so I got a front row seat for the soundcheck:



Mary, setting up with the sound guy. Stu and Marc on guitars came up soon after. Ed, on standup bass, must've had trouble getting a parking spot close enough to haul out his strings, so he and the bass came in the stage door during the opening number.



Lots of businesses decorate for Halloween, but Sportsmen's goes above and beyond. The ghoul behind Stu Weissman has a real guitar, and the band members were checking it out between songs.

Their show was mostly covers, from Beatles to bluesier things. She had stories of getting music stands to hold music up at outdoor venues, and histories of others they sang- working from thick binders of lyrics and chords, not iPads.  At the break, I finally got to say hello to Mary in person; we've  been Facebook friends for years and I've been seeing her perform back to a mid-90s show I took Emily to when the kid was four years old, but these were our first actual exchanged words.

Including her name.

For one thing, she told all of us that "Yes, Mary Ramsey" is a palindrome. That alone was worth the price of admission. But that name minus the yes got written down for me, as well. For this time, I brought the 2002 John & Mary CD I’d found at Hi-Fi Hits- the last of several she'd done with her longtime duo partner (and Maniac co-founder) John Lombardo- right before his first show with 10KM3.0 last month.  I forgot to bring it to that one but showed him the cover picture on my phone, but this time Mary not only signed it, but she took the time on her break to bring it to John on the Sportsmen's balcony and had him sign it for me, too. 



I got to thank her for the songs, her stories that afternoon of music stands and song histories, and for making my day far better than the Bills would go on to do that night.  They won, but it was ugly.

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Last night then returned me to two things of beauty.

I had never seen Shawn Colvin perform despite having about 37 of her records and devouring her memoir when it came out a few years back. Last and only time I saw Mary Chapin Carpenter perform was in 1993, before we even moved here- at Melody Fair, an in-the-round venue of onetime fame, the abandoned hulk of which is now under a Walmart in North Tonawanda. The (paywalled) local review of that show survives online in all its glorious misogyny, and it was written by a woman:P

MARY CHAPIN-CARPENTER, country music's reigning female singer-songwriter, engaged in a little give and take Thursday night at Melody Fair: She gave her all, and her worshipful fans made her take it right back. Carpenter opened her energetic show with "I Feel Lucky," which inspired a front-row fan to present her with a strip of scratch-off lottery tickets.

The round-figured star, with small features framed by long, straight blond hair, showed off the talent that earned her a 1993 Best Female Vocalist Grammy. With her wry smile and infectious melodies, she seemed to have the wattage of the sun wrapped up in her diminutive stature.

WHO CARES WHAT SHE LOOKED LIKE? We came for a concert, not a fucking fashion show!  (The opening act, women who went by The Heartbeats, also got a review devoted more to their footwear than their songs.)

Finally, my lack of any-to-recent history with these brilliant performers changed. Mary and Shawn have been doing these one-off duo tours together for years, this one on-and-off-again due to COVID. They just had to cancel the two this week right before this one, but they made it to the 716 for a near-full house and 90 minutes of song, story and occasional silliness.



Speaking of silly, we'd seen John Cleese at UB some years earlier. Looks like he left the comfy chairs.

No opening act, so Mary and Shawn came out close to the stated 7:30 start, promising a mix of duos, solo numbers, stories in between and guaranteed irreverence.



“Let it be noted it took only 30 minutes to drop the first f-bomb.”

( The setlist in its entirety, from some nice scribe who knew the titles better than I: )

There were stories with many of those songs, and updates to a few of their lyrics. "End of the Innocence" has frequently required revision of the verse that Henley and Bruce Hornsby originally wrote for it about Ronald Reagan-

O beautiful, for spacious skies
Now those skies are threatening
They're beating plowshares into swords
For this tired old man that we elected king

By the time we heard Hornsby play that song in his own concert in the early 90s, he'd morphed the last line into "this tired old man who is no longer king." Now, though, another 30 years and at least three tired old men on from the Gipper, Mary and Shawn changed it to "these tired old men we keep electing king."

Another came in their rendition of "I Feel Lucky," one of those 1993 hits that got Mary that Grammy back then. The original lyric she wrote for it shared a fantasy of a female country singer of the era:

Dwight Yoakim's in the corner, try'n' to catch my eye.
Lyle Lovett's right beside me with his hand upon my thigh.

Ah, but that was years before #metoo, so now she sings that last line as "Lyle Lovett's right beside me and I think I made him cry!"

Then the tales of their creation. Shawn's "Polaroids" was inspired during and after her first UK gig, singing backup for Suzanne Vega for no ostensible reason for either woman's career. She and Mary both sang on "Someday," the Steve Earle composition Shawn famously and beautifully rendered on her first "Cover Girl" album, but the better Earle story she told was about one of her own compositions, one she played with Steve when they were on tour together. "That's the best break-up song ever," he told Shawn. That compliment, coming from a man then married eight times (twice to the same woman) and in a universe of great break-up songs, led her to inquire as to why he felt that. "BECAUSE IT'S A MURDER SONG!"

And then they went into "Sunny Came Home." As you do.

Mary prefaced the one new song of the night, with a brief conversation inspired by the CEO of Spotify. Her last recording was released in 2020, which prompted her to repeat the quote from Spotify guy:

“You can’t record music once every three to four years and think that’s going to be enough."

Mary  to Spotify CEO: "PISS OFF!"

That one beautiful new song, inspired by a woman in an old pickup truck with her two dogs as passengers, will be on this upcoming album that, yes, has taken her three to four years. A house full of fans agreed that was enough.

After the mostly silly encores, we headed to our homes and she and Shawn to Ithaca, where they will do it all over again tonight.

I'll be here. My house, and heart, are already full.