To: Hix List <hix@yahoogroups.com> From: Wendy Lapides Date sent: Tue, 31 Jul 2007 Subject: Show Report Show Report from The Barn, Brooklyn, Connecticut, July 29, 2007 WORST VENUE EVER I had been eagerly anticipating this show since I’d first heard about it via the Hixlist. I usually see Dan at The Narrows in Fall River, Massachusetts but that wasn’t one of his stops this tour. Instead, he was to be at a place I’d never heard of called The Barn in Eastern Connecticut, about an hour from my house in Rhode Island. The Barn’s website says that no alcohol is served though BYOB is permitted. “Good,” I thought. Fewer drunks for Dan to contend with. The site also states: “Our goal is supply a family friendly environment...” They neglected, however, to say what kind of families they were appealing to. By the end of the night, names like Addams and Munsters came to mind. My husband, children (ages 21 and 23) and I arrived at The Barn at 5:30. Not being familiar with the venue, we wanted to get there early. The doors opened at 5:00, a band called Sour Grapes was to start at 6:30 and Dan at 8:30. We parked the car and toted our cooler across a dewey field towards The Barn. The first thing I saw was a pair of outhouses. I haven’t used an outhouse since I spent a summer on a school bus in Maine in 1974. I kind of wanted to let that record stand. We entered The Barn and handed in our tickets. I had been expecting a charming place where perhaps weddings and parties were held. This barn, however, must have held animals only hours before it held us. The floor was dirt and the scent of manure lingered in the humid, still air. I wished I hadn’t worn sandals. The layout of the barn was peculiar too. As you walk in and look to the left, there was the “stage”, really just a small slab of concrete. There was an area of dirt and stones in front of the stage, a bar area straight ahead with a pool- and foosball table, and plastic chairs to the right. This configuration meant that people were constantly crossing in front of the stage to get to the outhouses. The Barn’s MC announced a raffle for a kid’s benefit and I bought 18 chances for a pair of Red Sox tickets (second prize) or a guitar autographed by Dan and the band (first prize). How I wanted to win that and I had a funny feeling that I just might! Promptly at 6:30, Sour Grapes came on. The band consists of a woman on congas and a crutch to which a washboard and tambourine were attached. The other band member was a guy on guitar and harmonica. The woman had a nice voice, and what I could hear of their music, sounded pretty good. The audience was incredibly rude, talking loudly through their entire, albeit a bit long at an hour and a half, set. Around 8:00, Dan walked into the barn and began fiddling with the sound equipment. Four or five people came up to him and gave him albums to sign, and their communication seemed amiable. I was very worried about how Dan would react to this crowd. I’ve seen him get annoyed with far less than what was going on here. With little fanfare, Dan and the Lickettes (Roberta and Daria) and the Lickman (Paul, Rich and Dave) as he referred to the male members walked onto the stage. All were dressed in dark attire, or maybe it was just the poor lighting that made it seem that way. The sound was a problem too. The Lickettes kept telling the sound guy that their monitors weren’t working. It improved after the first couple of songs. The set list was as follows: 1. An instrumental medley that I was unfamiliar with 2. Four or Five Times 3. Canned Music 4. Blues My Naughty Sweetie Gives to Me 5. Savin’ My Lovin’ 6. How Can I Miss You When You Won’t Go Away 7. Peach Pickin’ Time 8. Song For My Father 9. I’m an Old Cowhand 10. Honeysuckle Rose 11. I Scare Myself 12. Milk Shakin’ Mama 13. Jug Band Music 14. Long Come a Viper 15. Scotch & Soda 16. Chattanooga Shoe Shine Boy During the show, a guy, I’ll call him Wookiee #12, stood right in front of the band doing idiotic dance moves and blocking everyone’s view. Occasionally, he was joined by some other revelers. They were intensely distracting and annoying. One woman kept saying “My mother knows who Dan Hicks is” over and over. She came over to my daughter and said, “Come on, get up and dance!” and my daughter replied that she was here to see and hear Dan, not her. No one really seemed to be in charge of crowd control so these people were allowed to just block the view and make the night about themselves. At one point, Wookiee jumped right onto the stage in front of Dan. There was an audible gasp from the crowd, and I found myself hoping Dan would shove the neck of his guitar into the guy’s cojones. Another time, Wookiee splayed himself on the ground and lay still. I kind of hoped he had passed out. Some guy came over and started leaping around him in WWE or (WWF!) style. Dan pretty much ignored it all. He went from one song to the next with no in-between patter. Though the singing and playing was wonderful, I felt like he just wanted to get the gig over with and I didn’t blame him at all. I kind of just wanted to get out of there too. It occurred to me that I could have been listening to Dan on my ipod at a freak show for the amount of intimacy and joy I was experiencing from live music. I didn’t win the Red Sox tickets or the guitar. So much for my intuition. At the end of the show, the MC who was obviously a Dan fan, said it was a dream come true to finally see him. He also said that Dan’s music was the kind where you just had to be in the moment when you listened. While I agree in theory, if “the moment” was like the one I had just been in, I’ll take the canned music of my ipod.