We knew Spoleto season was upon us last month when people started phoning in Lou Reed sightings a few days ahead of the opening ceremony, and though the former Velvet Underground frontman accompanied wife Laurie Anderson to her official festival house party Wednesday night, he seems generally to have kept a low profile.
But Anderson and Reed had a surprise planned for the audience Thursday night (the second of Anderson’s three Spoleto shows). News of some kind of special guest reached the newsroom at about 3 p.m., and through some mojo I’ll never understand I wound up with a ticket to what appeared to be an otherwise sold-out Anderson performance at Memminger.
The surprise? Near the end of the show, Anderson announced that it was her 61st birthday and called Reed up on stage for a rendition of “The Lost Art of Conversation.” It turns out this isn’t the first time Reed has joined Anderson for a performance of this song from the Homeland cycle, but for what it’s worth, I thought Reed added an electric growl to the piece as it wore on, and for just a moment the five players transformed the relatively minimalistic score into what seemed like a sudden, queasy, blues-rock hallucination, which isn’t exactly an everyday sound when one of your five instruments is an accordion. It surged and faded, but it seemed spontaneous and surprising.
So that’s why I got a ticket. But there was so much more to talk about.
If you’re one of the lucky few who has a ticket to Friday night’s show, I suspect you’ll wind up agreeing that the centerpiece of Homeland is a spoken-word-over-tecno-beat thing called either “Only an Expert” or “Only an Expert Can Deal With the Problem.” It’s a brilliant piece of social commentary and you could probably dance to it in a pinch, but I didn’t know how it would go over here.
Short answer? It cracked the audience up. Just a few, at first, but they got the humor and started laughing at all the right moments. The laughter got louder as the audience grew more confident, too.
But here’s the memorable part: The peak of the laughter — and this drew applause in the middle of the performance, too — came during the part when Anderson riffed on global warming, and how so long as enough experts agreed it wasn’t a problem, it wasn’t… until one expert made a movie and won an Oscar and then a Nobel Peace Prize, which then forced the other experts to reconsider. This was much, much funnier to the audience than the previous bit, which talked about how only experts can find weapons by looking at refrigerator parts and magnets.
And I found myself wondering: Was the odd surge in laughter in part because those audience members who hadn’t been laughing at Anderson’s Iraq/Bush administration references finally got an Al Gore reference and thought they were laughing at him, rather than the absurdity of the whole situation? The group seated immediately in front of me even laughed, and one of the men from that group left ridiculously early and appeared to be offended by something.
Here’s the payoff: The next topic after the big-laugh “An Inconvenient Truth” reference was a stark, unfunny statement about torture. Bam. That’s full-stop message delivery.
But as promised, Homeland is only overtly political when it’s in political mode, and it spends the bulk of its time being poetic in one form or another as Anderson tells a bunch of short little stories in a couple of voices. I’m not quite sure what “strange perfumes and long-lost rooms” means, but it’s a phrase that lingers. One of several.
I found the end of the show intriguing as well. As soon as Anderson said goodnight, many of the older members of the audience bolted for the exits, including the unhappy (not to mention absurdly over-perfumed) group in front of me. But the bulk of the middle-aged crowd remained on its feet through a generous ovation and refused to leave the hall until Anderson and her band returned to the stage to accept their enthusiastic appreciation. I don’t know that I’ve seen a curtain call like that at a Spoleto event.
Was Homeland one knockout song after another? No. There was quite a bit of ambient, minimalistic stuff between the standout pieces, making it not unlike a record album that has tracks you’ll generally skip over to get to your favorites. But even the transitional compositions were musical, and in the end my only beef was that for some reason I just couldn’t make out some of the words Anderson sang, particularly in the choruses. And it wasn’t just me: The woman next to me asked if I could tell what she was saying. Is that a fixable technical issue?
On my way home I detoured up a blocked-off stretch of George and St. Philips around The Cistern, where the Carolina Chocolate Drops were playing to what appeared to be an engaged and appreciative crowd. I’d heard reports that police and security have taken to hassling people who try to listen to Cistern concerts from the street, but there was none of that on display when I walked by, and the result is likely to be one of my favorite festival memories: All these people grooving on the Chocolate Drops in this beautiful setting, and all these people peering through the cast iron fence, just soaking it up.
So it was a good night. I hope yours was as well.
A video of Anderson performing “Only an Expert” last fall.
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Thought the performance was way too dark for me. Even scathing political satire gives the audience a chance to have some fun for their money. If one agrees or not politically, this was entertaining to say the least. And at times the lyrics seemed to make no sense at all.
Also, the seats in last row of the balcony (which I took to get a better view of the stage) were horrible. The lower row reclined into our legroom making the seats the worst I’ve ever endured. The woman in front of me, an usher, insisted on reclining against my protests.
Please edit to say “not entertaining to say the least”