Concert Review from the Archives: Emmylou Harris at Battery Park, NYC 7/4/01

(Editor’s note: Happy Fourth! Here’s one from the archives, way back in the day before 9/11 when you could just wander into Battery Park and see a show without being forced to stand in a line extending all the way around the park for an hour, be hassled by cops on the way in, miss most of the show and then be forced to use the same exit as everyone else, meaning another hour’s wait on the way out. Pity those poor people at the Sonic Youth show today. Why hasn’t anybody made the connection that there were no security gauntlets before 9/11…and also no terrorist attacks either?!?)

 

It threatened rain earlier, but we escaped. A long show for this kind of gig, an hour and fifteen minutes including a three-song encore. Emmylou these days is like Mary Lee Kortes except without the supersonics and the rage: very pretty voice. But the band was the real story: Buddy Miller on lead guitar, doing a literally breathtaking, exhilarating Richard Thompson impersonation, all kinds of lightning bluegrass runs incorporating a lot of eerie chromatics throughout the show. Emmylou’s new material, including the title track to her new cd Red Dirt Girl was the best, and she saved it for the second half of the show. Before that, she did a nice cover of Townes Van Zandt’s Pancho and Lefty, along with a more recent Patty Griffin tune. At the end of the show, she and Miller left the stage to the rhythm section, at which point the bass player took a jarringly ostentatious, completely out-of-place funk solo. Her final encore was Love Hurts, which was ruined years ago by that horrid Nazareth cover. We hit a couple of bars afterward, one in the seaport, one a couple of blocks behind it, ended up walking up to Chinatown and eventually Good World at the base of Orchard Street where we finally called it a night about 1 in the morning. Always nice to spend the Fourth in Manhattan since half the town is away.