NRBQ: Night 2 at Levon’s

On the second of a two-night stand at Woodstock’s Levon Helm Studios Saturday, NRBQ everything worked, it all fit and flowed faster and farther, better than Friday. The mood was up; tempos, too; also confidence, communication – unspoken, intuitive – and cohesion.

NRBQ, from left: Terry Adams, John Sebastian, Jake Edwards, Casey McDonough, Scott Ligon, Klem Klimek, Gene Oliveri

When they hit hard with the exuberantly rhythmic, joyful opener “Yeh Yeh,” fans smiled around at each other, exclaimed “WHOA!” and dance-clustered in the scanty open spaces, way more active than on Friday. Then “Terry Got a Muffin” shifted into an even higher gear, that trademark almost-frantic but somehow loose, happy groove, guitarist Scott Ligon’s voice soaring atop both rousing numbers. He and bassist Casey McDonough harmonized as the band relaxed a bit into “Rain at the Drive-in” about love behind fogged car windows. A slower tempo and cozier feel didn’t diminish the energy or momentum, just made it romantic. This perfectly set up the laid-back exorcism of “Blues Stay Away from Me,” cool saxophones of Klem Klimek and Gene Oliveri and John Sebastian’s baritone guitar conversing around the edges.

Then, the usual roller coaster, bumping the energy in the blithe strut of “Singin’ in the Rain,” Scott singing and Terry Adams’s piano erupting strong. “Magnet” rolled in a similar arrangement, but here Scott lit up the tune with a swaggering guitar break and burly vocal, sharing the spotlight again with Terry’s piano.

Next came a slow-down three-song sequence; then an explosion.

“Daddy’s Gonna Tell You No Lie” reassured in a calm, contained way, Casey and Scott singing together. Scott nodded to Klem, cueing a hot tenor sax break; Klem shrugged off the mid-song applause with hilarious mock humility.

Gene Oliveri’s chart tablet

Monk’s “Pannonica” did what the best Monk tunes do; Terry first portrayed one feeling, then layered on others so subtly the emotions blended, buzzed around together in successive revelations, each a surprise. This masterly piano excursion hypnotized, slyly nuanced but accessible right away; here the saxes had their subtle say, too.

John sang “Richland Woman Blues” persuasively, in better voice than anything he sang Friday. Then Klem knocked everything sideways in the irresistible detonation of “Get a Grip,” sensational R&B fervor at top volume. A saxophonist, he sang like a human trumpet, roaming restlessly up front; Scott’s guitar break hit just as hot.

Klem Klimek, above; Scott Ligon, below

That four-song run felt like a peak, but then they kept things just that high right through to the end. “Please Don’t Talk About Me When I’m Gone” built from Terry’s quiet solo piano intro, expanded via his vocal, smoother, stronger than Friday. Then everybody built this happy groove together. Scott’s guitar first comped chords, then staccato single notes flew fast, Casey’s bass got busy, drummer Jake Edwards took his first solo all night, then the saxes took their turn.

This outburst echoed the careening energy of the opening run, then “We’re Walking” and “We Travel the Space Ways” – Afro-Futurist mission statement of Sun Ra, one of the heroes Terry cited Friday in “Imaginary Radio” – celebrated happy motion, on foot, then planet to planet. Terry both sang and soloed big in “Walking,” while Klem cracked up Gene by ad-libbing about Christopher Walken. Scott’s solo here, though, was serious business, a gleeful note clatter.

Introduced by Terry’s piano carving circular riffs, “Spaceways” looked into the future, but its groove reached back, to a powerful railroad-like momentum. Here, Scott detuned his guitar for sustained, bent-note glides under Klem’s hard-charging solo.

The rueful confessional “That Makes Me a Fool” hit home in Scott’s heartbreaking/heartbroken vocal, saxes edging in between phrases, before things went comical again.

Casey McDonough

Casey’s vocal led the goofy shuffle “Yes, I Have a Banana,” affirmative reply to the familiar fruit denial. In the raucous, playful “Hit The Hay,” Sebastian shifted to banjo and the crowd shouted the refrain. These novelty numbers sandwiched the seductively tender “Things to You,” slower and seriously sweet. Again, Scott’s vocal brought this lovely lyric to poignant life.

Then came a happy-love pairing – ‘I Love Her She Loves Me” in simple sincerity and the pledge “Never Take The Place of You” – and an antique celebration of music itself: “The Music

Goes ‘Round and Around.” Terry’s solo rang sweet and serene in “I Love Her” with Scott shifting to acoustic guitar and singing lead. He was back on electric for “Never,” John chiming in on harmonica and everybody chanting “Never!”

Saxes starred in the rollicking “Music Goes ‘Round,” Klem quoting “Pennies from Heaven” – as he’d quoted the recently deceased Woodstock resident saxophone colossus Sonny Rollins’s “St. Thomas” in a solo on Friday.

Terry stood and donned his coat to signal the end and they went off, briefly. Then, as at the beginning, a run of their most joyful tunes hit as happy encores. “Little Floater” (refrain: “I’m in love with an automobile and I know that it loves me too”) cruised on Terry’s synthesizer glide. The careening “Howard Johnson’s Got His Ho Jo Working” raised the question of the next tune, “Do You Feel It?” The band was rightly confident of the answer. Terry led early with jaunty piano and vocal while Klem brought the crowd back up to its feet, happy unanimous. He didn’t bother calling out this invitation; he simply went to the front row and took two fans by the hand, the folks next to Fred and Mary from LA – you remember – and drew them to their feet so everybody got the idea.

“Green Lights” delighted with its sense of release, that all the barriers to love are gone, blown away – like Scott’s guitar solo did to everybody.

Terry Adams

While all the NRBQ players but Terry Adams have changed over half a century plus, the play itself never has. Virtuoso without stiffening into fussy, playful but with serious intent, their music combines highly idiosyncratic individual performance with unanimous joy in the audience. The particular reaches the universal. Fans become part of the thing.

Full of taste, touch and tuneful fire, Terry’s keyboards weld the pieces together, leaving plenty of oxygen for everybody. He leads with a light touch, or none: He sometimes simply starts a tune and the band jumps in immediately. Klem would recognize a song after the first notes and notify Gene, who’d scan his tablet for a chart, if necessary. More often, he’d launch right away, too.

Klem Klimek, left; Gene Oliveri, right

Terry Adams, at left, digs Jake Edwards’s drumming; stage tech deluxe John Krucke at center. Below: Jake Edwards

That includes even new drummer Jake Edwards, maybe half Terry’s age and from the same western Massachusetts area where Terry now lives. Jake swings more like NRBQ’s late longtime drummer Tommy Ardolino than his more rocking predecessors in between; Jake really has the feel. This works because Casey’s bass hits as sparsely and strongly as Joey Spampinato. Playing a bit behind the beat, he pushes the music forward.

Scott Ligon, above, twice; John Sebastian, below

Guitar ace Scott Ligon’s high-energy solos burst with confident bravado or settle into subtle musings; just as essential to the songs and the feel, he steadily supports the groove and his bandmates when they solo. ‘Q songs breathe in an inviting way, seams open for interjections and comments. It’s always a conversation and always open. Frequent guest John Sebastian showed last weekend he knows how to find those spots just as well as the regular crew.

Wait, no – there’s nothing regular about NRBQ, maybe America’s most beloved band, revered by fans who pilgrimage across the country to see them.

Saturday, June 30

8:10 – 10:05 p.m.

Yeh Yeh

Terry Got a Muffin

Rain at the Drive-in

Blues Stay Away from Me

Singin’ in the Rain

Magnet

Daddy’s Gonna Tell You No Lie

Pannonica

Richland Woman Blues

Get a Grip

Please Don’t Talk About Me When I’m Gone

We’re Walking

We Travel the Spaceways

That Makes Me a Fool

Yes, I Have a Banana

Things to You

Hit The Hay

I Love Her, She Loves Me

Never Take the Place of You

The Music Goes ‘Round and Around

Encores: Little Floater

Howard Johnson’s Got His Ho Jo Working

Do You Feel It?

Green Lights

Note on Photos: Friday, I sat in a side section along stage right – the Terry side – but moved around some, in very tight quarters. Saturday, I roamed but mainly stood along stage left – the Klem side – and again moved around some.

Fred and Mary, from LA

Intermission, Between NRBQ Shows

Part 2 of 3

Thin rain flew sideways on wind so strong it earned warnings on the Kingston Rhinebeck Bridge over the whitecap-etched Hudson far below. On a rainy Saturday morning sentimental journey to the Bard campus, where my son, daughter and son’s wife all graduated, there was not a soul in sight. The art gallery was closed, everything seemed closed; but memories of happy dinner-time visits with my young ones, just an hour south of my Albany ad-and-pr agency office, echoed sweet. I remembered an Easter picnic at Blithewood, the mansion Bard had absorbed on a high bluff over the river.

The rain blew out of town as I recrossed the Hudson toward Woodstock.

The tie-dyed, pot-smoked town looks backward so strongly it’s become an easy target as a ‘60s cultural anachronism. But as skies brightened over my quest for parking, it felt cozy, charming.

Looking closer, it also seemed clamorous: many cars and people, and too many dogs, like the large, ill-managed and aggressive one that routed a woman from her bench by jumping on her repeatedly.

She’d asked permission to occupy her spot from a throng gathered behind it to watch a band playing on the patio in front of a Haight- or East Village 60s-style boutique. The building bore a sign claiming Dylan hung out there when it was Cafe Espresso. The band had the vintage-jam sound in its pocket, stretching out on the Velvets’ “Sweet Jane” as I had walked from the Woodstock Artists Association and Museum art gallery through a bookstore visit. I found an empty folding chair just off the sidewalk by the boutique and watched the band ease confidently into Traffic’s “Feelin’ Alright” then segue into the Dead’s “I Know You Rider” over a relaxed half hour. Later came “Come Together,” “Turn On Your Lovelight,” complete with Pigpen-style rap, and “Sitting In Limbo” with all its Caribbean flavor bleached out, but rocking OK. “You’d almost think we’d rehearsed,” claimed the lead singer.

A woman offered her pre-rolled to the drummer. A pro, he toked without losing the groove. Later, the lead singer pulled a bourbon pint from his guitar case and passed it among the band. Google “Old Woodstock hippie” and you’d find the guy in white beard and big hair who approached the band and reached for the bottle. The singer hesitated a bit before laughing and handing it over for a hefty snort.

As they shifted to 80s gloom and started the Cure’s “Pictures of You,” I scanned the folks whose look and affect seemed Woodstock-perfect but might not work as well elsewhere. They looked and acted like stars; maybe some were, some I thought I’d seen onstage somewhere, with somebody. Was that guy in lots of turquoise Steve Stevens from Billy Idol’s band? Was that wide-shouldered, big-jawed guy behind me Donald Fagen?

Heading back to the middle of town, I stopped to buy the novel I’d knocked off the shelf earlier in the Golden Notebook, managed not to buy any record-label cassettes ($6, about what they cost new) in Woodstock Music Shop with its stacked amps, guitars hung on racks overhead and knee-to-ceiling shelves offering albums in crammed bins. Step-stools gave views of the highest strata. I sat in a park nearby reading, watching the scene change in the lowering sun as the sound turned up.

The municipal parking lot behind me – $10 all day, free after dinner – filled up with more vehicles than earlier. A lean gent in cowboy glitz with braided beard set up amp and mic on a small shop’s even smaller porch. His accompanist tuned his guitar, then unplugged and walked, still wearing the guitar, to grab something from his car. A woman who’d brought her djembe to the porch decided not to play after all, packed it up and left as another woman walked past, music stand in one hand, guitar case in the other and a ukulele in her backpack, headed for a gig somewhere.

The glitzed cowboy started to sing in a Tom Waits growl as a full band down the street started to rock “Statesboro Blues.” The place felt happily alive, but it was time to head back to Levon’s.

Woodstock remains a town made by music and other arts; but on the weekend of The Festival (mid-August, 1969), NRBQ played the Aerodrome in Schenectady. My brother Jim skipped Woodstock to see NRBQ instead, and they changed his life. In bands himself since fourth grade and later a frequent guest saxophonist with them, he felt amazed, charmed, by the possibility their freedom and fluency in any style of music showed him.

And that’s what they still do.

Like Friday and Saturday, in Woodstock.

NRBQ at Levon Helm Studios, Woodstock; Friday, May 29 (First of two nights)

Boarding their flight from Los Angeles to JFK, Fred and Mary compared destinations with a stranger across the aisle. “We said we were headed to Woodstock,” Fred recalled. “Oh, you’re going to see NRBQ,” said plane neighbor Mark Rowland, a writer who’d profiled the ‘Q’ decades before in Musician magazine. “Seeing NRBQ play…for the first time is a little like sauntering into an amusement park with all-new rides,” Rowland wrote then. “You’re happy to be in on the discovery, and you’re having fun, but it’s still a little uncertain just what is going on.”

Other fans I met or re-met Friday at Levon Helm Studios flew from Atlanta, Seattle, Dallas, Omaha. Or they drove from Chicago, Boston, or across town, as John Sebastian did to guest on both Friday and Saturday shows, the beloved band’s first in weeks and last until August.

NRBQ fans may be dedicated as Deadheads. Super fan “Johnny D” DeAngelis followed them for a full summer as a teen and has seen them hundreds of times since. But they’re far fewer. Both shows sold out immediately, but the Levon Helm Studios hold only 250: 100 seats plus standing room for 150. It’s closer than intimate: Front row fans sit about a yard from the monitors; balconies stack tall in the timbered space.

Johnny D and friends

NRBQ Friday, from left: Terry Adams, Jake Edwards, John Sebastian, Casey McDonough, Klem Klimek, Scott Ligon; Gene Oliveri obscured behind Scott

Friday felt thrilling, spiced with scarcity, the tang of something much missed; but also raw at times, tentative and uncertain, like Rowland wrote. Saturday felt focused, sharp, soaring; as if Friday was practice, Saturday the pay off. Yet even if Saturday hadn’t happened, fans from far and near wouldn’t have complained.

When I bumped into John Sebastian just before show time Friday, I asked how much he’d play. “I don’t know,” he laughed. “I never know.” Uncertain, but ready, he went onstage right away as old friend, NRBQ co-founder, leader, keyboardist Terry Adams waved him to right join. He strapped on his baritone guitar and checked his harmonica case as bassist-singer Casey McDonough, guitarist-singer Scott Ligon, young new drummer Jake Edwards and saxophonists Klem Klimek and Gene Oliveri took up their instruments.

Terry Adams, above; John Sebastian, below

They bounced “That’s Neat, That’s Nice” as a jazzy hello, Scott singing lead and Terry taking the last solo after Klem, Scott and John – all compact statements without frills or fuss, drums signaling a stop-and-go coda. “Singin’ In the Rain” rolled at a similar upbeat tempo and feel, an agile strut, Oliveri taking his first yakkety bebop solo. Klem sang first in “You Got Me Going,” another happy rocker.

Klem Klimek, left; and Gene Oliveri

Klem wields the ‘Q’s biggest, most extraverted personality and strongest voice while workmanlike Scott’s rings the prettiest, perfect on ballads and happy numbers. Casey shows off both low-range grit and sky-high falsetto. As Terry told me when Casey joined a decade ago, his voice links beautifully with Scott’s; both sing in Chicago’s Flat Five group.

Casey McDonough, left; Scott Ligon, right

Friday, they sang tight on the joyous “End of the Road” and “Waitin’ On My Sweetie Pie” early on, then in both choruses and leads thereafter. Voices well worn, Terry and John left most leads to Scott, who once took over a tune mid-song when Terry’s voice faltered. John sang lead on his Lovin’ Spoonful classic “Did You Ever Have to Make Up Your Mind?” and his newer wistful “Passing Fantasy” on Friday; he chimed in happily in some bluesy guitar solos and the occasional harmonica break, and comped chords behind Scott’s skilled, often fiery breaks.

Terry Adams, left; and Jake Edwards

As usual, the show built in waves, both in the feelings powering the lyrics and the wonderfully wack mastery of many musical feels. Love songs worked because they felt sincere. “This Love Is True” and “Never Take the Place of You” expressed longing while “I Want You Bad” and “The One and Only” romped in romantic gladness.

As Johnny D rightly observed, years ago, “They make you feel young” – upbeat energy revving the comic “Wacky Tobacky” and “Get Down Grandpa,” the antiques “This Old House” and “The Music Goes ‘Round and Around” to end the set.

Quieter moods may be their most compelling, though. Adams’ soulful, understated piano gave the Monk classic “Ruby My Dear” a calm, sweet eloquence; his own “Tragic Magic” cruised on sci-fi weirdness and “Snowfall” mixed vintage melody with rock energy, updating this antique without bruising it.

On the quiet, nostalgic side, “Imaginary Radio” hailed Terry’s heroes in poignant words. He also revved up the comedy, leaving the piano to Casey and cautioning “Remember Your Name and Address” as if in a classroom.

The mood lightened then soared in the later songs, pulsating rockers “Magnet” and “Grandpa” setting up Clarence “Frogman” Henry’s funk shuffle “Ain’t Got No Home” with exciting Casey vocal and hot Scott guitar. That New Orleans mood bounced back to launch the encore with “Boozoo and Leona,” a happy zydeco chug. Monk’s “Well You Needn’t” held the mood, and momentum, through “Get Rhythm” to sign off.

Terry mostly chose the tunes early on, sometimes just starting up and trusting everybody to climb on board. He later looked around, accepting suggestions on the bandstand. Things flowed too smoothly for a rehearsal’s informality, with Klem quickly bringing newcomer Gene up to speed at each surprise. They blended well, both in section-like linked playing in harmony, soloing hot, or improvising parts together.

It all felt organic, made with fresh ingredients, as Terry has long described things. Tight parts crackled, loose stuff charmed in relaxed ways. The players all helped each other, listened and grinned. Fun reigned, and fans left wondering, in happy uncertainty, what surprises might happen Saturday.

Below, the song list on Terry Adams’s music stand; a menu more than a map. The actual set list is below this photo.