OTTAWA -- When you are as musically adventurous as Wilco, you fit in anywhere.
More than 8,000 fans packed Festival Plaza last night to see the Chicago-based alternative darlings and their temperamental fusion of acoustic country and electronic rock sound similar to the earliest recordings of the Allman Brothers and The Eagles.
As much live theatre as concertizing musicians, Wilco is the kind of band that still embraces rock’s anarchy and is not above reducing a perfectly good rock song to sonic cinders.
Sporting a cast on his right leg, bearded frontman Jeff Tweedy and his mates John Stirratt, Nels Cline, Glenn Kotche, Pat Sansone and Mikael Jorgensen’s setlist was a virtual lift off their new double-live album, Kicking Television.
Top 2004 gig
“We didn’t know that we were so popular with people in wheelchairs,” Tweedy mysteriously remarked about his handicapped fans on the last Canadian date of their tour. “It’s sad to leave your country. Can we live here?”
Occasionally annoying and often inspiring, Wilco was even more spectacular than they were for a critically acclaimed gig at the Capital Music Hall in 2004.
Meanwhile, opener Roseanne Cash hinted repeatedly last night that being Johnny Cash’s singing-songwriting daughter is both a blessing and a curse.
The 51-year-old Grammy Award-winning Cash turned out a brilliant set of country-style blues. It was the kind of ideal Bluesfest set you might dream of, with one heartbreaking tune after another, played by a wisecracking singer and her dynamite, bare-bones band — then the catcalled requests came in.
Give me a break.
“I’ll add that request onto the other quadrillion others I’ve gotten for a Johnny Cash song,” she snapped at the beginning of Radio Operator, Runaway Train, the tender God Is In The Roses and Tennessee Flat, a song with the kind of big rolling guitarline her father would use to motor a set into higher gear.
The progeny of Johnny’s loins began her career as a punk in the late 1970s before meeting and marrying Rodney Crowell, going country and recording three trailblazing albums — Right or Wrong, Seven Year Ache and King’s Record Shop — in quick order. And much like her father, Roseanne’s been lurking somewhere between punk and country ever since. An angelic storyteller with a fiery temper, Cash was born to sing the blues.
Like I said, a blessing and a curse.
Accompanied by her band and guitarist John Leventhall, Cash comfortably cruised through a 75-minute set of greatest hits and favourite covers that seduced the fans, most of whom were there to see Wilco.
“I know that I don’t exactly fit your criterion but I’ve got a lot of blues in me,” she joked before singing a deliciously raunchy version of Burn Down This Town from her latest CD, Black Cadillac. Her set sounded as raw as it was emotionally bare. Alternating between blues, bluegrass and country, she performed with a rawness that was resonant. Suddenly it felt like a blues festival again.
Earlier on the mainstage, Martin Sexton, the globetrotting troubadour from Massachusetts, turned up the heat on an already blistering afternoon with a passionate set of songs that included the plaintive Black Sheep and the slightly more upbeat Diggin’ You Diggin’ Me.
