A summer show at Hancher? Yes, please!
Lyle Lovett and His Large Band fill the auditorium with a well-choreographed set long on banter and big sounds
At this point, it’s probably silly to review a show by Lyle Lovett and his Large Band. Forty years in, Lovett is polished at seeming casually unpolished, his songs and setlist creation have few peers, and if his band isn’t the most-talented, most-versatile combo on the road, I’ve yet to see its competition.
But it is perhaps because of those things that I feel compelled to write about seeing Lovett and Co. on Sunday night at Hancher Auditorium in Iowa City. I saw an abbreviated version of this set a year ago at the McGrath Amphitheatre in Cedar Rapids and would watch it again a year from now. Even when you know what is coming, there is something magical about it when it arrives.
I’ve been listening to and keeping up with Lovett since the late 1980s, and I wondered if there were newcomers to Lovett among the crowd. Hancher tends to draw a fairly consistent audience that attends things because they are presented at Hancher as much as they do because it is something they want to see, so I assumed there were a few who didn’t know much. Trying to explain Lovett to my teenaged son as we headed out the door, I fell back on country and folk, immediately realizing this hasn’t accurately described him in a very long time.
As if to affirm expectations or confound them, depending on the individual audience member’s experience, Lovett followed a ripping band-only opening run through “Cookin’ at the Continental” with his cover of the Tammy Wynette hit, “Stand By Your Man.” Yes, it’s a country standard, but Lovett’s arrangement surrounds what little twang remains with a jazzy horn section and soulful backing vocals. Anyone expecting country would find little beyond this the rest of the night.
What they would find instead is a true big band show. Each of the 14 other performers on stage had a chance to solo, some multiple times, and nearly all had the opportunity to ham it up with the boss in seemingly spontaneous conversations that just happened to cue the next song. When you are trying to keep 15 musicians on the same page — and the light crew busy as each took a turn in the spotlight — there is little room for spontaneity.
Lovett’s latest LP, 12th of June, came out two years ago, and that followed a 10-year gap in his catalog, so it’s no surprise he’s still featuring it heavily in the set. The 65-year-old singer is the father of twin six year olds, and this clearly has offered him a rich vein to mine as a songwriter. He bantered with his bandmates about parenting styles, each anecdote leading to another song from that album. “Pants is Overrated” and “Pig Meat Man,” one-note jokes on record saved occasionally by Lovett’s lyrical wit, had more life on stage as the players dug into the soulful grooves.
The new songs held their own, for the most part, when standing shoulder-to-shoulder with deeper cuts, but those older tunes were the most satisfying moments of the show. Lovett drew from nearly every studio album, hitting “Cowboy Man” from his self-titled debut, “If I Had a Boat” and “She’s No Lady” from Pontiac (the latter dedicated to a couple he said had shared it was their first dance at their wedding, the opening lyric of “She hates my momma, she hates my daddy too” drawing the biggest reaction of the night), “Here I Am” and “Stand By Your Man” from Lyle Lovett and His Large Band, and “I’ve Been to Memphis” and “Church” from Joshua Judges Ruth. He even pulled out “Penguins” from I Love Everybody.
One could knit pick the setlist, hoping for a broader stylistic range, but Lovett, no fool, didn’t waste a moment with that band on stage. I wasn’t going to hear The Road to Ensenada favorite “Private Conversation” when he could let the band loose on “(That’s Right (You’re Not From Texas),” for example.
The best moments of the night were those taking full advantage of those tools. “I Will Rise Up” from the relatively recent It’s Not Big, It’s Large, and the title song from his latest, “12th of June” (about the day his kids were born), were chill inducing, the rich vocal harmonies lifting the songs beyond where they reside on record. Those vocals were a help for Lovett, his voice occasionally dropping out in a swallowed consonant here or there, those 65 years starting to catch up with his vocal cords.
If the only quibbles with a show are that the artist has too many good songs from which to choose and that his voice is showing its age, perhaps it is time to bring this to a close. Hancher has rarely hosted concerts in the summer, its schedule following the academic calendar for decades. If this is what we can expect from the new leadership there, I’m here for it. Lovett remarked more than once on the beauty of this relatively new auditorium, and he was right to do so. It’s one of the best-sounding rooms in the country, and when you have the chance to see a band like this fill its every corner with warm, wonderful sound, you would be a fool to miss it.