Oct. 29, 1977: Phoebe Snow at Shea's Buffalo
When
you love an artist madly, you come to a show expecting that it will transcend
troubles and cares. But sometimes troubles get the upper hand.
Oct. 29, 1977
It’s
Bad Night All Around
For Phoebe Snow
Phoebe Snow never has a bad night, her
bus driver responds backstage in Shea’s
The main question, however, concerns
how to get to the Boardwalk Café & Electric Company on
She’s smaller than she looks on stage,
5 feet plus her high shoes. This highly-evolved stylist has become a kid in
jeans and dark jacket. She says hi and says she was tired and the size of the
crowd didn’t help either.
It’s maybe two-thirds of the
less-than-sellout last year. An intensely varied group. Young and old, black
and white, scruffy and spiffy. There’s
jazz deejay Carroll Hardy. And there’s
Many of them linger in the splendor of
the Shea’s lobby during the opening set by singer-songwriter Andy Pratt. And
for just cause. The lanky, frizzy-blond pianist from
Pratt’s a rocker, he’s screechy and
he’s sloppy, either from stage fright (deejay Hardy’s suggestion) or some funny
potion (laughing gas?) before he stumbles out and botches the first few songs.
Snow is a pop-jazz singer with a
four-man jazz-rock band and a two-member “All Male Revue and Sanctified Choir”
adding harmonies. The sound system screeches for her too as she limbers up on
Motown’s old “Standing on Shakey Ground.”
Mercifully, balance comes on the
second tune, Paul Simon’s gentle “Something So Right,” and she closes it by
reaching into her amazing high range for the first time.
Like an athlete aiming for a record,
she just keeps pushing higher. After a comfortable flounce through her hit,
“Poetry Man,” she winds up and reaches for the ceiling to end her ‘40s jazz
tribute, “No Regrets.”
“Ride the Elevator,” she announces,
has a tribute to Groucho Marx. That’s where the milk-fed hen comes from. She
follows with “Harpo’s Blues” from the first album, putting a hearty scat solo
in the middle of it.
“Next I gotta write about Gummo,” she
suggests with a laugh.
She dedicates “Never Letting Go” to
her baby daughter, takes a flower from a fan after “Majesty of Life” and chases
“Two-Fisted Love” with a bravura “Teach Me Tonight,” Steve Burgh’s guitar
adding to the steam of her vocal.
“Electra” is the walloping finale;
“San Francisco Bay Blues” and “Let the Good Times Roll,” the encore.
Backstage she’s asking Festival East’s
David Nathan about books from
“I’ll probably,” she concludes, “die
singing.”
* *
* * *
IN
THE PHOTO: Phoebe Snow circa 1977.
* *
* * *
FOOTNOTE:
This tour followed the release of Phoebe Snow’s fourth album, “Never Letting
Go,” and the smooth sailing she enjoyed after her debut with “Poetry Man” three
years earlier was running into rough waters. When she stopped touring and
recording in the early 1980s, she cited the responsibilities of motherhood as
the reason. An assessment of her in the New York Times right after this 1977 show suggested something else, that she lost her artistic focus and had gotten bland.
There’s no list of her songs from the
Shakey Ground
(unknown)
Harpo’s Blues
Poetry Man
Love Makes a Woman
Something So Right (Paul Simon cover)
Ride the Elevator
No Regrets
Two-Fisted Love
Cash In
We’re Children
(unknown)
Gone at Last
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