Flying Hockey Pucks
Liz Phair at the King Cat
Theatre
Seattle, September 1998
The slideshow
started with "Lust For Life" blasted
over the King Cat Theater speakers. Forewarned
that Liz's opening act was nothing less than a
half-hour slideshow of herself, or herself and
people she knew, or at any rate people in
pictures she wanted shown, I did not join in the
understandably disbelieving groan-chorus of folks
who lacked mailing-list friends to warn them of
this very phenomenon and whose tickets--at $16.50
plus usurer's fee--read helpfully on the back in
tiny red type, "Not liable for anyone hit by
a hockey puck."
From the slideshow, then,
several conclusions: First, while playing Liz's
own music during the slideshow might have
rendered it recursively masturbatory and her
actual appearance redundant, picking your
favorite songs by other people is a tricky gambit
given the twin propositions that folk shall both
sit still for a half-hour of your fricking slides
and not at evening's end remark how the best
thing they heard all night was Iggy Pop's
"Lust For Life," the Violent Femmes
"Kiss Off," Madonna's "Ray of
Light," Prince's "Little Red
Corvette" (played intact, I noted with an
approving nod), and a funny white (-sounding) rap
song about a couch potato. Second, seeing Liz in
man-drag and Liz in man-drag mutated into Bob
Mould fed nourishment to my gestating conception
that Liz, like Ted Bundy (and she boasts two
unknown parents instead of only one) shifts
identities with the turn or inversion of her
head, the flip or chop of her hair, not to
mention a John Waters mustache or that Marcel
Marceau striped shirt. Third, while I am no more
immune than any straight white male my age to
photos of a pretty woman with a Marcel Marceau
shirt rolled up to the top of her lungs, I submit
that to succeed at its formidable task, a slide
show of the artiste's wacky friends in
wacky poses, about half as long as its soundtrack
and therefore repeated once ("Liz, get your
ass out here!" yelled somebody around the
turnaround), ought rightly to evoke more of, say,
"How sinister a specter of the good-ole-days
slideshow they put up at my ten-year high-school
reunion, when I was sixty pounds lighter and had
that shirt exactly like the red-and-white
checkerboard tabletops at Pizza Haven," and
less of, say, "Can I tap a kidney and get
back before the slave-girl-chain series comes
back around?" I waited.
After some flashlight and
red-dot waving from behind the curtain to goose
the crowd (irritating in the waning of the
slideshow but heck, the Stones do it by sitting
backstage for three hours), open came the curtain
and "Explain It To Me" lifted us off. I
liked the songs better live, honestly; the
keyboardist, invisible from my stage-right seat
except as an occasional elongated shadow flung
stage-left, shot Farfisa sparkle into
"Polyester Bride" and "What Makes
You Happy," the hit single, on which the
singer endeared herself by clearly faking her own
mike echo over the big breakdown. "Support
System" boasted a soul strut not so tight as
Wilson Pickett's "Mustang Sally" but
equable with what the Blues Brothers put out on a
not-so-tired night. Some say Liz rags off-key
even more than than Jake Blues, but in all
honestly I've played Sade for years without
noticing her doing it so I'm the wrong man to
ask. Quoth Liz, just before "Polyester
Bride": "As I got older, I did less
drugs, so my voice got higher."
"Supernova"
started too fast, staggered back, and plunged
into a too-fast chorus, but in the words of the
late great Guy Stevens, producer of the Clash and
Mott the Hoople, "It's rock'n'roll, of
course it speeds up!" Liz calmly enunciated
the one "fuck" which might have, save
for the wonders of digital editing, ruined the
song's change for radio play, and I found that if
her legend is based largely on the emergence of
dirty words from the angelic visage (except she
paid a model to pose mostly naked inside Exile
in Guyville, at least, so who knows really
what's really layers of Liz onion, including the
frontal throat-down shot which illustrated, aptly
enough, "Dance of the Seven Veils"), at
least she doesn't step on them given every overt
opportunity. Heck, during "Flower," and
another slide show, her only companion the unseen
keyboardist and her shockingly Joan Osbourne-like
backup singer standing arms out from elbows like
the statue of Justice, or the one on the cover of
Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil,
she kept running out of breath and cracking up at
her own audacity in filth. So she’s human.
"Divorce
Song" hit full volume at a third of its
length, organ pulsing and then the man on a
stage-right aisle seat of the center section with
the tie-dye shirt stood up and started running in
place, shaking his neck. I think at that point
we'd thought about it enough and decided, with
the smallest prodding of ivories that could see
our way to forgiving the slide show. Four songs
later, after "Fuck and Run" with its
surprisingly jumpy drums and freakout finale, she
was gone for good. "I knew much better than
that," she breathed through the last verse,
with a smile and a hitch not found on the
original. The tye-die man had time to flick an
imaginary lighter.
(With warm
gratitude for Mark Bishop, Dr. Blase’, Patt Cranage, Mike Hamrick, Don Coffin, Jo Brown, and especially
Sheri Hinshaw)
Liz Phair at Matador
Records
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