>>REVIEW
THE BOXING MIRROR
Alejandro Escovedo
High Performance Rodeo
Big Secret Theatre (Epcor Centre)
Just the fact that Alejandro Escovedo returned to the High Performance Rodeo last week was cause enough for celebration. Not long after his last Rodeo appearance, in 2002, the hard-living, hard-touring Tex-Mex songsmith was sidelined with hepatitis C and very nearly died. Since then, however, he’s kicked the booze, embraced Buddhism, married, fathered another child (his seventh) and released a couple of albums, the live Room of Songs and studio-made The Boxing Mirror, the latter produced by the legendary John Cale.
So it was an ascetic-looking, tea-sipping Escovedo who took the Big Secret stage for two sold-out shows Saturday and Sunday, fronting a six-piece band consisting of his string quartet augmented by bass and drums. But if he looked more like a Buddhist monk in a business suit than a former punk rocker who once opened for The Sex Pistols, the 55-year-old singer-songwriter proved he hasn’t lost the trademark passionate intensity that has fuelled his remarkable 15-year, 10-album solo career – one characterized by critical plaudits and sustained by a small but ardent fan base.
I caught Sunday’s set, which kicked off with "Baby’s Got New Plans" from the 1993 concept album Thirteen Years (his heart-wrenching response to a lover’s suicide), before plunging into the new material from The Boxing Mirror. It included a couple of songs typical of Escovedo’s disarming, left-field approach to familiar subjects: the album’s opening track, "Arizona," seemingly a wistful adieu to past excesses but painted in tones of mystery and melancholy, and "The Ladder," a tender love song to his wife illuminated by strange snake-and-ladder imagery – which, he revealed, was inspired by watching the antics of one of the fabled freaks on California’s Venice Beach.
The Cale influence was most evident when Escovedo’s string players rocked out, cellists Matt Fish and Brian Standefer and violinist Susan Voelz sawing furiously through combustible versions of "Everybody Loves Me" off 1999’s Bourbonitis Blues, The Boxing Mirror’s "Break This Time" and "As I Fall" (from 2001’s A Man Under the Influence), with Voelz’s awesome, bow-scorching solos in particular evoking the Cale-era Velvet Underground at its most manic. (But if there’s a Cale album closest to Escovedo’s Tex-Mex flavour, it’s 1996’s Walking on Locusts – I’d love to hear him do a cover of Cale’s bullfight-themed "Secret Corrida.")
Unplugged, Escovedo revisited By the Hand of the Father, the music theatre piece about his Mexican immigrant roots that he brought to the ’02 Rodeo, with renditions of "Juarez" and the poignant "Rosalie" graced by David Pulkingham’s dexterous Spanish guitar. Electrified again, he closed the set with "Castanets" after admitting with regret that the song (with its classic line, "I like her better when she walks away") is apparently a George W. Bush favourite. Perhaps to rectify that, he dedicated it to the late Joe Strummer of The Clash.
Escovedo’s impeccable taste in covers surfaced at the encore, with his stark, stripped-bare performance of a concert favourite, Ian (Mott the Hoople) Hunter’s hauntingly sad love ballad "I Wish I Was Your Mother," the string quartet muted to the verge of silence and Escovedo eschewing the microphone for his raw, aching vocal. "Is there a happy ending?" he sang. "I don’t think so."
But then he switched gears one more time for a cheerful take on the Stones oldie "Beast of Burden," complete with Jagger-esque inflections and limp wrist. And when he got to the line, "All your sickness, I can suck it up," it could’ve been a personal statement coming from a man who’s fought his way through the valley of the shadow and emerged triumphant. Muchos gracias, Alejandro – it’s great to have you back. |
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