Front Page Reviews & AIR

Every music fan I’ve ever known has made fun of the Rolling Stones for pretending like they’re way younger than they are.  And of course I agree – I saw them seven or eight years ago and there was no questioning the ridiculousness of the spectacle of a bunch of sixty-something guys acting like twenty-something rock stars.  But we’re all hypocrites when we criticize them.  Because we want The Stones to pretend they’re twenty-five.  That’s why they’re still doing it.  When middle-aged Stones fans go to a Stones show, the last thing they want to see is Mick Jagger acting his age.  They don’t want to see him sitting motionless, rocking out in a rocking chair, holding a cane, looking like the 68-year-old he is.  They want the strutting, preening, rebellious Jagger they remember from their youth.  As long as Jagger is out there jumping around – and he’s done a remarkable job staying in good enough shape to do so – they feel like their own long-lost youth is still within their grasp.

But The Stones are the exception among rock bands.  They’ve been at it continuously for forty-nine years.  Most bands get together, make a few albums, tour for a few years, hang on a bit longer than they should, and then finally call it a day.  But even when that happens, there is still an opportunity for nostalgia: the reunion tour.  The reunion tour generally serves the same purpose as a Stones show; it gives the audience a chance to relive their glory years while simultaneously serving to make the band a boatload of cash.  Which is why the reunion tour is almost impossible for bands to resist.  Even sworn enemies like Sting and Stewart Copeland were able to make amends long enough to cash in on a Police reunion tour (which actually had the opposite of the intended effect when I saw it; the show was so boring that it made me question if I ever even liked them that much in the first place).  Which brings us to the problem with reunion tours: some work better than others.  Did we really need a fifty-four-year-old Debbie Harry donning a mini-skirt, a dog collar, and 8-inch platform shoes for Blondie’s 1999 reunion?  Personally, I’d prefer to keep my memories of vintage Blondie intact.  But some reunion tours work surprisingly well.  For instance, on The Eagles’ “Hell Freezes Over” tour, five middle-aged guys sitting next to each other on stools and playing acoustic guitars worked because it wasn’t all that different from the Eagles original incarnation – they’d always been laid back acoustic rockers.  The unifying tie between reunion tours is that the artists always feel compelled to imitate their most popular incarnation.  They almost never present middle-aged versions of themselves; they try to dress and act like they did in their younger heyday, which is, of course, what we as an audience want and expect.  Which is what makes The Jayhawks’ current reunion tour so unique.

For those of you unfamiliar with the band, during the 90s, as the mainstream music industry was devouring itself and before the indie scene as we know it had developed, The Jayhawks made four consecutive very good to great albums in a span of ten years for Rick Rubin’s Def American label.  They started out in the alt-country vein, releasing two masterpieces of that genre – 1992’s Hollywood Town Hall and 1995’s Tomorrow the Green Grass – before transcending the genre with 1997’s more rock-oriented Sound of Lies and 2000’s more pop-oriented Smile.  By the time Smile was released, its lackluster reception was something of a metaphor for the changing rock music industry – the New York Times review of the album was titled: “What If You Made a Classic, and No One Cared?”  And an interview on Terry Gross’s NPR program Fresh Air echoed that sentiment.  But their metaphor status was soon usurped by their good friends Wilco, who became the archetypal band trotted out to illustrate the millennial changes in the rock industry.  Even as a metaphor, the The Jayhawks couldn’t get any respect.  But none of that mattered so much to me; they were simply my favorite band of the 90s.  They were an integral part of the soundtrack to some of my most formative years – I went from a homebound seventeen-year-old high school student to an independent twenty-five-year-old adult during their brilliant four album run.  And those four albums were each so good that when I went to a Jayhawks concert in New York with three friends in the early 2000s, each of us had a different favorite.  But instead of that difference leading to a heated argument, we all simply acknowledged that the other guys’ favorite was pretty damn good.  After that run, they released one more album, 2003’s occasionally great but largely inconsistent Rainy Day Music, then quietly broke up in 2005.

The news that The Jayhawks had gotten back together and were touring the country in 2011 was pretty exciting.  Not only would I get to see them again, but my wife – who I had met and married after The Jayhawks’ break-up – would get to see them for the first time.  Here I was, after all my Rolling Stones jokes, hoping to ride Gary Louris’s heroic lead guitar into a magical time-warp back to my formative years.  Add to that the fact that Jayhawks co-founder Marc Olson, who had left the band in 1995, was coming back for the tour, and how could it get any better?  But then the initial report came in from one of my best friends, a huge Jayhawks fan who caught them in Boston a week prior to our show in Asheville, NC.  And it wasn’t good.  His exact words were, “the worst concert I have been to since middle school (Young MC).  Young MC was probably better because I saw a girl take her shirt off.”  My friend is prone to occasional exaggeration, but there was no mistaking his opinion of the concert.  “It was so depressing I came home and listened to old Jayhawks in the dark, rocking gently back and forth.”  And so, with our expectations properly lowered, my wife and I attended The Jayhawks at The Orange Peel in Asheville on Oct. 25.  But as we were drinking beer and standing around and watching the room fill up while waiting for the show to start, I turned to her and said, “You know what?  I really like these guys and their songs.  I always have.  I can’t imagine not enjoying hearing them sing their songs.  I still think I’m gonna enjoy this.”  And then the show started.

I could immediately see why my friend might have found aspects of it off-putting.  The first thing you notice about The Jayhawks circa-2011 is that they’re old.  In addition to the fact that it’s been nineteen years since Hollywood Town Hall, they weren’t even that young then; Gary Louris was already thirty-six back in 1992, making him now fifty-five.  In fact, all but one of The Jayhawks are in their 50s.  And they don’t wear make-up or dress like teenagers to compensate for their age.  For instance, Marc Olson had put on a few pounds in his 15-year hiatus from the band, and that fact, coupled with his tousled, floppy hair and ill-fitting cardigan sweater, gave the impression that he had just woken up from dozing on the couch in the den during “Matlock” re-runs.  And Gary Louris looked, how should I put it, feeble.  On the Smile tour back in 2000, he would take over a room with his effortlessly amazing guitar playing, but now he was having trouble hitting all the notes, and even more noticeably, he didn’t have that command anymore.  A roadie was coming out to help him wipe his face with a towel between songs.  And drummer Dan O’Reagan, balancing Ben-Franklin-esque bifocals on the end of his nose, looked more like an aging college professor than a rock musician.  The whole thing had the potential to seem really sad.

But you know what?  I didn’t end up seeing it that way at all.  Yes, they were slow and creaky and offering no rock and roll illusions about never-ending youth, but that was what was so refreshing about it.  In a culture that bows down daily to the cult of youth, hawking everything from wrinkle cream to boner pills, here was a group of musicians who were comfortable enough with their advancing age not to pretend like it wasn’t advancing.  This band loved playing – and loved playing together – so much that they were dragging their tired old bones across the country on tour just to do it all one more time.  And apart from the relative weakness of the set list – specifically, their insistence on playing so many songs from their lackluster reunion album Mockingbird Time and largely omitting songs from albums Olson hadn’t played on (disqualifying some Louris masterpieces) – they sounded great.  Nothing flashy, just some old friends jamming it out.  Maybe Louris is no longer a guitar god, but that was never his most important characteristic anyway – his voice is as pure as ever and his best songs are among the best in the rock canon; and age will never take those songs away from him (or from me).  It was also nice to know the tour wasn’t a get-rich cash play either; a Jayhawks club tour isn’t making anybody rich.  But the band was obviously enjoying themselves.  Olson was loving being back on stage with everyone.  And Louris’s wry smiles seemed to indicate that he enjoyed – and almost needed – Olson’s support fronting the band he had carried on his slender shoulders for the second half of its career.  Unlike so many reunion tours, which feed the illusion of a fountain of youth, everything about the Jayhawks’ demeanor seemed perfectly natural, a soulful yet somber reminder of both the joy of life and the truth of human mortality, with no costumes or make-up or illusions necessary, thankyou very much.  Just some great musicians playing some great songs.  And by the end of the show, after 90 minutes hearing them sing and play together, I was no longer feeling sad for them.  Instead, I was realizing how much I loved these guys and how much their music had meant to me over the years.  That, to me anyway, qualifies as a successful reunion tour.