Susan Derry has encountered all the personal and professional ups and downs, bumps and bruises, twists and turns that seem inevitable for those who embark in careers on stage.

But Derry has persevered, building a career that has included roles on Broadway and across the Washington, D.C. region. She has performed in concerts with a number of our nation’s top symphonies and produced a series of acclaimed cabarets while also working as an adjunct professor at American University for more than a decade.

And 2026 shows no signs of slowing down. In March, she debuted a new cabaret, “Unexpected Songs,” as part of a year-long residency at Creative Cauldron Stage in Falls Church, Va., and worked with AU students and director Aaron Posner on a new adaptation of Shakespeare’s “The Two ‘Gentlemen’ of Verona.”

This month, she will play Marian the Librarian in a concert performance of “The Music Man” and the title role in a new musical based on the life of Emily Dickinson. And in May, she’ll attend the Helen Hayes Awards, where she is nominated for a leading actress in a musical award for “The Turn of the Screw,” which ran last fall at Creative Cauldron.

“For whatever reason, right now, there’s a lot of opportunity for me,” Derry said. “I’ve got a lot of balls in the air. “I don’t know why this is happening all at once, but it’s wonderful. I’ll take it.”

Reconnecting

Derry and I met in the spring of 2009, when my son Ben was cast as the understudy to Little Boy in “Ragtime” at the Kennedy Center. It was a heady time for both of us; my wife and I were raising four children, including one who lived in North Carolina and one who would soon move to New York — at 11 — to pursue the performer’s dream.

At the time, Derry was a single parent — her son is the same age as Ben and his twin, Emma — who had moved back to the D.C. area from New York when her marriage ended. She was in the ensemble and understudying the principal role of Mother but opted not to return to New York when the show was revived on Broadway that fall.

Over the years, we remained in touch via social media, and more recently on Substack, where Derry writes the excellent “Raising the Key” about the highs and lows of spending a life on stage. Last month, we reconnected in person when she hired me to shoot “Unexpected Songs.”

Afterward, I asked if we could sit down for a conversation about her journey. The following has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity and length.

What led to this residency?

Last year, I was a cabaret fellow at the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center. It was the most intense, amazing, crazy two weeks of getting into this art form, and seeing what this would really look like on us as individuals, and I felt really good about it. When it was over, I wanted to do something else with it.

The Creative Cauldron Stage does a cabaret series at Christmas. I’ve done it a few times, and it’s fun. And because of that relationship, I took a chance and asked if they were interested in creating something more for the art form in the D.C. area.

I’ve done a number of cabarets in my later career. A couple of groups in the D.C. area (the National Capital Cabaret and the D.C.Cabaret Network) present original work and they’re great. But there’s no place that does educating for this (creating a cabaret) for this specifically. Because I’m an educator, I thought we could combine it into something that can really uplift the form for interested folks around town, so we’re running with it.

You’ve described “Unexpected Songs” as a show that focuses on “the beautifully imperfect middle of our lives.”

I have lots of stuff in my little bag of cabaret tricks, but they’re fun and funny and they’re a little more showy. Now, because I have this safe space, I really wanted to try something a bit riskier. So, this show looks at some of the more intense moments of being a human that have happened to me and the music that resonates and brings those moments to life.

Without giving way too much, there is some big stuff I wasn’t sure I would ever be able to talk about, but I wanted to. Musically, it’s stuff I’ve wanted to try in public, because I’m a trained classical and theater singer. I’ve always been the soprano with the high notes in the back row. That was my job, I loved it, and it was great, but that’s not the only thing I can do.

At the same time, I’m not Pink. I’m not going to try to be Taylor Swift. Nobody’s interested in that and neither am I. My job with this show is to bring my voice to these songs in a way that is interesting and entertaining, and yes, a little unexpected.

How do you assemble a cabaret?

Everyone has their process. I collect lists of songs, throw them all in a bin and move them around periodically. I was a little chicken to do only music that I had never done previously, so I had a couple of songs where I decided to do a Golden Age piece, or a musical theater song. The hits in my world. And then I tried to combine it with songs that you wouldn’t necessarily find from me in a cabaret setting.

There are a lot of ways to look at the word “unexpected.” Performing pop or rock songs is not what you would expect from me, a person who has played Christine in “Phantom.”

I think my favorite atypical song was your take on “Still Crazy After All These Years.”

I love that song so much. That is one my dad had. I don’t know which album it was on first, but my dad had it on the “The Best of Paul Simon.” I can still see the cover of the LP, and I remember as a child looking at the big record cover and just pouring over it. On Friday nights, my father would put it on, get a martini, and say, “The friends are coming over.” And so the bridge club would come over and this is the music that would be on.

I always wanted to try that song. It just speaks to me and reminds me of that time. And one of the things I love about this cabaret is that it does look back.

What did you find when looking back?

The cumulative things that make us who we are right now. We’re not who we are without those moments. I hear regret from people sometimes when we talk about what’s happened in the past, and I don’t want to feel that. I don’t want to feel bad about my choices.

Things happen. They make us who we are. It was terrifying being a young mom and becoming a single mother. I was not good at it, but I gave my all to it. Of course there are times, and I think this is true for all parents, where we have interactions with our kids that we wish we’d handled differently. We’re not human if we think otherwise. I think to minimize it, or to either pretend something didn’t happen, or to wish it away isn’t honest. Yet, I see some people living with a lot of regret and denial at the same time.

When I talk to parents and their kids about pursuing this business, I tell them the ability to deal with the ambiguity of the unknown and the unexpected will be the difference between whether they stick with it or whether they don’t.

That’s right. Because it tests our mettle. It really does. It’s so nice when things make sense. We love to predict what’s going to happen, but we just can’t.

As a writer, I’m interested in how you developed the narrative around the “Unexpected” theme.

Learning to embrace the unexpected and trying to be open to things not going quite the way you think they’re going to is hard, I think, for humans to learn. You can be a 5-year-old saying, “I am going to dance. I’m going to become a prima ballerina. I’m going to be on Broadway by the time I’m 12.” Or, in my case, “I’m going to grow up and be just like Maria Callas.” That was something I truly thought.

At the same time, I was also being brought up in a pretty traditional home, with a huge Irish Catholic family on one side and an Italian Catholic family on the right. I wanted my own family, I wanted a husband, and I wanted babies, and In my naivete and hubris perhaps, I was pretty sure I could have it all. I thought, “I can figure this out. I grew up in Rockville, Maryland. This is not a problem.”

And your career takes you in places that you would not expect at all. I’ve gotten to be part of some pretty out there, wild, exciting productions and things that people say, “Oh, you were in that?” Yes. Was I the most important cog in that wheel? No, but I was in that wheel, and it was deeply, deeply satisfying.

It got me to where I am right now, and I wouldn’t change anything. At the same time, I wanted that thing, that path or whatever I thought that path would be. But unexpected things happen.

Life has a way of throwing a lot of curveballs.

And it should. Otherwise, it’s not life.

I like to say you spend the first 40 years of your life focusing on nothing but looking ahead, then the rearview mirror starts creeping into your line of sight.

That’s so accurate.

Were your parents artistic?

No. My dad was a lawyer. My mom was, at first, a mom, and when she came to Washington she worked on Capitol Hill and then taught for a little while. Then she had a family and raised three small children. She had a lot going on.

Now I look back at her and think of her with so much empathy for the mom she was. It was so different for them, raising children in the 1970s and 80s, than it was for their parents. I think you can probably say this about all the generations, but I think there were expectations of roles and who did what.

Raising a family in the D.C. area comes with expectations. Lake Wobegon level achievement is considered mediocre.

I like your reference. Living here puts pressure on parents, regardless of the generation. They tried to be chill about it all, but I think it was hard. It was hard not knowing what to do with me. My mom ended up spending a lot of time driving me to things. Ballet class, play rehearsal, piano lessons, choir, whatever it was. Bless her.

Your father passed away a couple of years ago, and you’ve written eloquently about his effect on your life on your Substack. Was he involved in your career?

My dad took an active interest to the point of redoing his own understanding of the arts and music. He ended up getting a subscription to the National Opera at the Kennedy Center. He took me to my first opera at Wolf Trap when I was 12. He would get my CDs that interested me and listen and listen.

This is when I was really into classical music, and I was getting ready to audition for colleges and all that stuff. And we would drive around going to things, and he got me a cassette tape of Kiri Te Kanawa singing Gershwin. It is a delightful album, an opera singer singing these really smart songs, smart lyrics, interesting lyrics, and my dad is singing along.

The guy was tone deaf, but we sang in the church choir together. He was in the tenor section, and the choir conductor, bless him, would say, “Peter, Peter” and shake his head. We had a lot of fun.

Speaking of curveballs, did you expect that university professor would be something you’d have on your resume?

I remember so distinctly my mother wanting me to double major in music education with my voice degree, and me saying, “I don’t want to do that. I don’t want to do that.” At the time, she was saying, “Well, you just don’t know if it’s going to work out,” which is what a mom’s job is. But I was resentful of that idea instead of saying, “My mother is just trying to take care of me.” I didn’t have enough knowledge, enough prefrontal cortex development to understand that so I kept resisting and resisting.

In 2007-08, my son’s father and I had split, and I needed to figure something out. I needed to make money, so I spent one more year in New York City after the split and then moved home. And then I ended up booking “Ragtime” at the Kennedy Center, and I got asked to transfer with it, and all of a sudden Broadway was calling. I was like, “I just got here with this very vulnerable 10-year-old boy who needs me.”

I’m not saying this to tell you I made some sort of honorable choice, but it just wasn’t the right time. To be a single parent, doing that Broadway schedule eight shows a week, along with understudy rehearsals and four shows on the weekends, without the co-parent in town and not co-parenting, just wouldn’t have worked.

I had already pulled on the thread of friends helping me out earlier when I was on a tour with “Bernstein’s Mass.” And I was so grateful to them because they were so gracious. They helped me raise this kid. They were so generous, but I couldn’t do it again. And that’s OK.

So I moved home, taught private voice lessons, and married my current husband, and in 2014, a friend said he had recommended me for an adjunct professor’s position at American University. I was like, “I don’t think so,” and my husband said, “Do it.”

Ultimately I did, and it’s been great. It’s been fascinating.

And your mother was thrilled you were finally teaching.

Laughs. So happy.

How does teaching influence your singing and writing?

They’re all intertwined. Teaching in a university, you can be a skilled professor or an unskilled one. I’ve learned a lot about how to teach. Sometimes there are instances when your patience needs to outweigh what you’re trying to accomplish. You have to know when to push and when not to push.

I have to become a better singer because I’m a teacher, and I have to convey it in a way that gets results because I’m responsible for these young voices. I think back a lot about my teachers, and I pull from what worked and what didn’t. Then I think, “If I were my students and I was doing this, how would this feel? How can I get them to break it down and really understand it so they can make faster progress than I did’”

So that helps me understand my own singing. Writing helps me understand my point of view on the world. And certainly, being on stage helps inform the teaching. It also helps being in a scripted play to inform the more freewheeling cabaret stuff because you know you have to have a structure to be successful.

That’s how those intersect, but really what I need is an assistant. I think everybody should have an assistant.

Well, you can have an AI assistant.

Oh, come on. Laughs. No. Run away. Run away.

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Thirteen years ago, on a Saturday morning just 10 days before Christmas, my cousin Kerry was killed while driving to Austin from the small West Texas town of Albany. His truck crossed over the median and slammed into an 18-wheeler on U.S. 183 South; police later said he apparently had a seizure and passed out just before the accident.

Kerry, a severe diabetic for most of his life, was making the trip to see my teenage son Ben in a touring musical. When we got the news, my mom and I were eating an early dinner with family and friends, waiting for Kerry to arrive.

While in Austin, I had hoped to attend Wednesday night “church” — back-to-back shows by two of my favorite songwriters, Jon Dee Graham and James McMurtry, at the Continental Club. But something came up and those plans were thwarted. Before leaving, I saw Graham was playing that weekend with Freedy Johnson and Susan Cowsill in a new group, the Hobart Brothers and Lil’ Sis Hobart. Due to my cousin’s death, that show would be impossible to go to as well.

Even though I saw Graham several times in the ensuing years, those missed opportunities have been on my mind since his death from a fall last week at age 67. Along with a handful of other artists, Graham’s songwriting and music have played an outsized role in the soundtrack of my life, and those opportunities now are ones I’ll never get back.

So many songs. I can name 20 off the top of my head without looking at a list, even more if I think about it for a minute. “Faithless,” “Home,” “Big Sweet Life,” “Holes,” “Amsterdam,” “$100 Bill,” “Swept Away,” “Something Wonderful,” “Airplane,” “Laredo (Small Dark Something),” “I Don’t Feel That Way,” “The Majesty of Love,” “Something to Look Forward To,” “Tamale House No. 1,” “Beautifully Broken,” “World So Full,” “Do Not Forget,” “The Orphan’s Song,” “See You By the Fire,” “Goin’ Back to Sweden.”

Ballads, mid-tempo tunes, and rockers. Lyrics that are often dark but ultimately hopeful, with vivid characters and details that stand out because they were written by an adult for adults.

“What I learned pretty early on was the stuff that moved me was simple. Not in the sense of the obvious but in the sense that the fewer moving parts a machine has, the less likely it is to break or to do something that’s not its job,” he told me in a 2019 interview for Americana Highways. “There’s so much to be said for letting the listener’s imagination do what it’s there for.”

••••••

Going with my mom from Austin to Albany for Kerry’s funeral in 2012, I played many of those songs on my phone. The irony was not lost on me that, at the time, Graham’s most recent studio album was 2010’s It’s Not as Bad as It Looks.

The album’s title was based on Graham’s brush with death while driving home from a 2008 solo gig in Dallas. The late-night crash, which broke several bones and forced the removal of his spleen, was the first of many health challenges he would face for the rest of his life.

My mom doesn’t consume and enjoy music the same way I do. Born without hearing in her right ear, she has trouble understanding certain voices and sounds, Graham’s deep gravelly voice being one of them. That said, I continued to play his music as we drove on backroads toward the small West Texas town of her early youth.

Graham was a fifth-generation Texan. Born in the Panhandle, he had a tough relationship with his father and moved to Austin in the late 1970s. Still a teenager, he picked up work quickly as a guitarist, along with addictions to alcohol, drugs, and cigarettes. So many cigarettes. Depression, too.

I first saw Graham in the mid 1980s when the True Believers opened for Los Lobos in Houston. The band’s reputation as an incendiary live act, I can tell you, was deserved as the three-guitar attack of Graham, Alejandro and Javier Escovedo tore the club down to its studs, melding the literacy and wit of Texas songwriting with ferocious hard rock and punk sounds.

The True Believers signed to EMI after their self-titled first album was released on Rounder in 1986, but their second was caught up in label merger hell. It wasn’t released until 1994, long after the band broke up.

A fixture and legend in the Austin music scene, he is the only person elected to the city’s Music Hall of Fame three times — as a solo act and for his work with the True Believers and The Skunks. But broader success eluded him.

Graham worked as a sideman with a number of other musicians throughout the 1980s and 1990s. At 37 — “Kinda late,” he told me, “and maybe not the most stable career move” — he signed to New West Records as a solo act. He released four records, all critically acclaimed, but was dropped by the label in 2005 after poor sales.

“There used to be artist development,” he said. “Record labels really didn’t expect to make their money back for the first three records because artists were encouraged and allowed to grow? Who on earth would give Tom Waits a record deal today, or for that matter, Neil Young? These were artists who were nurtured and allowed to move forward in ways that are just actually impossible now. Even if someone wanted to do it, they couldn’t.”

At that point, Graham scrambled, playing more than 120 live gigs a year and sporadically releasing albums, a relentless schedule he maintained as long as his health permitted. For more than a decade, he was constantly on the road; weekends each month in Houston, Dallas, San Antonio, and Austin, along with his Continental Club residency, plus annual tours to clubs in the Midwest, Northwest, and Northeast.

“Acclaim doesn’t put food on the table,” he told me. “It’s adorable and I’m touched, but I cannot possibly be more tired of the phrase ‘Best songwriter you’ve never heard of.’”

Fans and supporters tried. Mark Finkelpearl, who writes the Hard Rain and Pink Cadillacs Substack with music critic Geoffrey Hines, made a documentary on Graham and his music. (“Jon Dee Graham: Swept Away,” released in 2008, is available for streaming on Amazon.)

And from the tributes pouring out on social media since his death, the people who knew Graham and his work mourn his loss and, more important, his presence in their lives.

End of the Road

My mom and I took our time on the Albany drive, arriving on Tuesday evening for the visitation. The graveside service would be held the next morning, after which I would return to Northern Virginia.

Albany was and is a hard place, and Kerry lived a hard life. In the small town, population 2,034, he was known by almost everyone. His barbecue was legendary and his personality was as broad as his shoulders. A welder, he broke his neck after a fall on a job site. Diabetes ran rampant in his family, and he struggled with that as well.

The pastor who delivered the eulogy noted he did not know Kerry that well. “From what his friends and family members have told me,” the pastor said, “he lived nine lives and borrowed a few others.”

Kerry was 59 when he died, the same age Graham was when I interviewed him several years later. At the time, Graham was working on songs that would be included on his last full-length album, 2023’s Only Dead for a Little While.

“Potentially this will be my last record,” said Graham. “I hope not but what if it is? At my age and the crowd I ran with, let’s just say they were enthusiastic about living and a lot of them are not with me anymore. If this turns out to be the last record, I want it to be right. My approach is, ‘Let’s say this is your last, what do you want it to accomplish?’”

In the same breath, Graham worried that music has become “very disposable.”

“What I do miss is that music used to mean more to people,” he said. “I find it hard to believe that it doesn’t still. How many times do you hear a song on the radio and go back instantly to where you were when you heard the song the first time. There’s so much value in that.”

Our conversation later shifted to my favorite of his songs — “Faithless.” Graham said he had played it in churches and at funerals, but noted the song was not religious.

“People get confused with the terms spirituality and religion. Religion is for people who are afraid to go to hell. Spirituality is for people who’ve been to hell,” he said. “Literally the definition of faith is the belief in things unseen. If you can’t muster that up, you’re going to have a hard time in this world. It does not have to be the belief in the white robe bearded God. It can be whatever, but you can’t live in this world and not realize that something is going on, that something happening that is not you and is not me.

“So much of what happens in our lives and what goes into our lives is necessarily unseen. ... With love, friendship, fidelity, loyalty, you don’t see it, you just see it pass through your life. That’s why we need faith.”

And thoughtful statements like that are a reason we need more people like Jon Dee Graham. He is missed.

Go Fund Me

An account has been set up to help Graham’s family pay for medical and funeral expenses, which have been immense. Graham’s son, William, writes:

Over the past several years, my father faced tremendous health challenges that resulted in significant medical bills, many of which we are still paying off. Now, in addition to those ongoing medical expenses, we are faced with the costs of funeral arrangements, cremation, and settling his affairs. We are asking for help to cover these medical and end-of-life expenses so that our family can focus on grieving, honoring his life, and preserving his musical legacy rather than worrying about the financial burden left behind.

Playlist

An Apple Music playlist of the 20 songs I mentioned can be found here. A Spotify list is embedded (grrr…) below:

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When I moved from Texas to North Carolina in the mid 1990s, I had only an inkling of the fertile music scene waiting for me in the Tarheel State.

Of course, as a fan of R.E.M. and The dBs, I knew about Chris Stamey, Peter Holsapple, and Mitch Easter, who produced both groups’ early albums. And as a fan of the band Uncle Tupelo, I quickly glommed onto a new magazine with North Carolina ties (No Depression) that helped greatly expand my musical universe.

My wife and I had three kids between December 1996 and December 1997, so there wasn’t much time for live music, but I relished the 20-minute commute to work because I could listen to my new discoveries. Whiskeytown was the first “new” North Carolina band I recall becoming a fan of; others like Old Crow Medicine Show, 6 String Drag, the Avett Brothers, and American Aquarium soon would follow.

One night after we moved to Northern Virginia in 2001, I was in Raleigh working on a project and was told by a school PR friend about a new band (Tres Chicas) that I needed to see at a bar that night.

Caitlin Cary, who had been in Whiskeytown prior to its implosion, was in the group with Tonya Lamm and Lynn Blakey. They hadn’t recorded anything yet, but Cary and Blakey had backed up Alejandro Escovedo on 2001’s A Man Under the Influence, which was recorded in Chapel Hill and produced by Stamey.

Being a longtime Escovedo fan and needing a live music fix, I was happy to check them out. Tres Chicas blew me away, especially Blakey and her amazing voice. I started searching out the rest of her catalogue, and discovered that she had played in numerous bands, including Easter’s Let’s Active and the group Oh-OK, which was fronted by Michael Stipe’s sister, Lydia. Her range was astounding.

It would be some time, however, before I discovered that Blakey was the inspiration for one of my all-time favorite songs — The Replacements’ “Left of the Dial.”

The Muse

According to Paul Westerberg, “Left of the Dial” was a “hidden love song.” He became infatuated with Blakey after his group toured with Let’s Active, but the relationship between two working musicians who were constantly on the road was doomed from the start.

“I figured the only way I’d hear her voice was with her band on the radio,” Westerberg told Rolling Stone. “We were passing through a town somewhere, and she was doing an interview on the radio, left of the dial. I heard her voice for the first time in six months for about a minute. Then the station faded out.”

And a classic song was born.

Blakey, like too many talented musicians on this planet, never made it to the “big time” (whatever that is). But she has a body of work that you should definitely check out.

In addition to Tres Chicas, which released two lovely albums on YepRoc (2004’s Sweetwater and 2006’s Bloom, Red & The Ordinary Girl), Blakey was in numerous bands in and around the Chapel Hill area. 2002’s The Beauty of 23 by Glory Fountain is, in my view, a pop masterpiece.

Cancer, College, and Tributes

In 2022, Blakey was diagnosed with cancer and went through chemotherapy and surgery. At 61, she went back to college at the University of North Carolina at Greenboro to earn an online degree in Peace and Conflict Studies, but had to leave when the cancer came back.

Blakey died last week at age 63. Her last recordings appear on 2025’s A Brief History of Blindness, an international power-pop effort by The Salt Collective. She sings the title track and a duet with R.E.M.’s Mike Mills (“In the Shadow of the Moon”) on the album, which was released in November and features Stamey, Easter, and Aimee Mann, among others.

There have been many terrific tributes to Blakey, none more eloquent or poignant than these two pieces (here and here) by David Menconi, a longtime music critic for the Raleigh News & Observer.

From Menconi’s blog: “When the new Salt Collective album came out a few months back, I wrote, ‘Whenever Lynn Blakey sings, an angel gets its wings.’ And in death, she made one last gallant act of generosity by giving some lucky soul out there the gift of sight. Yes, she donated her eyes — and this after co-writing and singing ‘A Brief History of Blindness,’ the title track of that Salt Collective LP.”

Wow.

Menconi also shared a Spotify playlist compiled by Chris Stamey after Blakey’s death. I realize many have issues with Spotify, but “Lynn Blakey: An Introduction” is as good a place to start as any if you want to hear someone whose talents are greatly missed.

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What a difference (almost) a year makes.

One year ago today, I was in Mexico City with my wife Jill and 300 Jason Isbell fans, listening to the Grammy-winning singer/songwriter perform a solo show in a small, intimate venue.

This past Thursday, I photographed another Isbell solo show, this time at the Hylton Performing Arts Center in Manassas, Virginia, for the Americana Highways website.

The concert, combined with spending two evenings in a darkened theater photographing 16 teenage dancers and another day spent shooting 170 headshots for a school program, has kept me busier than usual in what typically is a dead January. Also in the mix was a second trip in three weeks — this past Friday through Sunday — to see family in North Carolina.

And to think, last January I was just happy not to be dead.

Flashback

Flashback to January 16, 2025: Six weeks after I was hospitalized with a life-threatening bout of pneumonia and sepsis, Jill and I left on a four-day trip to see Isbell in Mexico City. She had surprised me with the trip for my 60^th birthday during our annual Thanksmas celebration, then I got sick and spent five days in the hospital.

Fortunately, I was cleared by my doctor to take the trip, which included a Q&A and meet and greet with Isbell — on my birthday, no less — as well as two concerts and other excursions. It was a memorable experience, and it kicked off what proved to be one of the best years I’ve had in some time.

The solo show on January 19 was the last event in Mexico City and included the live debut of two songs from Isbell’s then-forthcoming album, Foxes in the Snow. The intimate solo acoustic set, which has been nominated for three Grammys, was his first since his divorce from Amanda Shires.

Isbell was engaged throughout the event and a consummate professional, but Jill and I noted that he seemed tired (we all were) by the end of the show. We both wondered if he had been a little nervous playing the live debuts of “Bury Me” and “True Believer” — one of several with ties to the breakup — from the new album.

Flash Forward

When the opportunity to photograph Isbell’s solo show in Manassas came up, I couldn’t pass up the chance, even though we were scheduled to leave the next day for North Carolina to see our son, daughter-in-law, and grandson as well as Jill’s brother and sister-in-law. The 361 days between concerts is the longest I’ve gone in almost a decade without seeing and/or photographing one of my favorite singer-songwriters.

And Isbell didn’t disappoint. Engaged and energetic from the moment he took the stage, he played almost two dozen songs over two hours, including five from the new album, three from his days with the Drive-By Truckers, and the rest from across his deep catalogue.

Telling stories throughout, he also played two covers — a spontaneous “Storm Windows” that followed a story about John Prine, and a tribute to Todd Snider (“Play a Train Song”)

I looked at it as an early birthday present.

Here are some more photos from the show:

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Here are two stories I wrote based on the Q&A with Isbell at last year’s Mexico City event:

Note: “Another 52 Weeks” did not appear this past Saturday because of the time crunch at the end of the week. A combined edition for weeks 3 and 4 will run on January 24.

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In April 2003, I was working at the National School Boards Association as managing editor in the publications department, overseeing the development and production of our flagship magazine — American School Board Journal.

At the time (though, sadly, not in recent years), the magazine and the association were flourishing. ASBJ, as the magazine was known, was editorially independent of the association, a distinction it maintained by virtue of being the oldest continuously published education periodical in the U.S. It was not an academic journal, but a magazine with features that focused on school leadership.

NSBA, which had almost 150 employees at the time, consistently drew 5,000 to 7,500 people to its annual conferences and featured celebrity keynote speakers from the education, arts, and political spectrum.

In the nonprofit association world, the annual conference is your Super Bowl — an all-hands-on deck experience that requires everyone to step outside their customary roles at points over several days. Don Blom, the associate executive director who hired me in 2001, gave me an unusual assignment: security staff liaison (aka “bouncer”) for the general sessions.

That meant I had access to backstage and opportunities to meet the keynoters, giving me opportunities to shake hands and speak briefly to Julie Andrews, Bill Clinton, Jamie Lee Curtis, and Colin Powell, among others.

NSBA’s 2003 conference, held in San Francisco, featured one of my journalism heroes — Walter Cronkite — as the opening keynote speaker. I made sure to do everything I could to meet him, which Don helped to facilitate.

During our five or so minutes together, Cronkite and I spoke briefly about journalism and our mutual Texas roots. The longtime CBS anchor, who by this time was in his mid 80s and nearly deaf, was very kind even as he held his hand up to his ear to hear me.

As we started to leave, Cronkite asked Don if his “friend” Bob was on the list to come backstage after the keynote. Don assured him Bob was and said we would bring him back personally.

We got word that Bob had arrived and went to the side door. I didn’t think to ask who he was, but he looked familiar. He shook our hands and was polite but didn’t say much as we escorted him backstage.

“Who is he?” I asked Don after we dropped him off.

Don laughed. “That’s Bob Weir. They’ve been friends for years. He had dinner with Mickey Hart last night.”

All I could muster was: “The most trusted man in America is a Deadhead?”

Don chuckled again. “That appears to be the case.”

Several months later, I interviewed Cronkite for a special section ASBJ was doing on the 50^th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education and mentioned our encounter. I asked about Weir and his appreciation for the Dead.

“I got to know them because of Mickey Hart,” Cronkite said of the group’s drummer. “I was narrating the America’s Cup in 1987, and he was in charge of the score. He invited me to a show at Madison Square Garden, and I was mesmerized by them. I’ve gotten to know them all over the years. They’re all great guys.”

Cronkite died in 2009 at age 93. After Weir’s death last Saturday at age 78, Hart and fellow percussionist Bill Kreutzmann are the only surviving core members of the Grateful Dead.

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In first grade, Steven Jenkins was already “heavily into” The Beatles and The Beach Boys when he discovered “Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits, Volume 1” in his mother’s record collection.

“I didn’t understand the songs back then, but I was captivated by Dylan’s voice and by the colorful and iconic Milton Glaser poster that was included with the album,” says Jenkins, who became a lifelong, “occasionally obsessed” fan of the Nobel Prize-winning songwriter.

Jenkins, who worked in the nonprofit arts sector for 35 years in the San Francisco Bay Area, never thought he would move to Tulsa, Okla., to feed that obsession, or that he would become the leader of the center that is responsible for housing Dylan’s vast archives.

“I had never been to Tulsa, although I’d always been intrigued by the town because of the S.E. Hinton books — The Outsiders and especially Rumble Fish — that I’d read as a teenager,” Jenkins says during a Zoom call. “When I heard about the acquisition of the Dylan archive, I thought, ‘Whenever this opens, I’ll finally make it out to Tulsa.”

Through a mutual connection during the pandemic, Jenkins met Steve Higgins, managing director of the American Song Archives, which oversees the Dylan and Woody Guthrie Archives. Soon he started sharing his ideas about what a director of the Bob Dylan Center “might need and want and could do,” and finally decided to apply for the job.

During an interview earlier this year, Jenkins discussed his role as the senior director of the Bob Dylan Center, which opened in May 2022 and has seen a spike in awareness and attendance since the release of the Academy Award-nominated “A Complete Unknown” last year. The biopic, which looks at Dylan’s early years and relationship with Guthrie prior to “going electric” at the Newport Folk Festival, grossed more than $140 million worldwide.

The center, located in the Tulsa Arts District down the street from a separate facility that honors Guthrie, has sponsored a series of multi-artist themed concerts devoted to iconic Dylan albums such as “Blood on the Tracks” and has announced plans for another in February 2026 devoted to “Blonde on Blonde.” The center also has a “Going Electric” exhibit focused on 1965, the year of that Newport Folk Festival show, that is running through March 2026.

I interviewed Jenkins and Mark Davidson, the director of archives and exhibitions for the American Song Archives, after touring the Guthrie and Dylan centers. Portions of both conversations first appeared on Americana Highways.

Here are excerpts from the interview with Jenkins, in which he discusses his work at the center and his devotion to Dylan, who he calls an “exemplar of fearless creativity.” The interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.

The Bob Dylan Center and the Woody Guthrie Center (which opened in 2013) are separate entities under the same umbrella. What do you do in your role?

It’s lots of different things, from helping to oversee daily operations, some management of staff, and working with the executive team on curating and programming live events such as concerts, film screenings, and conversations with writers. I’m also working on education programs and helping to set the long-term goals for the organization. We’re always asking ourselves, “Where do we want to be?”

I’m always working to make connections. And, like all nonprofit organizations in this day and age, I’m working with our fundraising team. We rely on the partnership of our members and donors, so working with and for them is a big part of my job too.

Like you, I had never been to Tulsa, so visiting the center when I was there was important. As a Dylan fan, walking in for the first time was a holy grail moment for me, but as the self-guided tour progressed, I also found it fascinating to watch how others were reacting to what they were seeing.

One of the most gratifying parts of the job is seeing who comes in on any given day, really from all around the world. And they’re all often very eager to tell their stories of their point of entry into Dylan. “I was at that show,” or pointing to something that’s on display, or “I came to him later.”

We talk a lot about skimmers, swimmers, and divers. Skimmers are the folks who are taking in some of the highlights, who might be more casual fans, and that’s great. I hope there’s a lot for them here that’s surprising and they see Dylan and his creativity differently.

The swimmers are really doing laps in the in the galleries, going back and forth and making sure they’re seeing everything. The divers really are getting all down into those deep layers of information. On the archive wall on the Second Floor, you’ve got the hundred plus objects and our cabinet of curiosities. With the touch screens, you can choose to go deep into each and every one of those items and learn more. There are hours and hours of additional audio and video and all the rest of it.

You’ve been on the road quite a bit this year screening the documentary, “Fifty Years in Sixty Minutes.” Tell me a little more about that.

When you were here, you saw some of the rare Dylan film footage we have of him on stage and in the studio over the decades. We thought until we are ready to bring entire exhibitions to other institutions, having a film program is one way to share what we are doing and hopefully entice people to come to Tulsa or to become members of the center, or both.

By the end of 2025, I’ll have done 25 to 30 screenings of a one-hour film program in different cities. Often, I’ll invite, musicians, writers, and other folks to take part in that program, a post screening discussion and a performance.

Taking the show on the road in that way is very much part of being the center’s director. I’m making sure I’m out there meeting with people, talking to our members, bringing more people into our orbit, and serving as an ambassador for our mission and programs.

What sort of boost did you get from “A Complete Unknown”?

We saw an immediate spike in attendance. This is a big pop culture moment for Dylan, and it was a big hit, so it drew a lot of people to the center. What’s great to see is a lot of younger viewers and visitors who came in because of it.

Although the classic demographic is aging, and I count myself as part of that, you still see younger people at Dylan concerts. I think it’s a lot of parents and grandparents bringing their kids and grandkids to the shows. He also has a sense of perpetual cool and iconoclasm that draws younger listeners who discover him because he’s namechecked by the contemporaries they’re listening to.

What are your plans for the future?

There’s a pretty compelling story that’s being told here just on one block in Tulsa’s Arts District. I want to do everything I can with my colleagues to bring more people here, get people excited about Guthrie and Dylan as cultural figures. If we can get them to look at social justice on the Guthrie side and the boundless creativity on the Dylan side, then through those lenses, we can expand on what we do in a way that hopefully resonates far beyond their monumental bodies of work.

In addition to the permanent collection, we’ll continue to have two or three rotating shows a year, such as the Jesse Ed Davis show and the Going Electric exhibits this year. We have numerous things in the works for 2026, 2027, and beyond. And then it’s the public programs — the film screenings that we’re taking out on the road, and things here that hopefully will entice people to come to Tulsa.

We’re looking at more multiple artist concerts, as we did with the “Blood on the Tracks” anniversary or the “Going Electric” exhibit, or the tribute show to Jesse Ed Davis. We’ve presented shows by The Pretenders and The Baseball Project, people who we love and who are great. But I think what we can do to make something really special is mixing and blending different artists to see how they interpret the Dylan songbook.

It’s part of looking at how Dylan approaches his songwriting, which we really try to focus on here. How does an artist approach covering a Dylan song? What are the creative decisions that go into that? It can be a daunting process for a lot of artists to take on these songs, even though he’s possibly the most covered musician we have.

And finally, we want to do more to serve K-12 students, thousands of whom come each year for field trips to both the Dylan and Guthrie centers. We can create curriculum and materials that I would love to see in classrooms, not just in Oklahoma, but in other states as well. We’ve been piloting different programs here, such as “Tangled Up in Tunes,” for which we have instrument tutorials in classes and after-school programs where we’re teaching guitar, harmonica and songwriting to kids. That’s very important to us.

Of course, it’s crucial to keep up the fundraising and partner with philanthropists that share our vision of what the center can continue to be, but after three years, I really think we’re really hitting our stride.

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Mark Davidson was an adjunct professor at the University of Texas and working for historian Douglas Brinkley as a research assistant in the summer of 2017 when he found a job in Tulsa, Oklahoma, that seemed like the right fit.

The previous year, Bob Dylan had sold his vast archive to the George Kaiser Family Foundation and the University of Tulsa for $20 million. The archive needed a collections manager and Davidson applied.

“Because I’m willing to go to stupid lengths to do big projects, I found myself where I’m at now,” says Davison, the senior director of archives and exhibitions for American Song Archives, which oversees the Woody Guthrie Center and the Bob Dylan Center.

Over the past eight years, Davidson has co-edited and co-written (with Parker Fishel) Bob Dylan: Mixing Up the Medicine. Published in October 2023, the massive book — three inches thick — showcases the archive in rare images and never-before-seen manuscripts, with essays by 29 writers and the work of more than 100 photographers, artists, and filmmakers included.

Davidson also helped with the design and curation of the Bob Dylan Center, which opened in the Tulsa Arts District down the street from its Guthrie counterpart in May 2022. And in addition to overseeing all the archives and exhibitions, he has curated three, including the current “Going Electric: Bob Dylan ’65” that runs through spring 2026.

Earlier this year, I visited the two centers, which, are located on the same street in the Tulsa Arts District. After the tours, I interviewed Davidson as well as Steve Jenkins, the Bob Dylan Center’s director. Portions of the interviews — the conversation with Jenkins will appear on Tuesday, December 23 — also were published on Americana Highways.

Here are excerpts from my conversation with Davidson. The interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity:

Let’s start with the book. What were the challenges in putting it together?

It started off as a pretty modest idea that’s now three inches thick. The original curator of the archive, Michael Chalkin, and a colleague of his, Robert Polito, were working to get people down to Tulsa to see the archive and they started doing events here. The hope was that they would choose something that piqued their interest in one way or another and write an essay about it. It was going to be a book of essays with pictures of the objects they chose.

This was taking place until the pandemic hit, which is when we started working on the book and got a publisher. And the publisher wanted us to make it into a magnum opus “Inside the Bob Dylan Archive Book” so we end up with this 607-page book that I’m looking at in front of me.

So how did the pandemic affect the building of the center?

The early story of the center was these public programs that we were holding to generate excitement, but when the pandemic hit, we shifted to curating and designing the center. During this intense period, we were designing it over Zoom.

Olsen Kundig out of Seattle was the architectural firm that designed the center, and we chose 59 Productions as our lead media designer. They had done a fantastic exhibit called “David Bowie Is” that we had seen and were impressed by. And then we all of these other partners working on the project, and we were putting it together literally over Zoom.

That must have been tough.

Designing a space that contains objects in cases when you can’t go outside to even get at the artifacts was a particular challenge. The archive was originally over at the Helmerich Center for American Research at Gilcrease Museum. I had some masked-up moments where I’d run over there, make sure nobody was in the building, and rush into the vault and wrestle through things.

So the center opens to much fanfare, and you get this great boost from the Dylan movie “A Complete Unknown.” Has that drawn more attention to the archive and the center?

Absolutely. No question. It’s brought in a new wave of people, either longtime fans who hadn’t come to Tulsa or people who didn’t know much about Dylan until they saw the movie. It’s been a big boost for us.

The timing was great for the 1965 exhibit, which focuses on the period that concludes the movie, the Newport Folk Festival performance where Dylan famously went electric. Let’s talk about that and some of your plans for future exhibits.

The nice thing about telling these stories is that we’re taking a first pass on all of this right now. The 1965 exhibit is the first time we’ve really been able to pull out all the stops and bring this stuff out. Curating this exhibit, more and more people have come out of the woodwork with things that they have that are amazing to put on display.

Julian’s auctioned off three original drafts of “Mr. Tambourine Man” that had been previously unknown. These were TypeScript drafts. And due to happenstance, somebody got it and reached out to us and asked if we wanted to borrow them. It was perfect timing because “Mr. Tambourine Man” is a pivotal moment in the folk rock 1965 moment.

I’m really excited about this exhibit. It all feels like it has been falling into place.

Your dissertation was on the WPA and the rise and preservation of folk music, and now you’re steeped in all things Dylan. Do you have a preference between the two?

I don’t know if I have a leaning one way or another. When I was doing my research, I really got into that era of the United States, which will never happen again. Not the Great Depression, but the desire people had to come together and preserve our history. We live in such a different era now.

I love them both. There are commonalities, not just Dylan kind of doing the Woody Guthrie thing early, learning all of his songs and calling himself a Woody Guthrie jukebox at one point. It’s their approach to creativity, how they doodled and marked up manuscripts, and how they were very invested and constantly worked at their craft in different ways. I think that is fascinating.

The late 1960s is such an interesting period in Dylan’s life — the tour of Great Britain, Europe and Australia captured in “Don’t Look Back,” the motorcycle accident, the Basement Tapes. You don’t have any shortage of content to draw from.

Given the number of opportunities that we have right now, the challenge is that we’re trying to be precise and focused and not let our eyes be bigger than our stomachs. We have a relatively small staff and budget compared to other institutions our size, so we’re doing a lot with a little here.

It would be easy for us to keep just hitting the anniversaries. 1966 would be a fantastic exhibit because that is Bob Dylan at his sort of pinnacle of hipness. You’ve got the post-Newport moments of him pulling together the band that would become The Band and then going and doing the big international tour. That is one of the most photographed and visually exciting moments. Then he recorded “Blonde on Blonde” and put that out before the motorcycle accident.

So there’s a lot, if we decided to remain on that course. But I’m not certain that we will. We’ve done a number of great non-Bob exhibits, like the Jerry Schatzberg photo retrospective called “25^th and Park” that had been up at fotografika in New York and that fit really well. And there are Bob ties there (Schatzberg shot the cover of “Blonde on Blonde). And we’ve had the exhibit on (guitarist and Oklahoma native) Jesse Ed Davis, which was fantastic. There are Bob ties there, but it was more about Davis as an artist and the lives he touched and people he influenced.

So there’s any number of directions we can go. The same can be said of the Woody Guthrie Center. He represents so much more than just the Dust Bowl era. Finding other key people to showcase in our exhibits is not a big stretch for us.

The full Dylan archive has about 100,000 items and is available to credentialed researchers only. Given the swirl of interest in Dylan’s work for more than a half century, is there anything that you’re on the hunt for that is “missing”?

There are some things on our radar that would be great to have. Some pieces have been on our radar that didn’t end up here, and that sort of goes back to the challenges of all the opportunities. It was a decade or so ago that a few drafts of “Like A Rolling Stone” went for $2.5 million or something astronomical like that, so there’s definitely a market there.

But we do occasionally get lucky with people donating some really amazing pieces. Here’s a side story: Dylan went to England for the first time late 1962/early 1963 and was part of a BBC telecast called “The Mad House on Castle Street.” As is the case with so much of the TV from that time, the BBC wiped their tapes and reused them, but a few people had their tape recorders out and captured this play.

Somebody just reached out and donated to us the tape that their brother had made, so we’ve become a magnet for people have been holding onto these things for decades. It’s really great to be the central repository for all of this stuff.

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Touring the Centers in Photos

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This is the time when we’re being bombarded with the annual end-of-year lists that focus on the best and worst of everything we’ve seen and heard in 2025. The stream usually starts right after Thanksgiving and continues through December, with a few stragglers and diehards — “How dare you call it best of the year before the year is out?” — waiting until January.

I’m here for all of them, but rarely take the time to build lists of my own. Instead of attempting (feebly) to review albums and shows, the essays and interviews in “The Music Diaries” are tied to how certain artists and songs affect my life in some way.

More of "The Music Diaries"

In 2025, I’ve written a great deal about music, even though I haven’t seen or photographed nearly as many shows as in years past. The ones I saw were memorable: Jason Isbell in Mexico City, the multiple-artist Boys from Oklahoma concert in Stillwater, and The Eagles in Las Vegas were all part of trips with my spouse, Jill.

One story I haven’t written is about a fourth concert we traveled to see in 2025 — Pearl Jam, standing on top of a converted hockey rink in Raleigh, N.C., on the evening of Mother’s Day.

It was a bucket list show for my wife, but after 29 years of marriage and two concerts filled with unusual back stories, she is still waiting for “Better Man.”

Back in Time

Let’s start by going back half a lifetime.

Released on November 22, 1994, Pearl Jam’s Vitalogy was a multiplatinum behemoth that completed a trilogy that started with Ten and continued with Vs. The album included several hit singles, but no song was bigger or has had a more lasting impact than “Better Man,” an album-only track never released as a 45.

The story of a woman trying to get out of an abusive (physical, emotional or both is not specified) relationship, the song’s protagonist fears she’ll never be able to leave her partner. Vedder wrote the song in high school and later pitched it to the other Pearl Jam members, but the band initially refused to record it, feeling that it was too accessible for the style of grunge/punk music they were making.

In early 1995, “Better Man” started receiving airplay on the stations Jill and I listened to from nearby Greensboro and Raleigh. Trapped at the time in a cyclical, emotionally abusive relationship with no end in sight, “Better Man” particularly resonated with her during what is described most succinctly as a difficult time.

Unlike the song’s protagonist, Jill finally got the courage to terminate the relationship in the fall of 1995. The next year, we married and soon after that had three children within the span of 12 months.

Over the years, “Better Man” always has seemed to play at those times when we needed a reminder of what we had gone through and how far we had come. Jill, who also sings, has always had an appreciation for Vedder’s voice and playing, especially solo. When Pearl Jam released its tender “Just Breathe” in 2009, she said she wanted to see him live at some point.

But the timing was never right. As our lives became more flexible, the group started touring less, and tickets became hard to access without the unlimited funds we didn’t have.

Fast forward almost 25 years, to March 2019 and the Innings Festival.

Maybe It’s Time

Vedder, who had branched out into solo work with the soundtrack to 2007’s “Into the Air,” was headlining the festival, a two-day annual event in Tempe, Ariz., that is tied to the start of spring training for Major League Baseball.

We had recently become empty nesters, which made travel easier. Although I go to most shows by myself, Jill and I had seen traveled to see Isbell several times. Isbell had become one of her favorite artists, but she continued to tell me she wanted to see Vedder and/or Pearl Jam perform “Better Man” live.

I wrote to the festival’s PR team about how seeing Vedder was a bucket list item for my wife, and how we were willing to fly in from Northern Virginia to do so. The PR folks granted me a photo pass — we had to pay for our tickets to the second day of shows — and off we went.

When we arrived Sunday morning to pick up the photo pass, Vedder’s soundcheck was coming through the PA. Although he was not singing, he was playing “Better Man.” Jill squeezed my hand.

That night, I was in the pit for the first three songs. As I walked back to Jill, who was saving a spot for us, I heard the strains of a familiar song. Vedder was playing “Maybe It’s Time,” the song Isbell had written for Bradley Cooper’s character to sing in “A Star is Born.”

I pushed my way through the massive crowd to reach her for the last two-thirds. There we stood, amid thousands of Vedder and Pearl Jam fans, lost in our thoughts and alone together.

That moment eased the sting a bit when Vedder, for whatever reason, ended his set without playing “Better Man.” As I mentioned to Jill, his cover of a song by a writer we so appreciate was a gateway to the next chapter, allowing us to put those long-ago memories behind us.

“Maybe it’s time to let the old ways die…”

Not the Next Time

In the fall of 2019, I entered the lottery for Pearl Jam’s upcoming tour and managed to purchase tickets to their Oklahoma City show in the upper nosebleed section of the NBA Thunder’s arena. The show was scheduled for April 2020, then postponed for two years because of the pandemic. We ended up not using the tickets.

Sigh.

Last fall, Pearl Jam announced that they would embark on the fifth leg of their “Dark Matter” tour, the first to come reasonably close to us on the East Coast. I signed up for the pre-sale lottery, which would be held in December, to see if we could get tickets to one of the Raleigh or Pittsburgh shows.

The day of the pre-sale, I was in the hospital, fighting a life-threatening case of bacterial pneumonia and sepsis. Falling in and out of sleep, one lung completely covered, I had an IV in my arm and a roommate watching Fox News at full blast.

At 3 a.m., for some reason, I woke up with a start and realized the lottery had started. Glassy eyed and under the influence of heavy pharmaceuticals, I found my phone and checked to see if we’d been selected for pre-access. We had, with one shot — Mother’s Day evening in Raleigh.

I accessed the code and found three sets of two seats — one in the upper nosebleeds in the rear of the auditorium, one (also upper nosebleeds) to the side of the stage, and one on the floor, about halfway back from the stage. Curious, I checked the floor prices and nearly aspirated on my own fluids.

Then, I said, “F— it,” and pushed purchase, thinking, “If I die, at least she’ll have good seats.”

One small problem: Four-digit purchases made at 3 a.m. on a mobile phone send a fraud alert to credit card companies. The purchase was rejected, and Ticketbastard said I had less than 6 minutes left to buy them or the tickets would be released.

Somehow, despite the pharmaceutical haze, I managed to get through to the credit card company, which approved the purchase with just seconds to spare. All I had to do was recover from my illness and convince my spouse that she didn’t need a new couch for Christmas.

Seeing Pearl Jam would have to suffice.

This Time?

Mother’s Day weekend arrived, and we made the trip to Raleigh. We had a lovely brunch with Nick, Conner, Conner’s parents, and our grandson, Colin, then drove to the venue to stand in the merch line on a drizzly May day.

Jill and I thought it was strange that Pearl Jam would open its merch line eight hours before going on stage, but it shows how little we knew about the extent of their fandom. Shortly after noon, the line was already several hundred people long.

We talked to fans who had seen the group 70, 80, 90 times. One woman had caught each stop on the 30-city tour, the most intensive year for the band since 2006, and I asked if she lived in her car.

“I almost have to so I can afford the tickets,” she said. “But it’s worth it.”

The show was the first of two that would take place over three nights. In between, the Carolina Hurricanes were hosting a NHL playoff game, which meant the crews were working overtime to reset the arena.

By seeing only one of the shows, I knew we had just a 50-50 chance of hearing “Better Man.” The group’s catalogue is so deep and varied that they had been performing only a handful of songs on both nights of their tour stops. (In Raleigh, only “Courduroy,” “Dark Matter,” “Porch,” and “Alive” were played at both shows.)

Our seats were great, although we stood for most of the show. Vedder was charismatic, in great voice, and the band was fantastic as they alternated between old and new cuts. At our show, they performed “Hold On” live for the first time since 2018 and Vedder gave a shout out to a fan who was seeing her 100th Pearl Jam concert.

At the start of the encore, Vedder played a lovely version of “Just Breathe” as the lights came up and the audience sang along. It was just gorgeous, but I knew its appearance meant that “Better Man” would have to wait for another day.

Ears ringing after more than two hours, we left the arena with a better understanding why Pearl Jam has such devout fans even after more than 30 years of touring. And while slightly disappointed, my wife was philosophical.

“Maybe it’s just not meant to be,” she said. “I guess you’ll just have to find a way for us to see them again.”

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I can’t put a finger exactly on when I became a Lou Reed admirer — fan is a word he alternately would have loathed and loved. But I think he would have appreciated that I came to love his music — or at least a great deal of it — in backward fashion.

My appreciation started, I guess, when a neighbor passed me a copy of “New Sensations” in the late 1980s. At the time, I was living in Houston’s museum district, an area that opened my eyes in ways my parents had always feared. It was my own sort of quiet rebellion; I was partially embracing a bohemian lifestyle while working nights and going to school during the day, unsure of what the next chapter would bring.

Reed’s music — along with that of X, The Clash, R.E.M., the Talking Heads and The Replacements — pointed me in directions that clashed with the reality I experienced growing up. They are directions I continue to find intriguing and exciting, especially from a distance. To this day, I can still quote Reed’s 1989 album “New York” verbatim and find myself looking for the very characters he describes when I walk the city’s long since gentrified streets.

In October 2013, I was in New York the day after Reed died of liver failure at age 71, and walked over to the Chelsea Hotel, where a makeshift memorial with candles, flowers and notes was placed at the entrance. Someone also put a small plastic Ziploc with a powdery substance inside.

While I stood there, a woman walked to the memorial and moved it out of sight. Another passerby said, “He wouldn’t have cared.”

Two doors from the Chelsea, painters were finishing work on the sign for a new 7-11 that opened a few months later on West 24th Street. On that note, I get the feeling Reed would have cared. Or maybe not. I’m not sure.

From Edie to Andy to VU and Lou

My first exposure to Reed and his first band, the Velvet Underground, came almost 30 years before his death. The summer before my freshman year in college, I picked up and consumed Edie, the biography of socialite and Andy Warhol muse Edie Sedgwick. Masterfully presented in an oral history format by Jules Stein and editor George Plimpton, Sedgwick’s story is equal parts fascinating and time capsule tragedy, one reason she remains an icon in some circles more than 60 years after her heyday.

For a brief period in the mid 1960s, Sedgwick was the brightest star of Warhol’s faux reality show and inspired Bob Dylan to write “Just Like a Woman.” But within five years, she was dead of a drug overdose at age 28.

Looking back, Sedgwick never stood a chance, given the Warhol-level indulgences and her family tree — a generationally unstable lineage with a history of great wealth, mental illness, breakdowns, and suicide.

At 18, living on the Texas Gulf Coast, I did not understand why someone with so much would piss it all away in a drug- and alcohol-induced haze. More than 40 years after reading the book, her story of self-destruction still affects me, especially as I understand more than ever how fragile life — especially one with a deep family history of mental illness — can be.

Just after finishing Edie, I met and quickly became good friends with Brian, a fellow student at the University of Houston. I didn’t have many male friends growing up, but we formed a bond that lasted more than 20 years. He was like the older brother I never had.

And he was a Lou Reed fan.

A Familial Bond

When we met during my freshman year, Brian was a sportswriter at the university newspaper, an erstwhile English major on the slowest possible path to graduation. He was putting his life on the right path, he said, claiming he could not remember his last three years of high school because he was stoned all the time. Going back to school at 23, he said, was a chance to make something of his life.

Brian and I bonded over sports, music, movies, and journalism. He handed me my first copy of the Village Voice and extolled the virtues of the alternative press. He talked about the Velvet Underground’s music that he had found in second-hand record shops and was thrilled when Verve reissued the group’s first three albums, long out of print, in 1985 along with two compilations (VU and Another VU) that mixed unreleased studio cuts and live tracks.

Over time, I learned of the struggles he had growing up as the oldest child of alcoholic parents involved in a toxic, codependent relationship. Brian had identified some of his parents’ issues as his own and tried to work his way through them, but life proved to be a struggle.

For a time, our lives paralleled. He married. I married. We participated in each other’s weddings. He had children. I had a child. Then I moved from Texas to North Carolina. The time between our conversations lengthened, buoyed occasionally when I returned to Texas and we managed to connect in person.

He did not understand why I left my first marriage, at least in the beginning. I did not understand why, given that he became miserable in his relationship, he did not do the same. But Brian said he could not leave his children, no matter how many times he wished his parents had divorced when he was growing up.

Write About Anything

After returning home from New York, I found a Fresh Air segment devoted to Reed’s life and legacy. The primary interview subject was Bill Bentley, who worked as Reed’s publicist from 1988 to 2004 — no easy task given the songwriter’s notoriously prickly nature.

The program, which featured clips of interviews with former band members and others close to Reed, was an intriguing listen. But one quote in particular stuck with me:

"Lou's whole contribution to rock 'n' roll was — at the very start of his career he said, 'You should be able to write about anything.' Anything you could read about in a book, or talk about in a play, he felt should be in a rock 'n' roll song,” Bentley said. “He set that out as his No. 1 goal: to change the parameters of what rock lyrics could be.”

And Reed succeeded. To the listener with a pop ear, much of his music can be tough sledding, although he also wrote some cool pop songs. (I’m not a huge fan of feedback and extended drone, and “Metal Machine Music” is almost as bad to me as “Having Fun with Elvis on Stage,” for many of the same reasons.)

The riches for the listener, and occasionally the beauty, are found in the lyrics, three- to 10-minute short stories and poems filled with vivid characters living on the fringes, with tragedy lurking nearby.

The Lurking Tragedy

Like his parents, Brian tried to fight his demons, but the demons fought back. Eventually, at some point in 2005, he and his wife formally separated — apparently for good this time. He also took a leave of absence from his job.

No matter how many times I asked him to call if he needed help, I was always the one reaching out. In 2005, we talked only three times — once in person when I went back to Texas, and twice by phone. The last one, in June one weekend evening when I was working late, seemed like old times as we talked about sports and music. He said he and his wife were living apart, but didn’t want to go into details.

At that time, the Houston Astros were making a run that eventually would land them in their first World Series, and now that I lived near Washington, D.C., we trash talked about the Redskins/Cowboys rivalry, with promises to catch up again during football season.

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In early September, two weeks before the Redskins/Cowboys game on Monday Night Football, I called his office to talk and was told he wasn’t there. I also called his apartment but got no answer.

On September 19, the Redskins won 14-13 on two huge bombs from Mark Brunell to Santana Moss in the final seconds. I thought about calling Brian again, but decided to wait because I was leaving for a work meeting in Las Vegas that week.

In Vegas, I received a call from Sandra Santos, a mutual friend and former college classmate who told me the news.

Brian hadn’t seen the game. When I called his office that day, he had been dead for two weeks. He had taken his own life, apparently so lost, tortured, and hopeless that he decided to leave his sons behind after all. His soon-to-be-ex had buried him with no obituary notice and no calls to his friends.

Apparently no one at his office knew what to say either.

Perfect Day

Even now, 20 years after his death, I think about Brian often. Standing outside the Chelsea Hotel and its many ghosts the day after Reed’s passing in 2013, I felt his spirit more strongly than I had in years.

He used to love Reed’s song “Perfect Day.”

It’s easy to be lulled into the lyrics at the start. “Just a perfect day/drink Sangria in the park/And then later/when it gets dark, we go home … Oh, it's such a perfect day/I'm glad I spend it with you/Oh, such a perfect day/You just keep me hanging on.”

But then it turns dark: “Just a perfect day/you made me forget myself/I thought I was/someone else, someone good.” And even darker still with the refrain at the end: “You're going to reap just what you sow/You're going to reap just what you sow.”

I miss you, Brian. I hope somewhere you’re resting in peace. I hope Reed is too.

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If pressed to name my all-time favorite song, I sort through the lengthy mental rolodex of artists I appreciate most and come up with the same answer every time: John Hiatt’s “Have a Little Faith in Me.”

Since the song appeared on Hiatt’s 1987 breakthrough album Bring the Family, I’ve seen him perform it live more than 20 times in all kinds of settings, both solo and with various backing groups. And its message — the plea for love when you feel like you don’t deserve it, pledging to keep promises no matter how difficult times become — still gets me every single time.

Last week, listening to an Apple Music mix, the algorithm decided it had been too long since I had heard the song I know by heart. A few tracks later, Jeff Healy’s cover of Hiatt’s “Angel Eyes” followed. As it happens when you hear songs that are embedded in your being, this one-two punch sent me back to another time.

Musical Evolution

Through much of my childhood, my music tastes were limited to the singles and albums I found in my parents’ stereo system, a long rectangular piece of furniture that housed a turntable, an AM/FM radio with crappy reception in our cinderblock house, and a trough that held the vinyl 33s and 45s my dad collected.

That meant I listened to a lot of 1950s music — the inaugural class of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame was well represented in that cabinet — that represented my father’s teen years instead of mine.

My father was 23 when The Beatles appeared on Ed Sullivan, but he never really got into the first classic rock era. By the mid 1970s, when I was a pre-teen and he was in a pharmaceutical haze, his tastes took some strange twists and turns. Sadly, when it comes to music taste, psychedelics put pharmaceuticals to shame.

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In middle and high school, story songs and Southern Rock found their way into my consciousness. I gravitated toward groups like The Band, Lynyrd Skynyrd, and The Allman Brothers more than most of my classmates, who were into Boston, Journey, REO Speedwagon, Rush, Styx, and Van Halen and country songs that landed you squarely in the “Take This Job and Shove It” realm.

As a college freshman in 1983-84, my musical windows exploded. College radio was arguably at its peak. Shows in Houston’s clubs generally were affordable, 18 was the minimum age, and soon I was working at a slightly better than minimum wage newspaper job.

In short order, I found punk and New Wave — favoring the eclecticism of the early 1980s L.A.-based bands and the regional acts in the Minneapolis and Athens scenes. These soon would be followed by the New York groups that played CBGBs and the British groups that believed they started it all. Taking a cue from Willie Nelson, I also started listening to country artists who brought attitude and a heavier sound that labeled them as outlaws.

Just as I had done with the U.S. presidents, movies, and the NFL as a child, my immersion in music was headfirst. I worked to learn as much about different artists and bands as I could. Liner notes helped me connect the dots and sent me down wormholes to discover more about different songwriters and groups.

The possibilities seemed endless.

Brought Into the Fold

When the road gets dark / and you can no longer see / just let my love throw a spark / and have a little faith in me.

At the ripe old age of 21, having worked for a daily newspaper for three years, I wiggled my way into an internship on the features desk at the Houston Chronicle. For several months I did that job and college classes during the day while working nights at the Texas City Sun.

Living on next to no sleep — unknowingly avoiding past, present, and future traumas that would take decades to fully reconcile — I found myself talking to older staff writers at both papers and critics who knew far more than I did about music, movies, books, and theater. I had come to hate school, largely because it was boring and not challenging, and my co-workers provided the education I sought.

Over an 18-month period in 1986 and 1987, I left the Sun and ramped up my college class schedule, an ill-advised (see above) requirement to work full time at the Chronicle. During this period, I spent more time sponging up information from my co-workers than I did paying attention to the tasks before me.

Inevitably, it seems now, this resulted in my losing my tenuous “internship/staff position” at the Chronicle and almost flunking out of college for a second time.

During my Chronicle tenure, the newspaper’s music critic saw my enthusiasm for different acts. Marty Racine was championing a songwriter who had been through a rough patch, only to come out of it with an album that had blown the jaded critic away.

The songwriter was Hiatt. The album was Bring the Family.

Slowly Joining the Adults

Recorded in just four days and released in January 1987, Bring the Family was not an album designed to compete with the top 40, hair metal, and dance pop found on the airwaves during that period. But, as Hiatt biographer (and fellow Substacker) Michael Elliott noted in a piece marking its 35^th anniversary, it was “an album made by adults for adults.”

“Bring the Family represented adulthood, parenthood, sobriety, monogamy, domesticity, and responsibility — traditionally very un-rock and roll themes, and in fact, subject matter rock and roll rebelled against from its inception,” writes Elliott, whose excellent Hiatt biography is titled (not surprisingly) Have a Little Faith. “In that respect, Bring the Family rebelled against the rebellion. Becoming a sort of 1980s version of Music from Big Pink, it shunned what was popular in favor of authentic sonics and mature values.”

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I saw Hiatt live for the first time in September of that year at Rockefeller’s in Houston with his new backing band, the Goners. Grooving to the slide guitar of Sonny Landreth, I was hooked by all of those themes, even though I wasn’t ready to face up to the responsibilities they represented yet. In the months between the release of Bring the Family and its follow up, Slow Turning, I was let go by the Chronicle and, soon after that, met my future ex-wife.

Needing a job, I took an extended break from classes and after nine long days of unemployment, landed a position as an AM/PM newspaper in Tyler, Texas. Over a 30-year period, those nine days were the only time I was unemployed, so I guess I learned that lesson.

Tyler, located about 85 miles east of Dallas, was not exactly a live music mecca. The only show I remember seeing, in fact, was Delbert McClinton playing in the showroom of a former car dealership, the sound echoing off the cinderblock walls.

That night, he played a fantastic cover of “Have a Little Faith in Me.”

Triggering Memories

Last week, I heard the one-two punch of “Have a Little Faith” and “Angel Eyes” while driving the 120 miles on Interstate 20 from Dallas to Longview. I was going to meet my mom to clean out the rest of my aunt’s belongings, an onerous and complicated task since 1989, the year my paternal grandmother died while I was working in Tyler.

Having ported my grandparents’ house and belongings into hers, my aunt followed in her mother’s footsteps and threw away absolutely nothing. That meant my 84-year-old mom — the last immediate family member above me — and I had to go through 41 large boxes of letters and correspondence dating back to the early 1900s.

During that trip, I replayed my father’s record collection in my mind and Americana and punk music in my car. Several times, my thoughts drifted to Hiatt songs and that late 1980s period in my life.

I recalled that the first concert I photographed was a Hiatt show in Raleigh, N.C., in 1994, during a long tour behind “Perfectly Good Guitar.” By this point, my ex and I were at odds, and the marriage would end within the year.

I thought about how, before my current wife Jill and I married, I sent her small frames with the lyrics to “Have a Little Faith” and “Angel Eyes.” Both songs — Hiatt covered “Angel Eyes” on the live album that followed “Perfectly Good Guitar” as my first marriage was going up in flames — represented where I was and what I hoped to someday be.

I recalled the night in July 2008 when I dragged my sons Nicholas and Ben to a Hiatt show at The Birchmere in Alexandria. Nick was 15 and Ben was 10, and the reason they went was because I needed a father/son moment as the first anniversary of my dad’s death approached. Ironically, it’s one of only two times I’ve spoken to Hiatt in person, as I managed to convince my sons to stand (awkwardly, I may add) outside his bus in the parking lot post show.

Since then, I’ve photographed several Hiatt shows and have evangelized about his songwriting to anyone who would (or was forced to) listen. But I have hesitated — other than in a couple of Americana Highways reviews — to write much about him or the impact his songs (one in particular) have had on my life. The backstory has felt too complex to write about, with too many painful feelings from that time in my late 20s and early 30s attached.

But on this beautiful October day, one day after my father would have turned 85 and less than a week after sorting through generations of memories and all that such a journey entails, writing this felt like my own version of Bring the Family.

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Traveling south on a multiple day trip from Seattle to San Francisco, the last place you’d expect to make an extended stop is Aberdeen, Washington, once known as “The Hellhole of the Pacific” and “the roughest town west of the Mississippi.”

But that’s what happened last week as we pulled into the town of 17,000 off U.S. 101 near Washington’s coastline. My wife had agreed to indulge me on a 40-minute detour to see the town’s memorial to Kurt Cobain, the lead singer and principal songwriter for Nirvana.

Cobain, who was 27 when he died by suicide in 1994, spent most of his childhood in the gritty, working-class industrial town, which bears some striking similarities to the place where I grew up. And that difficult upbringing, followed by an against-the-odds rise and a sadly inevitable train wreck end, has Shakespearean overtones that are impossible to ignore.

As I continue to unpack, at age 60, pieces of my own upbringing and the influence of my hometown, the detour to Aberdeen felt necessary.

Nevermind

Unlike many of my generation and the one after it, my feelings were mixed toward Nirvana and much of the grunge movement, which stylistically felt like a sequel to the college radio I hoovered up in my late teens and 20s. Nirvana, especially, felt like the love child of a toxic relationship between Husker Du and The Replacements, two groups that failed to find mainstream success.

As a Replacements fan, I was mourning the group’s demise when “Nevermind” — the title of which was debatably cribbed from a track off the Mats’ “Pleased to Meet Me” album — exploded in 1991 and consumed the pop culture zeitgeist. Geffen Records initially expected sales of around 250,000; to date, “Nevermind” has sold more than 30 million copies worldwide.

The success of Nirvana’s second album brought alternative rock into the mainstream, serving as a national launching pad for Seattle-based groups Alice in Chains, Pearl Jam, and Soundgarden. Cobain’s songcraft shines through on classics like “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” “All Apologies,” and “Come As You Are,” now the phrase on a sign welcoming you to Aberdeen.

I appreciated “Nevermind” but couldn’t get into Nirvana’s other albums; the posthumously released “MTV Unplugged,” ironically, may be my favorite because of its relative softness. By the time it was recorded, in 1993, Cobain’s tumultuous marriage to Courtney Love had become fodder for the tabloid age and relentless footloose paparazzi of the era. His drug use had been exacerbated by the pressures of sudden, overwhelming stardom, and the pressure of being hailed as the voice of his generation.

Cobain, who had struggled with stomach pain and chronic depression since childhood, became addicted to heroin and overdosed multiple times before taking his life at his home in Seattle. Like Amy Winehouse almost two decades later, I was not surprised when I heard that Cobain had died. Both became members of the infamous 27 Club.

A Lack of Nostalgia

I have long been fascinated by public figures who connect with audiences so strongly that fans come from long distances to pay tribute, as evidenced by my stop at the Joshua Tree Inn earlier this month.

But unlike that visit, I had no interest in going to the place where Cobain died. In this instance, I was much more interested in seeing the town where he spent his formative years.

Cobain and I were born two years apart and grew up in towns tied to large ports that served different industries. Texas City is part of one of the largest refining and petrochemical clusters in the U.S., with the eighth largest port in the world. Aberdeen historically has depended on timber and fishing but now is a gateway as well to automobile imports and exports and other bulk commodities.

In August, during a brief trip to Texas, I visited my hometown and drove through the area surrounded by the petrochemical plants that defined our economy when I was growing up and still do so to this day. The names have changed over time, but the smell and the associated risks have not.

The dive bars frequented day and night by plant workers after a long shift still exist, although they are not as plentiful. Many of the shack homes on the south side of Texas Avenue, already dilapidated when I was a child, were torn down in the late 1990s in an effort to establish a greenway between the plants and residents, but pockets still remain.

I don’t feel nostalgic about my childhood in Texas City. It was difficult for a kid who others considered ”different” — i.e. one who liked books, history and movies more than sports, boats, and cruising Palmer Highway. The bullying that began in late elementary and middle school felt incessant and insidious, and I never felt like I belonged to any group or clique.

Having read about Cobain’s childhood in Aberdeen, I knew we shared early trauma from roughly the same age — mine due to my father’s illness, his due to his parents’ divorce when he was 9 — and had found escapes through our artistic pursuits. Like me, Cobain was bullied and accused of being gay by his peers; unlike me, he dropped out of school two weeks prior to graduation and left his hometown soon after, forming what became Nirvana with fellow Aberdeen resident Krist Novoselic.

Going to the Park

Driving into Aberdeen toward the memorial — the “Come As You Are” welcome sign was on a different road — I was instantly reminded of the neighborhoods I had driven through in Texas City. Aberdeen’s poverty is more pervasive than in my hometown — petrochemical refining pays better — but its violent crime rate and percentages of youth at risk are similar even though Texas City is more than twice its size.

Jill and I drove to the site, a small park at the end of a road on the banks of the Wishkah River at the foot of the Young Street Bridge. Cobain said he lived under the bridge when he was kicked out of his home after dropping out — a claim others (including Novoselic) dispute — and the lyrics to the Nirvana song “Something in the Way” are about that period.

The song’s lyrics are in the park next to a likeness of Cobain. Another headstone has several of the musician’s quotes:

• “Drugs are bad for you. They will f---you up.” (The profanity was erased by the city after Aberdeen took over the park in 2015.)

• “Wanting to be someone else is a waste of the person you are.”

• “The duty of youth is to challenge corruption.”

• And, finally: “My name is Kurt and I sing and play the guitar and I’m a walking talking bacterial infection.”

The owners of the house across the street from the park are, obviously, over the strangers who gather to pay homage. In their yard is a sign that serves as a sort of FAQ to the arriving fans, who’ve come from long distances, such as Alaska, Texas, and (in our case), Virginia, as well as far-flung countries (Canada, Chile, England, and Russia, among others).

Simple messages (“fill in the name blank,” followed by “was here”) are scrawled throughout the park, as if the visitors feel the need to be seen. Some are sweet and poignant (“I love your heart,” “Thank you for changing my life,” and “Memory lives on”) while others quote the names of Nirvana hits and Cobain’s lyrics (“Take your time. Hurry up,” and “I’m on a plain. I can’t complain.”)

Strange as it may sound, I found the park an appealing and appropriate tribute to an artist who didn’t know how to continue to live in this world. As messy and graffiti filled as it is, it doesn’t feel exploitive or ghoulish, but a place to say both hello and goodbye.

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As ticket costs skyrocket to see classic bands that have aged well beyond the Social Security mark, I regularly question whether the price tag to sit in the nosebleed seats is worth the dopamine hit of nostalgia.

The answer usually is a resounding no, with occasional exceptions. Jill and I saw Simon and Garfunkel on their final reunion tour (not great) and Billy Joel during his Madison Square Garden residency (a lot of fun). I also saw Bruce Springsteen on his most recent tour, which was spectacular, but the very expensive ticket was free — thanks to the kindness of almost strangers who had an extra — after I photographed the first three songs.

That’s it for me on the classic rock circuit. No Stones, no McCartney, no summer rock packages that feature bands like Def Leppard, Foreigner, Foghat, or Styx. I don’t need to relive what some say were the best of times.

And that explains why seeing the Eagles at The Sphere in Las Vegas wasn’t on my bingo card.

The Spectacular Sphere

Here’s the first caveat: Seeing the sold out show — the 33rd in the Eagles ongoing residency — was free. We were invited by the sponsors of a business trip my wife and I took to Vegas earlier this month. I couldn’t turn down a free opportunity to see the Sphere, even if I would be among a handful of people who wasn’t a big fan of the group performing.

I don’t hate the Eagles like some do, even though their hits send me flashing back to the middle school/high school years (shudder) when classic rock bands and the bullies who loved them were at their peak. You have your memories; I have mine. And generally, I think it’s wise not to voluntarily court PTSD if I can help it.

But the lure of the Sphere was enough to overcome those hesitations, even if the venue itself also was outside my comfort zone. As a rule, I prefer small and midsize places where you can actually see and hear the performers instead of craning your neck to watch them on a large screen, having paid hundreds of dollars for the privilege to do so. I also enjoy the spontaneity you find with groups in smaller venues; the logistics of playing in a large arena or stadium today rarely allow for unexpected, unscripted moments that make live shows truly special.

Taller than a football field and more than 500 feet wide at its broadest point, the Sphere is an astounding technological feat. It has nine levels — we were on level 4 — and a 160,000 square foot LED screen. The sound system comes with spatial audio and more than 1,500 permanently installed speakers.

Located just off the Strip, the venue opened with U2 performing a 40-show residency in 2023 and has subsequently hosted residencies by Phish, Dead & Company, and the Backstreet Boys. It also is screening a 4D version of “The Wizard of Oz” — tickets start at $125 — in an effort to recoup some of its $2.3 billion construction cost.

In a city that prides itself on excess, this venue wins the prize.

Beyond the Visuals

So how was the show itself?

Beyond the visuals, it depends on your view of the band, one of the most dominant groups of the 1970s and early 1980s, and your threshold for nostalgia.

As “The Long Goodbye Tour” moves into its third year, continuing at least until early 2026 with more shows at the Sphere, the Eagles know what their audience wants. All they do is play the hits, capitalizing on the nostalgia boom they helped start after reuniting in 1994 following a 14-year hiatus for the “Hell Freezes Over” tour.

I spent most of the night playing with my phone camera — the Sphere is tailor made for those who know how to shoot with an iPhone — while Jill and the others in our group sang along to songs they knew by heart.

As a kid, I appreciated the Eagles evolution from early country-rock — founders Glenn Frey and Don Henley met while supporting Linda Ronstadt in her first solo band — to threading the needle between country, AOR, and the heavier sounds that Joe Walsh brought to the group when he joined in 1975.

The Eagles had five number one singles and five albums that topped the charts, despite a constantly combative and evolving lineup that featured as many lawsuits — mostly over royalties and concert profits — as hits. Since the 1994 reunion, they’ve released only one album of original music — 2007’s “Long Road Out of Eden,” another No. 1 hit — along with a handful of studio tracks smattered across live albums and “best of” sets.

Like everyone else it seems, I owned their first greatest hits album — the country-rock era — as a kid, and still am fond of songs like “Lyin’ Eyes,” “Take It Easy,” and especially “Desperado.” But the rest of their hits, all of which are well-crafted, feel sterile and faceless, and they fail to move the needle for me.

The Nostalgia Piece

Throughout the show, I acknowledged that the Eagles were managing to do what many classic rock groups can’t — play the songs they recorded more than 40 years ago with much of the same quality that they were recorded. That’s despite Frey’s death — his song Deacon and Vince Gill (always welcome) were more than adequate replacements — and the advanced ages of Henley, Walsh (both 78), and bass player Timothy B. Schmit, who is 77.

I don’t begrudge or question another person’s fandom, or a band’s ability to make money at a time when record sales have been replaced by concert proceeds as a primary source of income. But the Eagles, to their credit and to their fans’ detriment, recognized the latter long before others did and capitalized on it. (Tickets for the Sphere shows routinely fetch more than $1,000 on the secondary market.)

The money didn’t seem to matter to those in attendance or to the band, which did not play a song recorded less than 40 years ago. The show did include solo cuts made famous by Walsh (“Life’s Been Good” and “Rocky Mountain Way”) and Henley (“Boys of Summer”).

Henley, speaking for the only time during the set, said the group is “working on new visual content” for future Sphere shows “but the songs will remain the same.”

“We know that some of you have been here more than once,” he said to a loud cheer from the crowd, including one close to us shouting “Eagles never die” at the top of her lungs. “And we appreciate you braving the highways, the airlines, and TSA to join us on a two-hour vacation from all the insanity. We know there’s uncertainty with friends, families, and our country, but we also have an obligation to joy.”

Henley didn’t smile when he said it, but no one seemed to disagree.

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Given my appreciation for Elvis Presley, it’s reasonable to conclude that “Viva Las Vegas” would run on an endless loop every time I venture into the “bright light city.” But Vegas has never set my soul on fire.

If anything, I walk away from it with a collective “meh,” having made my $20 to $40 donation to keep the casinos in business while humming Gram Parsons’ “Ooh Las Vegas” the entire time.

“Ooh, Las Vegas, ain't no place for a poor boy like me.
Ooh, Las Vegas, ain't no place for a poor boy like me.
Every time I hit your crystal city,
You know you're gonna make a wreck out of me.”

Earlier this week, the headline of my Las Vegas visual story was a nod to Parsons’ song, which describes the different ways the narrator loses at the tables. It also alludes to alcoholism and drug use, two things Parsons knew all too well long before writing and recording the song with Emmylou Harris, his duet partner on his two solo records.

“Ooh Las Vegas” appears on “Grievous Angel,” the posthumous 1974 album released one week after I turned 9. Parsons had died four months before, six weeks shy of joining the 27 Club.

Road Trip

On Sunday, I left Las Vegas for California, where I’m shooting a conference this weekend. It didn’t make sense to fly cross country and then back three days later, so I’ve spent time visiting friends, driving around, and (what else?) taking pictures. It has been a lovely, restorative break.

I decided to visit Joshua Tree National Park, a place I’ve long wanted to photograph, knowing the desert had long served as inspiration for creatives. Three hours southwest of Vegas and two hours east of Los Angeles, it’s always been too far to go on a day trip, and because previous West Coast travel has been on tight deadlines for business reasons, I’ve never had the opportunity (or time) to go.

After shooting Monday’s sunset on the Indio side of the park, 40 miles from the town of Joshua Tree, I returned to the same place for sunrise the next morning. My objective was simple — spend as much time photographing the desert landscapes and the various terrain in the massive park.

I had two additional goals:

• See if the park made any reference to Parsons. (It didn’t.)

• Check out the place where he died — the Joshua Tree Inn. (I did.)

Learning ‘Cosmic American Music’

For years, Parsons was an enigma to me, a young drug casualty whose worlds were connected to or had collided with some of my favorite bands and musicians. While commercial success eluded him, his name was mentioned whenever stories were written about “country rock” or, more specifically, the “alt-country” I grew to love for its gumbo-style approach to genres.

During my immersive late 1980s dive into America’s 20^th century music history — albeit an informal one spent reading liner notes and any books or magazines I could find — I learned of Parsons’ deep love for Presley, who he had seen live at age 9 in 1956. (Members of Elvis’ TCB band later backed up Parsons on his solo efforts — 1973’s “GP” and “Grievous Angel.”)

I also read of Parsons’ influence on the country sides of “Sticky Fingers” and “Exile on Main Street,” my favorite early 1970s era Rolling Stones music. Apparently, when it came to substance, Parsons and Keith Richards “influenced” each other during this hedonistic period, so much so that Richards allegedly told Parsons to slow down.

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Most of my early exposure to Parsons’ work came from Harris, who covered the majority of his best songs on her albums — “Hickory Wind,” “Hot Burrito No. 2,” the stunning “In My Hour of Darkness,” “Luxury Liner,” and “Sin City” — and paid tribute to him with her classic “Boulder to Birmingham.”

Locating Parsons’ recordings proved difficult, however. His vocals had been cut from all but three songs on 1969’s “Sweethearts of the Rodeo,” The Byrds’ album that was the first to be widely labeled as country rock. (They later would be restored on an expanded 40^th anniversary edition of the album.)

At the time, it also was tough to find “The Gilded Palace of Sin” or “Burrito Deluxe,” the two records he recorded with The Flying Burrito Brothers. The solo albums and another posthumous compilation (“Sleepless Nights”) were available on CD — I no longer had a turntable — but sounded like they had been produced in a blender.

It wasn’t until 1999, when Harris co-produced the tribute album “Return of the Grievous Angel,” that I felt the full impact of his vision for “Cosmic American Music.” Subsequent releases of his catalogue, remastered along with outtakes, only confirmed how deeply his music and sound had influenced my life.

Then, on Tuesday afternoon, I found myself standing outside the room where Parsons died.

Often Told Background

A bit of additional background is necessary, even though the story is so infamous that it inspired a 2003 movie (“Grand Theft Parsons” starring Johnny Knoxville) and has been featured in seemingly every story ever written about Parsons.

After “Grievious Angel” was completed, Parsons went to visit Joshua Tree, which was a national monument at the time. (It became a national park in 1994.) Like other musicians, Parsons had long had a deep connection to the park where the Mojave and Colorado Deserts converge.

Accompanied by his girlfriend and two others, the four spent the day drinking before moving the party to the Joshua Tree Inn, where more mischief ensued. In Room No. 2, Parsons overdosed on a combination of alcohol and morphine and was taken to Room No. 8, where he died sometime after midnight on September 19, 1973.

Phil Kaufman, Parsons’ friend and tour manager, “rescued” the body from LAX and set it on fire in the Joshua Tree park’s Cap Rock section. Apparently, Parsons had told Kaufman of his desire to be “buried in the desert,” but the attempted cremation was unsuccessful. Parsons’ charred remains were found and buried at the Garden of Memories in Metairie, outside New Orleans.

I drove around the Cap Rock area, stopping at the median next to the parking lot where the coffin was left, but saw none of the signs or trinkets that fans often leave behind. The makeshift memorials are cleaned up by park workers who try to preserve the natural landscape.

Driving into the town of Joshua Tree, I went to the park’s visitor center. No references to Parsons there, and only a small picture in a saloon where I grabbed lunch and a beer.

I then drove to the Inn, a roadside motel located on the Twentynine Palms Highway. Built in the 1950s, office hours at the small Spanish style motel — 11 rooms with a small courtyard — are from 3 to 8 p.m. daily. I arrived at 2:15 and decided to try my luck.

“Come on in,” an affable young man named Justin said as I jiggled the door. “We’re not open yet, but it’s your lucky day.”

Visiting the Shrine

Justin has worked at the inn for eight years. His wife Dee Dee, the general manager, has been there for 15. Both were hired by Margo Paolucci, who had purchased the hotel in 2002 and turned it into the shrine for Parsons’ superfans who visit from all over the world. Musicians stay there too; Donovan, the folk-rock singer, is a frequent guest with a room named after him. Others, including Grace Potter, Kacey Musgraves, Robert Plant and even Harris, also have stayed overnight, Justin said.

Previous owners tried to downplay the connection to Parsons’ death, Justin said, noting the inn was used as a group home for at-risk youth at one point. Paolucci, who died last year, took the opposite approach. Posters and pictures now adorn the lobby walls, along with fan art and messages in a small room off the lobby.

I couldn’t go into Room No. 8 because guests were about to check in, Justin said. (Reservations for the room, which costs $178 a night with a two-night minimum, are booked three months in advance on weekdays and six months in advance on weekends.)

“But you can walk around and take pictures,” Justin said. “Go back and see the shrine.”

“Streets of Baltimore” was playing in the front part of the building as I took pictures in the lobby and the small room that leads to the three-table dining hall. Walking down the corridor that opens into a small courtyard, I checked the numbers of the rooms I passed. I had read that Room No. 8 is haunted; Parsons’ spirit is rumored to roam around the grounds.

The room’s original door now hangs on the sidewalk outside, painted a flecked gold and providing shade to the chair next to it. The memorial includes a large stone guitar and a concrete slab with “Safe at Home” painted on it that was salvaged from the park. A few trinkets had been left behind at the memorial’s base; Justin said those will become more numerous when the anniversary of Parsons’ death is observed next weekend.

Standing under a tree, taking pictures of the backlit memorial, I was startled by a loud peculiar noise and commotion overhead. A great horned owl that apparently had been sleeping in the tree above Room No. 8 was lumbering over to another tree.

Owls often are viewed as messengers from the spirit world. I took a picture of the owl, which did not look happy as it perched in the other tree, and wondered if Parsons’ spirit was trying to tell me something.

“That’s strange,” Justin said as I returned to the lobby. “It’s rare to see them during the day.”

At that point, the guests who were staying in Room No. 8 arrived. One spoke in a heavy British accent. Justin gave me a business card, which has a photo of Parsons at Joshua Tree on the back.

“Consider this a souvenir,” he said. “Something to remember your trip by.”

Don’t worry. I won’t forget this one.

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The first time I heard “Fourth of July” was in a sweaty Houston club in July 1986 on a rare night off from the Texas City Sun. A parttime college student at the time, I was 21 and gravitating toward the bands played on KTRU, the Rice University station that my friend Brian had turned me onto.

KTRU, with the nickname “F-word Radio,” was playing the alternative, underground, and punk artists that you didn’t hear on the city’s commercial stations. Located at 91.7 FM — left of the dial, as they say — the music on the 650-watt station could be heard clearly only inside Loop 610.

The station was responsible for broadening my artistic palette as my politics turned more liberal, thanks largely to my Sun co-workers and the Red Scare elements of the AIDS crisis. Soon, I started haunting record stores, searching for cassettes to play on my 80-mile roundtrip commute between Houston and Texas City.

Brian, who by this point was setting agate and proofing box scores on the sports desk at the Houston Post, mentioned that X was playing on July 3 at Fitzgerald’s. He had to work that night, but I didn’t, so he gave me his ticket.

“You should go,” he said. “They’re not as good without Zoom in the band, but it should be fun.”

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Zoom was Billy Zoom, the wild man guitarist for the Los Angeles-based group, which had released four acclaimed albums between 1980 and 1983. He had left the group after X’s outlier effort at major level success (1985’s “Ain’t Love Grand,” which wasn’t) sold poorly. Unlike X’s first four records, the album’s AOR, hair metal production sounded dated as soon as it was released.

X replaced Zoom with not one, but two guitarists — Tony Gilkyson and Dave Alvin — and forged on. Gilkyson had just left Lone Justice, another influential band that imploded under major label pressure, and stayed in the role until Zoom rejoined in 1998.

Alvin had left his group The Blasters — where he was the principal songwriter — due to ongoing battles with his brother Phil, the lead singer. He had been part of the X-offshoot The Knitters, which had released a (mostly) old-time country record the same year as “Ain’t Love Grand,” and worked with Doe in other groups as well.

At the time, Alvin was working as a “hired sideman” for X. He wrote only one song for the group before starting his own solo career the next year.

The song was “Fourth of July.”

Life at Fitzgerald’s

Fitzgerald’s, along with Rockefeller’s, was one of Houston’s best music venues in the late 1970s and 80s. Built in 1918, the two-story club was located in the Greater Heights district, where it served as a Polish center and dance hall for more than 50 years.

The club became known for hosting many of the bands I was getting into, and I spent many a memorable evening in my 20s in the top-floor club or at the smaller bottom stage known as Zelda’s. Fitzgerald’s hosted my second favorite concert — The Pleasure Barons, an early 1990s “all-star revue” that included Alvin, Doe, Country Dick Montana, and Mojo Nixon, among others.

On this night, the new X lineup was playing the club in preparation for a much larger performance — the second Farm Aid show in Manor, Texas, just outside Austin, where they would play “Fourth of July” as part of a three-song set for a VH-1 audience.

I loved the song then — although it was something of an outlier (a good one this time) in X’s catalog — primarily because of Doe’s lead vocal. (I’ve always thought his vocals were underrated.) But, more important, It cemented my appreciation for Alvin’s vivid yet austere songwriting.

She's waiting for me when I get home from work
But things just ain't the same
She turns out the light and cries in the dark
Won't answer when I call her name

(chorus)
On the stairs I smoke a cigarette alone
The Mexican kids are shooting fireworks below
Hey, baby, it's the Fourth of July
Hey, baby, it's the Fourth of July

She gives me her cheek when I want her lips
And I don't have the strength to go
On the lost side of town in a dark apartment
We gave up trying so long ago

Whatever happened, I apologize
So dry your tears and baby, walk outside
It's the Fourth of July

In 2022, I interviewed Alvin about the publication of New Highway, a collection of lyrics, poems, eulogies, and short stories written during his four-plus decades in music. The book included the lyrics to almost 50 of his songs, one of which was the original, much longer poem that became “Fourth of July.” I mentioned at the time that the finished song was “an exercise in editing.”

“I am not the most prolific songwriter, but I am a massive editor,” Alvin said. “When I write a song, I go through it as if I had 17 editors in my head. Get rid of that. Don't even get rid of that, get rid of that other line. Sometimes songs just flow. They just come out of you and other times you got to squeeze them out, you got to edit them out.

“There are times when I will drop that and just let the song blabber on. Sometimes that works, but in general, I am a massive editor. I will write a song and then four years later still be editing it and I will still be editing it even after it's recorded and released.”

I saw X perform the song live only once more at a 1988 show at Fitzgerald’s, touring behind “See How We Are.” Today, the band — which has all of its original members — does not play songs live that Zoom was not involved in, although Doe performs it solo or with co-lead Exene Cervenka.

But I’ve heard Alvin play “Fourth of July” more than 40 times live, having seen him more than any other person. And every year, on this day, I make sure to play it as loud as I can.

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Josh Crutchmer vividly recalls his “Waylon Jennings moment.”

It was January 27, 2001, a week shy of the 42nd anniversary of Jennings giving up a seat on the airplane that crashed in an Iowa cornfield, killing Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and J.P. “The Big Bopper” Richardson.

Crutchmer, then the sports editor for Oklahoma State University’s student newspaper, had tried to arrange transportation with the men’s basketball team so he could cover a game in Colorado that night. But the flight was never confirmed, and Crutchmer opted to go to Cross Canadian Ragweed’s record release party at Stillwater’s Wormy Dog Saloon instead.

The plane crashed 25 miles east of Denver, killing all 10 people on board in one of the most devastating events in the university’s history. Word made it to the Wormy Dog, where Ragweed performed from midnight to 2 a.m. “because they didn’t know what else to do,” Crutchmer says.

“I always felt a little bit of guilt about it, because I was blowing off my job to see a bar band,” says Crutchmer, who “numbly” covered the aftermath for the newspaper while going to funerals for those who had been killed.

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In the middle of his guilt and grief, Ragweed’s lead singer, Cody Canada, offered to take Crutchmer to the band’s show in Dallas. The trip cemented his friendship with Canada; the tragedy cemented his relationship with the Red Dirt music scene that he has since covered in several books and for Rolling Stone.

“In a strange way, it was what made me decide that I was as much a part of Red Dirt as the artists who were making it,” Crutchmer says of the near miss. “I wouldn’t advise any journalist to do something like that, but looking back on a personal level, it gave me some direction. The motivation to give back to this scene, this region, and this state was rooted in that experience all those years ago.”

Planning Ahead

Earlier this month, Crutchmer stood on a stage in front of more than 45,000 Ragweed fans for four consecutive nights and told the story as an introduction to the band’s “On a Cloud.” Days afterward, during a Zoom interview, he said that doing so was a full-circle moment during one of the most memorable weekends of his life.

In yesterday’s “Conversations” piece, we talked about the Cross Canadian Ragweed reunion and the Boys From Oklahoma shows. But I also was intrigued by the unique career path that Crutchmer has charted since graduating from OSU. It’s one that sees him toggling between his home state and Manhattan, working for the New York Times and Rolling Stone, and self-publishing books about the music he loves.

“Most of my journalism career has been spent on the design and editing side,” says Crutchmer, who was the managing editor for visuals at the Cleveland Plain Dealer when the Cavaliers won the NBA championship in 2016. “I got to direct pretty much how everything looks and how all of our coverage fit in the print edition because the online version was so templated.”

The Plain-Dealer received industry praise for the coverage, leading to Crutchmer’s being hired by the Times in 2017. Two years later, he was promoted to the planning editor role and now is in charge of a four-person team that selects the stories that appear daily in the print edition.

“We’re writing a thousand stories a day with ease, and that counts everything from major enterprise pieces to two paragraph briefs and audio clips and and video and podcasts. My team looks at our content as a whole and then tries to figure out which 50 or 60 pieces from that will make up a newspaper that day,” he says.

Crutchmer says the Times’ digital news reporting “drives everything about us as an operation,” but the print product remains “very important to our company.”

“If I just tell somebody I work for the print New York Times, that can sound a bit like you're describing yourself as a dinosaur,” he says. “But actually my team has to be some of the most knowledgeable in the entire company because we are tasked with scouring our global report every day and turning it into a newspaper.”

Juggling Multiple Roles

Given that type of role, how does Crutchmer find the time to write as much as he does? And does that conflict with his job at the Times?

Since 2020, Crutchmer has written a series of books focused on Red Dirt music, including the new Never Say Never, which is a real-time, on-the-scene report of the Boys From Oklahoma shows. The books are produced by Back Lounge Publishing, a company Crutchmer started. He also works contributes to Rolling Stone, focusing mostly on the Americana/alt-country/Red Dirt genres.

“A trade off with having to be plugged into the Times all the time is that my job can be done from anywhere. It’s really easy for me to be involved with the front page while on the back of Cody Canada’s tour bus or in a green room somewhere,” he says. “That’s allowed me to get out and travel and reconnect with my musical roots.”

Crutchmer says his supervisors know about and have signed off on his music-related work. “That’s just not something the Times covers topically more than once or twice a year, so as long as I promise them I will take them the big important stories, they’ve given me the blessing to put most of my writing in Rolling Stone or in similar places,” he says. “It’s just been wonderful.”

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The juggling act, he says, is worth it because he’s getting to do what he loves — maintain ties to Oklahoma and its music while working at the highest level of his chosen profession at the Times.

As our Zoom call came to a close, I asked Crutchmer whether working as an editor and content curator has helped his writing or made it more difficult. Having done both myself, albeit on a much smaller scale, I find my writer and editor sides clash often, but the conflict often leads to better work.

“Being an editor at the Times and seeing how my colleagues craft their stories and question content has rubbed off so much in my writing. It’s helped me so much,” he says. “I question leads and headlines in a way that I may not have.

“It’s fun to sit here and feel like I’ve still got it as a writer, and to recognize that the career I’ve had has made my writing so much better than it would have ever been if I hadn’t had these opportunities,” Crutchmer says. “I’m truly grateful.”

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Last Friday, Josh Crutchmer was having one of those “mind in a blender days.”

He was finishing a writing deadline for Never Say Never, a new book about this month’s “Boys From Oklahoma” reunion of Cross Canadian Ragweed, a band he has followed for more than two decades. He also was watching the reaction to his Rolling Stone profile of Vandoliers lead singer Jenny Rose, who came out publicly in the article that day as transgender, while keeping tabs on his “actual job” as the planning editor for the New York Times.

And all of this was taking place as Crutchmer also changed Internet service providers, a switch with glitches that pushed our Zoom interview back 30 minutes.

“It’s been a crazy couple of weeks,” he said once we connected. “Fun, great, but crazy.”

Crutchmer, an Oklahoma native who has written two books that trace the history of the Red Dirt music scene, describes the April 10-13 reunion shows at T. Boone Pickens Stadium in Stillwater as “magical” and “surreal.”

Over four nights, the reunited Ragweed, Turnpike Troubadours and three other bands (Jason Boland and The Stragglers, Stoney LaRue, and The Great Divide) played to 183,000 fans. The shows — dubbed “Red Dirt Woodstock” by Scotte Lester of The Great Divide on the final night — were the largest in the state’s history and the first in the OSU stadium.

“It’s probably because Ragweed is a bar band I’ve followed my entire adult life, but seeing them get this Springsteen level of response from almost 50,000 people at each show was probably the coolest thing I’ve ever experienced in music,” Crutchmer says. “And that was after thinking about it and reporting on it for six months. Seeing it actually happen was a rush of emotion and adrenaline. It was just pure joy.”

Crutchmer started work on Red Dirt: Roots Music Born in Oklahoma, Raised in Texas, at Home Anywhere in 2020. His chapter on Evan Felker, Turnpike’s lead singer, discussing his newfound sobriety and hopes to reunite the band, led to the side gig with Rolling Stone when it was excerpted in the magazine.

Working on the sequel, 2024’s Red Dirt: Unplugged, Crutchmer learned that Ragweed was planning a reunion show — something that lead singer Cody Canada had told him “never would happen.” After Crutchmer published Canada’s remarks in a Rolling Stone article, the singer said he realized he’d made a mistake.

“One of the first things he said to me after the article appeared was, ‘Well, you should never say never,’ and I told him that was going to be the title of the book I write about this,” Crutchmer says. “And here we are.”

Here are excerpts from our conversation, edited for brevity and clarity. A second part will be published tomorrow.

Watching the final Boys From Oklahoma show reminded me of the “communal catharsis” I felt when I saw The Replacements during their reunion tour at Forest Hills Stadium in 2014. Similar circumstances: A band on the edge of mainstream success, one that played mostly clubs and theaters for more than a decade, breaks up and comes back years later for a victory lap in front of thousands of adoring fans.

With the exception of Turnpike, none of these bands have played anything at that scale. Twenty-five years ago, Ragweed got to play the Houston Livestock Show & Rodeo. That was pretty big. I think they played a couple of times at Lone Star Park in Grand Prairie and that's certainly comparable, but the actual feel of a stadium show is not something you can recreate.

The Replacements concert remains the greatest show I’ve ever seen because, unlike many oldies acts that reunite, Paul Westerberg and Tommy Stinson were firing on all cylinders. It was the best version of the band I had hoped would make it but didn’t. Is that how you felt about this show?

The production, beyond just how it sounded, had to be taken into consideration. I thought they just nailed it all. Everything they wanted to do they did. It was magical.

So what was it like for you when they came on stage?

Overwhelming. It was one of the coolest things I've ever seen.

Tell me about this journey to Never Say Never. This is your third book on the Red Dirt music scene in five years.

The first book (Red Dirt) really got into the history of this music and tried to trace it back to its roots with Woody Guthrie. It covered all the characters along the way who built it into a sustainable scene and ended with the chapter about Turnpike.

Last year, I thought Red Dirt was kind of unrecognizable from what I had written about because the scene had blown up so much. Folks like Turnpike and Wyatt Flores and Kaitlin Butts had taken this regional music scene to the world in ways that it never had been sustained before Ragweed did it. Until then, Ragweed felt always like a bit of an anomaly, but now all the eyes in the world were on Red Dirt. So last year, I decided to write a sequel, if you can call it that, called Red Dirt Unplugged that looked at all has happened in the scene and the new faces who are making a name for themselves.

While doing that, I learned that Ragweed will be reuniting at the Boys from Oklahoma shows. I decided to write and capture the band’s comeback, not just from their perspective but from all of the people who made it happen.

The last four chapters are the four shows. I thought there was no reason to wait six months to a year to put that out, so I’m writing it, giving it a once over during production and letting folks have it. It's one of the most fun things I've ever done, and also completely unconventional for a book, and I like doing unconventional things. That's how we ended up here.

What was it about Ragweed that that hooked you?

I grew up in Oklahoma, and I grew up a fan of country music. By the time I got to college at Oklahoma State in Stillwater, I was more into rock and roll than country, but I still liked the feeling you get from a real good country song. Ragweed has rock instruments, a rock sound, long hair and everything else you want out of a rock band, but their lyrics are these intensely personal experiences that reminded me of my favorite country songs. They always managed to be the coolest band in the room, the coolest band on any bill. But at the same time, they were just singing these songs that could rip your heart out.

I was thinking about that during the show. I just can’t believe that one person wrote all these songs — “Constantly,” “Number,” “Dimebag.” I just rattled off the names of a country love song, a rebel song, and a tribute to Pantera, and that’s just three of them. That’s the kind of range they have.

I’m a big fan and admirer of James McMurtry for many of the same reasons. I see a lot of his influence in Ragweed and in many of the Red Dirt bands.

Absolutely. They’ve listened to him for 25 years, and McMurtry songs, the ones especially like Chocktaw Bingo that touch on Oklahoma, always get played in Red Dirt settings. They get played between sets when one band’s leaving and one band is coming on because the sound man loves McMurtry.

His influence on Red Dirt, along with artists like Robert Earl Keen and Todd Snyder, has been really important to the scene pretty much since the beginning. They kind of let that part of it slide with Boys From Oklahoma, because it was focused on Oklahoma, but you can definitely see the through line there.

I’m about 15 years older than you, and I grew up in Texas, so my exposure to this type of music came from groups that you might consider Red Dirt adjacent — Keen, Reckless Kelly, Bruce and Charlie Robison, Jack Ingram, Wade Bowen, the Old 97s, Slobberbone. Now to some degree, they’re all under the “Red Dirt” label.

Texas started accepting Red Dirt as their own (music genre) and it became a term for radio stations and promoters to use, so they’ve kind of become one over the years. One of the first times I interviewed Jason Boland was in 2000 at the Yellow House in Stillwater where he lived, and he talked about the likelihood that he would move to Texas despite being a flag-waving Oklahoman.

I just gave him a puzzled look and didn’t really say anything, and he said, “That’s our market. That’s where people want to hear this music. So we have to make it to Texas because we have to make a living.” That made a lot of sense and it’s been fascinating to watch it come true over the quarter of a century since. Now many of the musicians, Cody being one of them, live in the Texas Hill Country.

What caused Ragweed’s breakup in 2010?

The root cause was you had four guys in their late 30s with kids who had grown up around each other. They were together too long without a break, still touring 150 to 180 shows a year when they broke up. They all wanted different things for each other and for their music and were too proud to work through the differences they had.

Some members of the band wanted to pursue more mainstream success. Cody didn't. Eventually these things that could have been talked through weren’t, and everyone just shut down. The stress became too much, and it ended up becoming a breakup over who was leaving the cap off the bottle of water on the bus.

When they got back together, I think they realized all the differences were things that could have been addressed if they had been a little more mature about it. I think they would admit that now.

Was this a one off, or do you think it’s a legitimate reunion?

I think it’s a real comeback. I think they had too much fun to make it a one-off. Let’s not forget that Ragweed and Turnpike have another stadium show in August (at Waco’s Baylor University) that is sold out and in its own right should be a great time.

At the very least, I think they’ll make Boys From Oklahoma an annual thing. I don’t think you’ll see them get on a tour bus and do a hundred shows, but I think a handful of really special ones are all but guaranteed.

It was quite the contrast hearing Canada say that he had played a pool party for 45 people the week before the Boys From Oklahoma shows, where they had 1,000 times that number for four consecutive nights in the stands. What does the Boys From Oklahoma mean for the future of the Departed, his other band?

I don’t think it goes away at all. I think the Departed will become more of a band that plays shows they want to play and less of a band that’s doing them because they have to pay the bills. I think you’ll see them play a lot more at Cain’s Ballroom (in Tulsa) and Gruene Hall (in Texas) and a lot fewer 20-day runs.

Do you think Ragweed will release an album from the Boys from Oklahoma shows?

Everything was absolutely recorded and captured, but they didn’t go into it with some plan to turn it to an album. They’re probably going to spend the summer assessing that, take some time and give the shows a listen and see what makes sense. If they do something with the shows, they’re going to want it to be a banger of a live album.

What about the possibility of new music?

All of them are really busy, and Cody doesn’t have the time as a songwriter now that he did 20 years ago, but I wouldn’t be surprised to see them put out new music. Maybe not this year, but next year or the year after.

Parts of this interview were excerpted in an article for Americana Highways.

To see the 250+ photos I took at the show, go to my Flickr albums page here.

Crutchmer’s book is now available for pre-order here.

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A short piece today, but a story worth telling.

Sometimes, when you least expect it, you’re reminded there are still kind people in this world.

I photograph a number of conferences each year, and many of my clients are recurring, which is nice because you get to know the staff over time.

At one organization’s conference a couple of years ago, I started talking about music with Nelson, a guy around my age who is a big punk fan. Formerly based in Los Angeles, Nelson is more of a late 1980s era hardcore follower than I am, but he is deeply knowledgeable about the entire scene.

During brief breaks while shooting that first conference, Nelson and I started talking about bands and our inspirations. I shared my love for Elvis, the blues and the all-encompassing Americana. Not his favorites, but he appreciated my enthusiasm.

We found more common ground when the conversation veered into X, Los Lobos, The Blasters, and other West Coast groups from that early 1980s era that continue to influence my music choices to this day.

I’ve shot photos at this conference for three years now. Right before the second, I had photographed X at the 9:30 Club in D.C. and had just interviewed John Doe. Nelson was impressed, and told me about a lyric sheet — a zine — he had gotten years before.

“I’ll dig that out sometime and send you a picture,” he said.

This past fall, we talked again about the group, which had just released “Smoke and Fiction.” The album, released 47 years after the band first got together, likely will be the last by the original four members. (Spoiler alert: If it’s the last X album, they are going out on a high.)

“I’m gonna send you something,” Nelson said at the end of the conference, asking for the address to my co-working space. We went our separate ways, promising to link up at a future meeting or when I’m in Las Vegas to shoot another conference this summer.

Several weeks passed. I got sick and was out for a time. Then one recent day, a small package arrived on my desk with Nelson’s return address on it. Inside, in a plastic sleeve similar to one used for the comic books that he loves, was a handmade 41-year-old “zine” in pristine condition.

The X “Song Book,” a collage of images and words, features the lyrics to the tracks on 1983’s “More Fun in the New World.” According to Nelson, the zine was handed out at shows during that time.

Nelson told me he thought it should be in the hands of someone who would appreciate it. And I do.

More than that, I appreciate his generosity of spirit. We need that now more than ever.

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Jason Isbell has been recording and playing his songs for more than two decades, first with the Drive-By Truckers, solo, and with his longtime band The 400 Unit. Digging into his deep catalog to decide what to play in concert can be a challenge, he says.

“I forget a lot of the songs. I forget they exist,” he said, responding to a question during a fan gathering at Super Ocho in Mexico City last month. “Somebody will come to me and say, ‘We should play this one again.’ Or a friend will say, ‘I just heard this song,’ and I’ll realize, ‘I guess I did write and record that one’.”

The question was one of 15 that Isbell answered during the fan gathering, which also featured two concerts by the Grammy Award winning artist, one solo and one with his band, the 400 Unit. Several of the heavier questions — about sobriety, songwriting, and growing up in the South — were addressed in a piece that appeared last week on my Substack, but there were a number of lighter moments as well that are captured here.

For example, Isbell was asked whether he would trade “Red Eye,” the 1959 Les Paul guitar that once belonged to Ed King of Lynyrd Skynyrd, for an Atlanta Braves World Series win. Isbell, a huge Braves fan and even bigger gear head, reportedly spent more than $500,000 on the guitar following King’s death in 2018.

“I wouldn’t do that if I owned the Braves,” he said. “If everything goes to shit, I’ll be out in a tent in the middle of the field with that guitar. I’ll eat beans out of a can before I’ll sell that guitar.”

Love for Centro-matic

Isbell’s love and enthusiasm for Centro-matic, the band led by current 400 Unit member Will Johnson, is equal to his loyalty to “Red Eye.” He went on the road with the Denton, Texas-based group in the mid 2000s, got the band to reunite for its first performance in seven years at 2021’s ShoalsFest, and brought them together again for Super Ocho.

“Having those guys reunite for this is a big, big deal for me,” Isbell said before Centro-matic opened the 400 Unit’s show the next evening. “There’s nobody I would rather have play this thing with us because I still listen to their songs religiously.”

Centro-matic played a 10-song opening set at Super Ocho. The final song, a cover of The Cars’ “My Best Friend’s Girl” with Isbell and 400 Unit member Sadler Vaden contributing on guitar, was released on Bandcamp earlier this month. The song was part of a compilation, available for one day only, that benefitted victims of the fires in Los Angeles.

Isbell, who sat in for the majority of Centro-matic’s sets at both ShoalsFest and SuperOcho, told a funny story at the Q&A about the day he met Johnson and piano/violinist Scott Danbom in Denton. It was the fall of 2001, and he had just joined the Drive-By Truckers for their “Southern Rock Opera” tour.

Before a show that night at Dan’s Bar — a Denton staple (now Dan’s Silver Leaf) that the Truckers played numerous times — co-founder Patterson Hood booked the group to play at an afternoon homecoming pre-game gig at the University of North Texas.

“Patterson was still booking the Trucker shows himself, so if he could find a show that paid $400, $500, or more we took it,” Isbell said. “There were parents, kids in cheerleader costumes and face paint. It was a big family situation. Now, I don’t know if you’re familiar with the Drive-by Truckers, but that’s not the most appropriate music for this.”

Hood told the group to open with the song “Buttholeville,” Isbell recalled to laughs from the audience.

“I was terrified,” he said, not knowing that the group had done the same thing several years earlier. “We were hungover, drunk again, and it was 2 in the afternoon. It was early for me. I’d just joined the band, so I didn’t look up for the first couple of songs because I was trying to figure out if I was playing the guitar. And I look up and see Will and Scott from Centro-matic. That’s when we met.”

Centro-matic opened that night for DBT, and Isbell was instantly hooked on the group’s music. “We listened to it in the Truckers van going down the road for months at a time,” he said. “Getting to know them as people was extra special because they’re all so lovely.”

At various points when Isbell “was having a hard time at home,” he would randomly tour with the group. “Sometimes I called Will and was like, ‘Can I just be in your band for a couple of weeks? I’ll bring my own weed and get my own hotel room.’ And he let me do that. That was very very special to me.”

Johnson, a prolific solo musician and artist who has been in a number of groups (Monsters of Folk, South San Gabriel), joined the 400 Unit when Isbell wanted to beef up his live sound for the “Weathervanes” tour in 2023.

“It’s just been a real joy,” Isbell said of having Johnson in the group.

In the Groove

Johnson’s arrival came as the 400 Unit faced its first major changes in more than a decade. Bass player Jimbo Hart, who had been with Isbell since he left the Truckers, left after the recording of “Weathervanes” and was replaced by Anna Butterss. Soon after the album was released, Isbell and his wife, Amanda Shires, separated; Shires, an acclaimed songwriter in her own right, played violin with the 400 Unit for almost a decade.

That leaves keyboardist Derry deBorja and drummer Chad Gamble as the two longest-serving members of the 400 Unit, which was formed in 2007-08. (Guitarist Sadler Vaden joined in 2013.) Isbell has known Gamble, who also is from the Muscle Shoals area, the longest; deBorja is a Baltimore native who started his career with Son Volt.

As soon as Isbell heard Gamble play, he knew he wanted to hire him.

“It's groove. It's all groove,” Isbell said. “Groove just leads everything for me because that's how it's supposed to work. The bass and drums are supposed to dance around the beat and set in a really good way.”

“My problem with a lot of recorded roots music, Americana music, is that it's just straight as an arrow — boom, pop, boom, pop,” Isbell said. “Everything's at a 114 beats per minute. It's all in G, and it's all just cruising right along, and there's no swing. Nobody wants to dance to Americana music, but Chad puts something in there.”

Isbell noted that Gamble can’t “sit still while he's playing.”

“If you notice his left foot is always moving on the high hat, whether you can hear it or not. He reminds me of Levon Helm and the way that his shoulders are always moving. And he internalizes the tempo, so he doesn't have to stay right on top of it and makes everything sort of swing.

“And he can drive. He can drive for a long time,” Isbell joked. “He could see real well and his braking was pretty clean. That was big in the early days.”

‘Loud, Quiet, Loud’

The 400 Unit is taking a break for a few months, but Isbell left Mexico City and went to Europe for a solo tour that returns to the U.S. later this month. The tour is to promote his first solo album in a decade, “Foxes in the Snow,” which will be released March 7.

Over the years, he has balanced the slower acoustic material in mini-sets with the harder edged, guitar driven songs he plays with the 400 Unit. Responding to the question about choosing songs from his catalog, he said the setlist influences what he plays in a full band show.

“I used to write a lot of slow, sad songs. I still write a lot of slow, sad songs,” he said. But I don’t want to everybody to have a slow, sad night. When I’m making a set list, I go by the old Pixies ‘loud, quiet, loud’ thing. I’m just trying to keep everybody awake, you know.”

He compared his relationship with his catalog to running into a friend from the past.

“You see them out somewhere and think, ‘I need to hang out with this person again. It’s been too long’,” Isbell said. “Sometimes you wind up hanging out once a week for the next 10 years, and then sometimes you’re like, ‘Oh, I see why I haven’t been hanging out with this person.

“Songs are kind of the same way. Sometimes you’ll get to the second verse and realize you didn’t nail that. But there’s still quite a few that hold up that I forget about.”

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Ron Patterson stood in line, surrounded by more than 300 people in the ballroom of a Mexico City hotel, and patiently waited to ask Jason Isbell his question. When Patterson’s turn came midway through the fan session with the Grammy Award-winning singer-songwriter, the Austin, Texas, resident cut to the chase.

“As a Black male who is Southern born and raised, I’ve been moved by your ability to embrace your Southern heritage while not shying away from the dark side of parts of that history,” Patterson said. “Is that from your years of travel … or is it something else that you can share?”

Isbell, who grew up in Alabama’s Muscle Shoals region and still lives in the Nashville area when he’s not touring, paused for a second before launching into the one of the longest answers of the session. His response resonated with me deeply.

“The place that you're born, you’re kind of stuck with that,” Isbell said. “Being from the Deep South is going to be a significant part of the way people see you and the way you interact with people for the rest of your life. You can't ever completely get rid of the accent. I'm stuck with that, and I think a lot of us are stuck with that.”

Isbell, who performed “Something More Than Free” at last fall’s Democratic National Convention and duetted with REM’s Michael Stipe at a Kamala Harris event in the days prior to the election, said he was fortunate to be raised in a family that did not “prejudge based on skin color or finances or what part of town you lived in.” That said, he admitted family members “had some backward Southernisms that, as I got into my teens, we argued a lot about.” The difference, he noted, was that “more often than not, they would listen to me.”

“I remember getting into some arguments with my parents and grandparents about things that had to do with race or gender or whatever,” he said. “Honestly, eventually they would go, ‘Alright. You know what? You're right. I've been thinking about this wrong for all these years.’

“I realized at that point how I was just so lucky.”

Diversity and Duality

The Q&A was part of “Super Ocho,” a four-day fan gathering run by Dreamcatcher Events that also included two concerts with Isbell — one with his longtime band, The 400 Unit, and a reunited Centromatic in a 600-seat venue, as well a private solo show for the 340 attendees. (Ironically, he did not perform “Super 8,” a long time fan favorite, at either show.)

The 35-minute question and answer session was held in a controlled environment, with questions submitted in advance and winnowed down in the interest of time. Isbell did not discuss his separation from Amanda Shires, his wife and former member of the 400 Unit, or the departure of longtime bass player Jimbo Hart.

One person asked about Isbell’s favorite place to perform; not surprisingly, it’s the Ryman Auditorium, where he has an annual residency. He talked about his relationship with Centromatic’s Will Johnson, who now is a member of the 400 Unit, his obsession with early Jackson Browne albums, and the “all groove” of his longtime drummer, Chad Gamble. He also was blunt about continuing to find diverse, lesser-known groups to serve as his opening acts.

“In a perfect world, those acts wouldn’t be available to me. … I wish it wasn’t that way,” he said. “I wish they were all getting what I feel like they deserve. If they’re white and male, then they’ve moved on to playing bigger venues. That’s how the system works, unfortunately.”

In addition to questions about songwriting, the most interesting responses to me from Isbell revolved around faith, grace, and dealing with — to quote his former Drive-By Truckers bandmate Patterson Hood — the “duality of the Southern thing.”

“I write about the things that continue to affect me and the things that keep coming back up in my mind, and one of those things is growing up in the South,” Isbell said, continuing his response to Patterson’s question. “It has the musical legacy that I'm so grateful for, especially coming from Muscle Shoals, where I got an incredible education in what I consider to be the best kind of music anybody ever made.”

Isbell said many of the friends he still interacts with from the Muscle Shoals area “are not getting along with their parents right now for a whole lot of very obvious reasons.”

“I got really fortunate that way, but also there are a lot of kids who didn't think the same way that I did and, you know, were really pretty shitty about it. So that's still in there and I'm still writing about it.

“Something that interests me is this idea that why can't we all just zoom back a little bit and say this place is not perfect,” he said, gesturing with his hands. “This place is good. These things are good. These things are perfect, but these other things have been doing a lot of damage for a long time.”

The Songwriter’s Lessons

The reason I was at the Q&A was my wife Jill had surprised me with the January 16-20 trip for my 60th birthday. It was a (more than) fitting gift, considering I’ve long thought Isbell is the best songwriter working today. His writing is a simple yet complex canvas of hope and regret, both personal and societal, that he pens with devastating insight and rigorous honesty.

Responding to a question about the mechanics of songwriting, Isbell said the “lightning in a bottle thing doesn’t happen very often.” He said he takes a “bunch of notes,” adding, “Don’t ever go by that bullshit where people say, ‘If the line’s good, you’ll remember it in the morning.’ You won’t. You will not. As you get older you will forget everything. Write it down.

“As I’ve gotten better at writing songs, I’ve gotten better at writing songs that I don’t like,” Isbell said. “Judging the quality of the work that you’re doing will slow you down so much. You have to trust the fact that you have time later to go back and edit and fix it. If I had to sit down and write a song right now for all of you, I wouldn’t like the first draft much at all, but it would be complete.”

Most songs require two or three drafts before he is satisfied. “You can’t judge it early or you’ll never get it finished,” he said. “Like Neil Young said, ‘People don’t want to hear a song that you like. They want to hear a song that you wrote.’ Now Neil Young sometimes writes songs that I think he means for me to not like at all, and I have huge respect for him for that, but I can’t do that. I can’t be like, ‘All right, I’m really going to piss them off with this one’.”

On the subject of faith and grace in his writing, he alluded again to his upbringing: “The word faith itself, especially where I grew up, means one very specific thing. But for me, faith is kind of like hope with a little bit of evidence, and I think that’s extremely important. If you’re looking at it from a religious perspective, all the religions are based on the same on the same essential thing … the golden rule or some version of it. Treat others the way you would want to be treated.”

He then pointed to a lesson he had gotten from reading Tom T. Hall’s The Songwriter’s Handbook.

“For a song to work, you have to have that sort of perspective,” Isbell said. “[Hall] talked about how you can be angry, but if you’re bitter, then you reduce the effectiveness of a songwriter’s perspective. You can be emotional, but it’s hard to trust somebody who’s bitter, maudIin, and judgmental of a person rather than an individual action. If you’re going to sell a song to somebody, you need them to trust you.”

‘Elephant’ and Finding Time

Isbell’s career has been on a steady climb since he got sober more than a decade ago and released 2013’s“Southeastern,” a mostly solo album that is on Rolling Stone’s top 500 all-time list. At almost every show, he plays the album’s “Cover Me Up,” drawing cheers from the crowd with the line, “I swore off that stuff, forever this time.”

One question was about the devastating “Elephant,” a centerpiece of “Southeastern” that deals with the illness and impending death of a close friend. The person asked about the origin of the line, “Surrounded by her family, I saw she was dying alone.”

With “Elephant,” Isbell said he intentionally focused on aspects people have trouble discussing when they are about to lose a loved one. “That’s something that doesn’t get talked about a whole lot, or it didn’t to me at the time,” he said of a song written 14 years ago. “I just tried to put myself in that place.”

Isbell said the line came from an interview with a hospice nurse on a “This American Life” podcast, “one of three or four that were out at the time.” The nurse talked about family members going through the stages of the grieving process before the person in the bed actually passes away.

“I think that happens a lot,” he said. “And like everything else, it’s a complication and it’s a gift. But it stuck with me. I thought, ‘You really come in and go out by yourself,’ and everyone else’s response to that is very separate from your response to transitioning to whatever is next.”

Asked how sobriety has changed his experience as an artist, Isbell responded, “I gained a lot of time.” He said drinking had become a never-ending cycle in an effort to escape memories and the things that troubled him. “As soon as the sun would start to go down, I would think, ‘Alright, time to go drink, so I can sleep tonight and get up and have a full day of drinking tomorrow.’ And that interrupted the person that I was and the work that I was doing.

“I discovered that the inspiration was never important. What I was writing about didn’t really matter a lot of times. What mattered was that I served the work with my time and my effort,” he said. “Once I got sober, I was able to really sit in a chair for a long time, and that’s how ‘Southeastern’ happened and then everything that’s happened after that.”

Accountability and Clarity

Staying sober, he said, forces you to “actually take accountability for your own actions, your own behavior, and stop blaming everybody else.”

“I don't think it's the case with everybody,” he said. “I know some people who go out on the weekends and get hammered and write great songs all week. But for me, that wasn't an option. I needed to be clear, and I needed the time. Before I got sober, I thought, ‘Well, people just don’t understand the music I’m making because it’s not poppy enough. I’m not dumbing it down for everybody.’ And then I got sober and thought maybe I could do a better job. Maybe the problem was that I wasn’t working hard enough.”

Now, the clarity that sobriety brings allows him to sit with his thoughts and deal with them in creative rather than destructive ways.

“There's a version of yourself that's just all your worst fears, your worst memories, your regrets, and everything that you love, and everything that excites you, and everything that you celebrate,” he said. “You have to sit across the table with that guy for long enough to carve it and mold it into a song or a sculpture or painting or whatever.

“When I was drinking, I could not stay in that seat across the table from that person. I couldn't look him in the eye, and I couldn't sit there long enough to make something out of what the two of us had experienced together. Once I got sober, it was like, ‘Alright, here we are. Let's stay here until it's done’.”

Super Ocho Q&A, Part 2:

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“Fifteen dollars each? Are you kidding me?”

Sometime in the summer of 1979, I found myself standing in a comic book store with my father in a Houston strip mall just off the feeder road of Interstate 59 near Kirby Boulevard. More important than the comics, the store had the figurines and other superheroes ephemera that appealed to my dad, who never abandoned the toys that had given him pleasure as a child.

The store also had something I had never seen, a shelf of LPs displayed behind the counter that didn’t look — how shall we say it? — like “official” releases. There were a couple of Dylans, a Led Zeppelin live album, and a couple by the Rolling Stones, but what caught my eye were the two double LP German “imports” of Elvis Presley’s 1968 Comeback Special.

The store owner would not let me look at the albums. I’m sure he thought any 14-year-old boy with a serious Elvis interest at that juncture — two years after Presley died, bloated and drug addled, from a heart attack at age 42 — must be a narc. But my father convinced him to let me see the albums, only to balk when the owner told him the price.

Admittedly, $30 for four unsealed LPs — The Burbank Sessions, Vols. 1 and 2 — was a lot, especially when a single vinyl album cost $6 at the time. But somehow, I managed to convince my dad to loan me the money for these two “imports.”

The ethics of bootlegs never came up. Instead, I’m pretty sure my dad was thinking about how to break the news to my mom that he had spent $30 — almost $150 in today’s dollars — as they pinched pennies to make ends meet. He had to know she would go through the roof.

Either way, I didn’t care. I had four slabs of mostly unreleased Elvis performing in front of a live audience for the first time in seven years, sweating profusely in a black leather suit as he desperately tried to rebuild his career.

I was holding the holy grail. And for years, I was only one of a small segment of the population that knew it.

‘Singer Presents … Elvis’

Fifty-six years ago tonight, NBC aired “Singer Presents … Elvis,” a 50-minute showcase that served as Presley’s first television special. Directed by Steve Binder and taped in June 1968, the special featured Presley performing 23 songs, most of which were either cut short or part of medleys.

Most of the production numbers, with the exception of the opening segment, are terribly dated, and I’ve never been a huge fan of the stand-up concert segments, which are backed by a too-shrill NBC orchestra. The real gold is found in the raw sit-down sessions, which feature Elvis with two members of his first band — guitarist Scotty Moore and drummer D.J. Fontana.

Airing on Dec. 3, 1968, it was the most-watched show of the season, with an estimated 42% of the total television audience tuning in. The finale, a performance of “If I Can Dream,” was released as a single and went to #12 on the Billboard charts, Presley’s best showing in three years.

The special reignited Presley’s stagnant career, which was at a tipping point due to a staggering series of terrible movies. Soon after, Presley recorded what was perhaps his best studio album (“From Elvis in Memphis”), and returned to live performances.

He performed more than 1,000 shows in eight years before his death, once again having fallen victim to Col. Tom Parker’s mismanagement and the boredom of life in a bubble.

Reclaiming the Magic

For years, I played the grooves off those “import” albums, taping the sit-down shows on cassettes that I handed out to anyone who would listen. Those performances, which have been cited as the forerunners of “MTV Unplugged,” were revelatory because they were raw and vulnerable, capturing Presley in a way he would not be seen again.

Various reports mention how nervous Elvis was prior to performing in front of a live audience, and you can see it in the opening moments of the first sit-down show. Early on, Presley switches his acoustic guitar for Moore’s electric, and things only improve from there, as he uses Jimmy Reed’s “Baby What Do You Want Me to Do” as a thru line.

Building momentum, Elvis mows through a string of hits and what would be considered deep cuts, such as the glorious “Trying to Get to You” and “One Night with You,” which became truly unplugged during the first show when Presley stood up and started to move around.

These magical moments became snippets in the special, and I never understood why RCA didn’t release the shows while Presley was alive, opting instead to parcel out individual songs in dribs and drabs on various compilations through the years. In retrospect, the decision has Parker’s fingerprints all over it; he didn’t like the raw approach Binder took and pushed him aside as soon as the special aired.

The special was repeated once when Elvis was alive in the spring of 1969, and again soon after his 1977 death. But it wasn’t until 1985, when HBO aired the first sit-down show, that a mass audience saw what I’d been hearing for years.

The title of the documentary? “One Night with You.”

A Story Often Told

In recent years, the story of the 1968 special has been told often, to varying degrees of success. In March 2018, the show served as a framing device for Thom Zimmy’s acclaimed documentary, “The Searcher.” Baz Luhrmann’s biopic, “Elvis,” devoted extensive time to the special’s creation and aftermath. Binder, who has written a book about the special, also served as the executive producer for the 2023 Paramount+ documentary, “Reinventing Elvis: The ’68 Comeback.”

Last month, Netflix released another documentary, “Return of the King: The Fall and Rise of Elvis Presley.” The film was directed by Jason Heihr, who helmed 2020’s “The Last Dance,” a multipart documentary about Michael Jordan and his final season with the Chicago Bulls.

RCA’s scattershot handling of Presley’s catalogue was heinous during his lifetime and only started to be rectified years after his death, when it had become overwhelmed by an enterprising bootleg market. Again, I attribute much of that to Parker, who in the mid 1970s sold Presley’s pre-1973 catalogue to RCA for a now paltry $5.4 million but continued to take a cut of Elvis-related revenue until he died in 1997.

For the special’s 30th anniversary — not, unironically, soon after Parker’s death — RCA finally went into the vault and released the standup shows as well as two CDs of highlights from the special. The recordings, plus rehearsals captured on a cassette, have been repackaged multiple times since on RCA and the Follow That Dream boutique label. The visuals also have been released in various formats on DVD and Blu-Ray.

After watching the Netflix documentary last month, I started digging around looking for my bootlegs again. As it turns out, my “import” LPs were not made in Germany but actually in the U.S. by Paul Dowling, who was convicted in 1983 of running a mail-order business of Elvis performance bootlegs, a burgeoning market given how RCA had bungled Presley’s catalog. Dowling didn’t deny copyright violations, but argued the goods sold across state lines were not “stolen, converted or taken by fraud,” a point with which the U.S. Supreme Court agreed.

My search for the bootlegs was pointless. I remembered losing track of the LPs during our move from North Carolina to Northern Virginia more than 20 years ago. By then, I had moved on to CDs, no longer had a turntable, and the LPs were scratched and skipping in spots after being played so often over two decades.

I wish I still had them.

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