Drive By Truckers

Last time three years ago or so and 3000 miles away with Annie at Tractor Tavern in Seattle. Tonight at the still-new Terminal 5 venue in Hell's Kitchen, a neighborhood that the hospice patient I visit said the new urbanites moving in want to rename Clinton because it sounds better for property values. Until precisely 9:38, 45 minutes or so into the set, I thought that the lack of smoky air and no sawdust on the floor, replaced by Sony projection TVs, had perhaps gentrified lead Trucker Patterson Hood as well, but then he hawked up and spit on the stage. Only once, compared to a dozen or so at the Tavern, but the bottle of Jack Daniels (or at least a bottle in the JD shape and label filled with an appropriately- colored liquid) got passed among the band members, so call them tamer, hardly tame. Though Trucker singer-guitarist #3, Jason Isbell, has gone solo, this is still an extraordinary band, capable of full on sonic assault featuring three guitars, bass, keyboards and drums. They play loud and they play Southern and they write very, very smart. They are also great value. One's $25 ticket got more than two hours of music, a time still slightly less than at the cramped Tavern where they played for three hours and had my ears ringing for two days. Hood writes mostly of his own demons, crediting rock and roll with saving him from suicide. But, hey, who's not got demons and the trick is to make them live for others, something that Hood, for me, does only intermittently, unlike, say, Leonard Cohen then and the National and Cat Power now. His anthem is "Hell, No, I Ain't Happy," but at this stage in his life, somewhere on the up side of forty I'd say, watching him on stage he seems happy indeed. My reservations aside, three very good things about Patterson Hood -- he lets the music speak for itself, avoiding the mortal sin of between song banalities or political rants; he has the good grace to thank his roadies and, several times, the audience; he has the audacity of assurance to spin a touching, long encore song/monologue called Sixteen Wheels of Love, about the late life love his mother found with a huge trucker named Chester. Co-Trucker Mike Cooley is more interesting in his writing, looking beyond himself to try and make some context of the South, of history, of music, of the working poor and where he connects with it. Check out, from various DBT albums, Uncle Frank, Carl Perkins Cadillac, and Marry Me, with the deathless lyric "Rock and Roll means well but it can't help tellin' young boys lies. " What this all adds up to, tonight reinforced, is a band matched by few and topped by none working today.

Illumination!

I now have an answer to my unspoken question whether there could be a more pointless reunion tour than the Eagles jaunt to the cash registers a few months ago. The answer, in fact, is a resounding yes as my Live Nation NY Concert update just delivered the unwelcome news that there will be a Crosby, Stills, and Nash concert sometime in the spring. That the only still musically breathing member of the erstwhile supergroup is not adding his Y to CSN says it all. Wasn't the fork stuck in the others some thirty years ago?

A Night at the Opera Even Groucho Would Have Loved

I had two warnings. First, it was Wagner. Second, the performance began at 7 PM when all the other operas in our season subscription had started at 8. Still, it was a shock to look at the preview e-mail from the Met and find the running time for Tristan und Isolde would be five hours.

We reached our seats only a couple minutes before curtain and when the lights dimmed, Met managing director Peter Gelb stepped from the wings to announce that the tenor Gary Lehman would be both making his Met debut and singing Tristan (which Mr. Gelb cheerfully and helpfully declared "impossible to sing") for the first time. Now I'm still very much in the beginning stages of learning about opera, but I know enough to recognize that double whammy is roughly akin to Billy Crystal making his Yankees debut in the bottom of the ninth of the seventh game of the World Series with the Yankees down by a run and two outs. Mr. Gelb made no mention of the unfortunate tenor who debuted in the role a few nights before (substituting for Ben Heppner who is ill at home in Canada, regarded as one of the few contemporary tenors up to the rigors of Tristan) and was subsequently hammered in the NYTimes review.

To a warm welcome, Mr. Lehman carried ably through the first act, where Tristan is less a presence than is Isolde, who was performed by the renowned Deborah Voigt, also debuting in the role. Problems began in the second act when Ms. Voigt fled the stage in the midst of their love duet. Mr. Lehman gamely carried on singing to an empty stage for a bit longer as murmurs grew in the crowd and, finally, mercifully, the curtain came down. There was some discussion in the seats around us whether this was illness or a diva act at having to perform with the debuting tenor. Majority view was illness, a conclusion supported by her also missing a later performance in the run. In her stead came Janice Baird, making it two Met debuts for the opera leads, and the performance resumed. We staggered out at 12:30, but Tristan adventures continued in the next performance when a scenery malfunction slid Mr. Lehman down into the prompter's box and gave him a head injury. He continued that night but was himself replaced by a third lead before, finally, in the sixth and final performance of the run Mr. Heppner and Ms. Voigt sang together.

It's enough to make one begin to think of Tristan und Isolde as the "Scottish opera." I do know that while my enjoyment of opera is growing, I'm clearly not yet at the Wagner level. Five hours, even without the evening's bizarre events, was a long haul for me.

It turned out to be quite a month for opera, with this gem from the Pittsburgh Opera. At a performance of Aida, the conductor wound up singing the part of Radames in the fourth act while continuing to direct the orchestra. The singer playing Radames -- who had warned management that he was not well -- finally could no longer carry on, although he silently continued to act the role. The company had arranged to borrow a singer from the Met, but his plane was delayed, and so the artistic director asked the conductor who had studied voice in Australia, to step in. NYT quotes: Antony Walker, the conductor, "It was quite a nerve-wracking thing to do, but I realized there wasn't much choice. " And Christopher Hahn, the artistic director, "The could be one for the history books." Amen to that.

Absolute Bagels

I am apparently the last person on the Upper West Side to discover Absolute Bagels on the east side of Broadway between 108th and 107th. But now that I have I'm there nearly every weekend, jogging the mile or so from the apt and then back with soft, chewy and just slightly sweet classics. They must sell thousands on Saturday and Sunday for the piles of each variety are constantly high and deep, but the turnover is so rapid that the bagels are always warm to the touch. On winter days the windows steam up and fathers wait patiently for their kids in strollers to decide what kind they want. I like to think of the place as a microcosm of NYC at its best -- a food most renown among one ethnic group, purveyed in a shop owned and staffed by two other ethnic groups and where, probably, one could place an order in any one of three different languages.