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Live review: Rodriguez
Jay Janner AMERICAN-STATESMAN
Give or take a stray performance here and there, there’s a gap of nearly three decades in the Detroit singer-songwriter Rodriguez’s music career — two albums of somewhat Dylanesque music released in the early ’70s, decades of manual labor and then an unexpected music industry rebirth over the past few years.
That gap showed in Rodriguez’s ACL debut this morning. On some songs, he and his six-piece band — guitar, bass, drums, keyboards, trombone and sax — held together, and at times even rocked with conviction. ‘Establishment Blues,’ ”Can’t Get Away’ and ‘Sugar Man’ (his best known song) were particularly strong. On the latter, the band imaginatively revamped the album version’s occult studio trickery, which wouldn’t have been possible to replicate live. Instead: trombone solo!
But on a number of songs — the opening ‘Inner City Blues’ (an original, not the Marvin Gaye classic), ‘Crucify Your Mind’ and, especially, a disastrous ‘I Think of You’ — the band kept falling in and out of step. It was hard to pin down who was at fault, but as the band seemed fine (some overbearing synthesizers aside) when Rodriguez wasn’t playing, one suspected it was his hesitant guitar strumming that was tripping things up. (Though the fact that this is not a regular band — Rodriguez lives in Detroit, the rest in North Carolina — couldn’t have helped. Nor did the feedback that plagued much of the set.)
Still, it’s something of a miracle that Rodriguez was here at all, more than three decades after he and the music industry essentially gave up on each other. ‘It’s an honor, a pleasure and a privilege,’ he said at the beginning of the set, and for most of his 45 minutes on stage, it was our pleasure, too.
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