Like a Train Wreck

We recently went to see Lucinda Williams and her excellent band Buick 6 at the Lowell Summer Music Series. It was a beautiful Saturday night in early July, outdoors in Boarding House Park against a backdrop of the restored buildings where the “Mill Girls” lived at the turn of the twentieth century. I’ve been listening to Lucinda’s songs for a long time, but Gail had never seen her before.
Couldn’t be nicer, right?
Wrong.
To start with, the concert was General Admission in an actual park – bring your own lawn chairs or blankets. We arrived when the gates opened at 6PM (for a 7:30PM concert) and were surprised to only find two cramped spots on the lawn for our camp chairs – apparently people can stake out their spots any time during the day, and a whole lot of them did. That made for some seriously pissed-off concertgoers, especially those who arrived after 7PM and ended up having to stand out on the street behind the park.

Also, the Series is a subscription event (you can buy single-show tickets too), so there were a lot of people there who weren’t familiar with her intense lyrics, which can get quite explicit, and many of those people brought little kids. “Learning How to Live” is not “Puff the Magic Dragon.”

I’ve seen Lucinda in concert before, and after a while she made it very clear that she didn’t want to be there, playing for that crowd.

I enjoyed the music, Gail not so much, but -- click on the title to check out what some of the other people who were there with us had to say