Two Concerts Unite Tragic Theme

Hurricane blues stretch from Colombia to Vegas

Timothy Pratt

I'm not sure what I was looking for, going to those two concerts in one week, a guy trained in the family-man routine, movies from Blockbuster, no time, no energy.


I think I wanted to cry, sort of like when Neil Young sang John Lennon's "Imagine" on television 10 days after September. 11.


Carlos Vives, a Colombian singer who long ago had made the connection between his accordion-based roots music called vallenato, the Caribbean coast it comes from, and New Orleans, was playing the House of Blues Wednesday.


His song, "Decimas," on the album Dejame Entrar that won him a Grammy, had shouted out five years ago, "Barranquilla (the Colombian coastal city) is just like New Orleans."


And Lucinda Williams, born in Lake Charles, Louisiana, who spent part of her childhood in New Orleans, whose songs have always been seared with all the places and faces the whole nation has been watching on TV—she was due on the same stage the next night.


Or as a fan put it on a Lucinda Williams online forum a day after the levees burst, "a lot of the locations from her songs are now underwater."


A friend said I went to the shows "looking for a release, a bonding, a way to make sense of what happened."


Both singers are white; both have based their careers on filtering mostly black, local musical traditions through contemporary rock and roll, with a mix of original and traditional songs.


Vives wasted no time in dedicating his concert to "New Orleans and everybody affected by the tragedy."


Before I realized it, hundreds of mostly Colombians were bopping to a dream Vives has:


"We saw the Mississippi at last


The mist at dawn


We danced zydeco in New Orleans


A vallenato in Louisiana


Looks like I'll never wake up ..."


I wondered how all the foreigners around me—many my friends, since more than half my household was born in Colombia and we have one foot in each place—how did they see the whole thing? Do they realize what's been lost?


The next morning, it was clear Vives did.


The artist, who lives between Miami and Bogota, Colombia's capital, said on the phone, "It's impossible not to feel the pain."


Then he took me on the trip imagined in that song.


"When you feel the river, the water, it's just like our coast ... We have so much in common."


He spoke of the roots in Colombia's coast, where there are still black villages full of descendants of escaped slaves, a drum beat at the center of town; and of New Orleans, of the birth of blues and jazz.


He said he was scheduled to play at the New Orleans House of Blues on September 17.


"Now it's under water."


And he let on that he had placed songs in tribute to the city on his play list before the tragedy, a coincidence—"but now everything has changed focus."


And that he is figuring out how to respond with his pocket, with money from the tour to the Red Cross, or to musicians from the area somehow.


I asked if he knew who Lucinda Williams was. He had seen her name on the marquee at the club, but no. I told him about her, where she was from, put the phone up to the speaker, her barroom voice newly sad when she sang,


"I'm going back to the Crescent City / where everything's still the same."


Vives dug it; he was going on about the connection between his roots and her roots, said something about, "this is what interests me, making larger the things that bring us together."


He said he'd stay in town to see her that night. We promised to hook up.


Later, at the House of Blues, with Williams already a few songs into the show, a guy next to me with the same sweet drawl as her was pissed.


"Talk about New Orleans," he screamed at Williams from the front row.


A guard drew close. A heated exchange followed.


I asked the guy what was up.


"She hasn't said a f--kin' word," he said, adding, "and I'm from there."


I could see he was drunk. But he was hurting.


I was with a friend, also from New Orleans. The drunk, who was white, echoed to my friend, who is black, what many had said in recent days: The levee was never reinforced in the past, the response so slow because most of the folks in the Big Easy were poor and dark-skinned.


"They flooded us," I heard him say. He looked like he was going to cry.


Williams kept ripping through her set, unusually rocking, with none of the roots—the Cajun fiddle, the accordion, the Dobro. "You took my joy, I want it back," she snarled.


I looked around for Vives, with his dirty-blond dreads. Nowhere in sight. I later learned he had somehow twisted his foot in the hotel, never got to the show. I thought of what he said shortly before hanging up: "Everything happens for a reason."


What was the reason he didn't make it?


Suddenly, Williams addressed the crowd.


"I'm representing Louisiana tonight," she blurted out.


She said she was going to finish her set and then sing some songs to Louisiana. The crowd erupted. We had moved away from the drunk.


Then she said, "I just want to say I want to dedicate all these shows to the people suffering from Katrina, directly or indirectly."


She left, came back out, broke into "Crescent City."


"Let's see how these blues'll do in the town where the good times stay."


And her own trip, now like a dream.


"Me and my sister, me and my brother


We used to walk down by the river."


In the street outside after, the lit-up desert seemed drier than ever.

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