Lovett Welcomes His Friends to the Big Apple

Sit across a poker table from Lyle Lovett, and it's a good bet the long, Kramer-faced bastard will walk away with your house and car keys by the end of the evening. He'll play a bad hand or two himself to throw you off, but there's a method to Lovett's madness, and sure enough he'll nail you with a royal flush on the last hand. |

He's a sly one, Lovett. Rather than follow-up 1996's brilliant Road to Ensenada with another display of his exemplary songwriting, this week he's released Step Inside This House, an ambitious but uneven twenty-one song, two-disc affair for which he didn't pen a single note. Instead, he's taken on the role of interpreter, covering songs by his favorite Texas songwriters. And to celebrate the release of the album, he invited many of those writers to perform four shows with him over the course of two nights at New York's Bottom Line.

Billed as "An Evening with Lyle Lovett," the shows were for all intents and purposes informal, in-the-round picking sessions at which Lovett simply played host. A disappointment to fans expecting more than a half dozen tunes per show from Lovett himself, perhaps, but to any connoisseur of fine songcraft, the rare opportunity to see the likes of Guy Clark, Michael Martin Murphey, Steve Fromholz, Robert Earl Keen and others sharing the same stage more than made up for the absence of Lovett's large band and an umpteenth performance of "Penguins."

Tuesday night's lineup included Lovett's feistier old Texas A&M buddy Keen, cowboy balladeer Murphey, Austin maverick Fromholz and Eric Taylor. "There's this place in Austin where they have this thing called 'Bummer Night,'" said Taylor by way of introducing himself. "If you don't play the saddest song they've ever heard, they kick you out. I've never been asked to leave." That's sort of the low-key singer/songwriter equivalent of a gangsta rapper boastin' the illest rhymes in tha hood, and Taylor more than made good on his threat.

Murphey's songs of life on the range went over far better with the Yankee audience than his cowboy jokes did, but he did have the disadvantage of being behind rapscallion Fromholz in the batting order. "I can't follow that," Murphey grumbled each time Fromholz polished off a nugget like "I Gave Her a Ring (She Gave Me the Finger)." Few folks could have. As for Keen, his status as a god of drunken frat boys in Texas, a la Jerry Jeff Walker, means he rarely gets to perform his quieter -- and best -- material, and he made the most of tonight's mild-mannered atmosphere by offering up the bittersweet nervous breakdown saga "Then Came Lo Mein" and the sparkling new "Feelin' Good Again."

The only disappointment the first night was Lovett himself. Steering clear of his own material in favor of songs by his friends onstage, and hardly ever engaging in the casual stage banter, he often seemed to be holding back. He did come through, however, with Clark's "Step Inside This House." Lovett's a wonderful singer, and by offering up this previously unrecorded gem he's done the world a tremendous favor.

Clark himself stole the show the following night, which also featured Fromholz, Willis Alan Ramsey and Vince Bell. Ramsey's country blues and Bell's country folk held their own surprisingly well, but Clark stands head-and-shoulders next to the late, great Townes Van Zandt in the Texas pantheon of songwriters. Initially looking as though he may doze off, Clark sprang to life with the benefit of a couple of cigarettes (first leaving the stage, then lighting up inside in defiance of house rules) and a stunning performance highlighted by "Let Him Roll" -- "the one song of mine that Townes said he wishes he wrote."

No doubt inspired by Clark's presence, Lovett himself was significantly livelier the second night, dipping into his own catalogue ("Her First Mistake," "If I Had a Boat") and turning in a lively "Bears" with Fromholz. "This is the most fun I've ever had on stage," he beamed near the end of the evening, shortly before playing his trump card -- a haunting cover of Van Zandt's chilling "Highway Kind" -- for the evening's encore.

Read 'em and weep.

RICHARD SKANSE(September 23, 1998)