Rodriguez @ The GovernorHindmarsh, Adelaide (10/04/10)

Wed 14th Apr, 2010 in Gig Reviews

CHECK OUT ALL THE PHOTOS HERE.

They’ll talk about this for a long time: grandkids two generations from now not yet conceptualised let alone conceived will hear the story of “when Rodriguez came to town”. A kind of mythical night celebrating the second (maybe third) coming of a true, lost prophet. A man who wrote a mere 25 songs between 1967 and 1973. A man who has at various points been presumed dead, blind, lost and institutionalised; for some people, all of these at once. A Hispanic-American man from Detroit who doesn’t even see an eyelid blink when his name is mentioned in the US. A man who had Liberal, White South Africans suddenly provide him with sold out stadium shows. A man whose myth is as powerful as his music but, somehow, even more evocative. In all honesty, he could have played the worst set of his life this weekend and he still would have been greeted with the most rapturous welcome and unrelenting adulation The Gov has ever seen. Even at an exorbitant price, The Gov sold out a week in advance. He filled it with Believers and Dilettantes, people that knew of him at the time, kids who have been privileged enough to hear his (admittedly modest) work, hipsters and true music-myth tragics, Gov regulars and those that had never seen the place before. But they all had one thing in common: a mutual love, respect , verging on idolisation of a somewhat decrepit man in his 60s, with heavily affected sight, a shaky gait, a guitar strap on the wrong shoulder and a guitar strumming style that has clearly taken its toll on well-worn and hard-worked hands.

Just about everybody knew every song. Any time a Cold Fact song came on, the crowd would scream. Rodriguez’s short, intermittent discussion between songs were almost impossible to get out as he waited for the screams of euphoria to dull down, but then when they did it was all silent anticipation. He made jokes about his age: “You can never trick a veteran”, and about women: “You can’t trust a woman, but you can never trust a man” He commented on Detroiter pacifist-leftism and even Australian indigenous issues – but he could have read out excerpts from a Catherine Cookson novel and still had the crowd on his knees.

It may sound as if I’m ramping this up to much, but it was truly ridiculous how much so many of these kids and all of these fans had been waiting for this moment. The gig was almost an excuse for all of us to thank Rodriguez for his slight back catalogue as opposed to an opportunity for Rodriguez to entertain us. He played for an hour and half – not a shabby effort for a man whose appearance seemed to belie an almost non-existent stamina. He didn’t take long either to lay his palm across the crowd and grab us all by the scruff of our necks. I Wonder, one of the few songs to get minor airplay at the time of release, threw the crowd into a scream singalong, leaving ol’ Rodriguez not even needing to sing for a verse or two. Whether it was lesser celebrated songs like The Establishment Blues and Jane S. Piddy or seminal numbers like the Triple J favourite Sugar Man or the roaringly powerful Crucify Your Mind the crowd was unrelenting, knowing nearly (or nigh on) every word: and far from scared to celebrate that fact! Most of Cold Fact was played and a pleasurable dose of the lesser, but still special Coming From Reality. In many ways the gig was a total gas as Rodriguez avoided playing minor key masterpieces like the sombre ‘working man loses job’ ballad like Cause in deference to those songs that we could sing-along to, those songs that still made it all feel like a bit of a big birthday party. And all of this was framed like a Rodriguez album as it was balanced and tempered by his gentle, but biting wit with kiss off songs like Forget It.

He was ably backed by an aging Australian blues-jazz-fusion band called Jim Kelly’s Healin’ Feeling Band (who also gave us a 45 minutes support show that garnered opinions varying between “Why are they here?” to “That was pleasant.”). They played an awe-influenced set (they looked at Rodriguez with beaming smiles that betrayed a simultaneous benevolence and celebration) of comfortable backing, that stayed true to the somewhat dateless nature of the original recordings. It ensured that window dressing-like refined keyboard solos and polite jazz-guitar noodling peppered the set but never truly influenced the sound. Rodriguez didn’t just take centre stage, he was centre stage. The touches of psychedelia and the carefully placed production nuances that populate his studio work weren’t present, therefore the show was almost straight-forward, but this allowed Rodriguez’s anti-establishment flavoured paeans of peace and tales of loose women to truly shine.

There was a certain feel of beauty that pervaded the night and the appreciation felt by both the crowd and Rodriguez, who once even muttered “Adelaide, I am yours” was almost suffocating. The man had cometh, he adored his band, he adored the crowd – and we adored him. He is a legend and, thankfully, more now than just in the Antipodes but I tell ya, this night was special. It encapsulated a career (a shoer one at that) in a night. It was an awe-inspiring night celebrating a man who truly is great, and deserved of the renaissance, critically and with the masses that he is now gaining. And that’s a stone cold fact.

CHECK OUT ALL THE PHOTOS HERE.