our first night at the Adelaide Fringe's Garden of Unearthly Delights last night, with two concerts at the wonderful Spiegeltent. lovely, lovely venue. magical. crap seats.
the amazing abigail washburn. i do love a lady who plays a banjo and sings. i have her first two albums. she majored in chinese language and was then going to study chinese law, but heard a recording of Doc Watson playing the banjo and changed her plans! her current musical collaborator is kai welch - he played guitar, keyboard and trumpet exceedingly well. abigail has worked with bela fleck and toured china at least twice, and some of her songs are quite wonderful bluegrass-chinese type songs (musically and lyrically). they were great together.
the highlight later in the night was Chris Hillman, formerly of The Byrds, Flying Burrito Brothers, Manassas, Desert Rose Band, and much more, amd Herb Pedersen (whose solo album I have on vinyl, and who has backed most of the people in the business). Chris played mandolin and Martin and Herb played Martin and pretty much second man (I wished he'd done some pickin'). It was just sublime. Chris would say "Herb sang a duet with Emmylou (Harris) on her first hit single" and then they'd play it. And then he'd say "Gram Parsons and I wrote this song together" and then they'd play it. Or "here's a song from when I was in Stephen Stills' Manassas". Of course they played Byrds songs too. some of their other originals, along with some trad folk.
Chris played nice mandolin. The audience was mainly balding and grey men...
I'm not really a country music guy. I love the Eagles but Gram Parsons is more of a cerebral exercise for me. I can analyse it but I don't get it. Some of Emmylou's stuff I love and some is just country music....
its was an exceptional set, only spoiled by the guy behind me who tapped his foot on my chair out of time for the whole hour. I kept wanting to turn around, but apart from the fact that I never do that kind of thing, he was obviously enjoying it so much!
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