Our delightful Mongolian babysitter came over last night, and Kevin & I went to dinner at The Elite Cafe, an old cajun-style restuarant on Fillmore. It’s worth a trip for the Meetinghouse Biscuits and b-b-q shrimp alone, and they make this great cocktail with Pimm’s and a slice of cucumber that, to me, tasted like home (Mobile, AL) with a kick, like a slightly spiced iced tea concoction easy on the sugar.
From there we went to see Lloyd Cole at The Great American Music Hall. The first time Kevin and I saw him together was nine years ago at Maxwell’s in Hoboken, a small, intimate venue just a train ride from Manhattan. That night he perfomed with Jill Sobule and sang one of my favorites, “Like Lovers Do.”
Last night, Lloyd looked older and seemed a little down, but still delivered a great show. He’s just finished a new album, which he said took three times as long as he budgeted for. After he missed a couple of lines on a couple of songs, some jerk in the audience shouted out, “Are you here?” and instead of a witty rejoinder Lloyd apologized to the audience. I realized that, at every show we’ve seen him at– and there have been quite a few– he’s forgotten a line or two; I think it’s part of his charm, a self-deprecation that doesn’t seem at all false. His occasional forgetfulness may also have to do with the fact that his lyrics are more complicated than your average crooner–the rhymes less obvious, the end word almost always a different word than the one you’re expecting.
Last night, he came out for an encore, singing “Like Lovers Do,” and when I realized what song it was it gave me a nice sensation of time travel–now, nine years down the road with Kevin, living in San Francisco instead of New York, in a house with an ocean view instead of a fourth-floor walk-up apartment, in it together for the long haul. When we first met eleven years ago in Arkansas, Kevin used to woo me with mixed tapes, and Lloyd Cole was a regular feature on those tapes. Now, Kevin makes CDs for our baby son Oscar, and there’s almost always some Lloyd Cole song in the mix.
LC made a few remarks about getting older–he said you know you’re a geezer when someone compares something you’ve written to Bread and you take it as a compliment–and I’ve been feeling older lately too, something about the responsibilities of parenthood and the mid-thirties mark and the fact that some of my graduate students now are ten to twelve years younger than I am. And I was thinking that Lloyd Cole isn’t just the kind of musician you grow up with, he’s also the kind you grow older with. When he alludes to Nabokov in a song, you know he’s actually read Pale Fire, and when he sings Are You Ready to Be Heartbroken, released more than two decades ago, you know he has been–probably more than once–which gives him more authority and more intensity than those “world-weary twenty-six=year-old”s he sings about (it occurs to me now that I must have been 25 or 26 when I first saw him).
Read Lloyd Cole’s studio journal here. If you’re into links of the grass and tee variety, you can buy Lloyd Cole’s old golf clubs at ebay–his seller name is lloydauctions. And the Glasgow band Camera Obscura has a catchy tribute song, “Lloyd I’m Ready to Be Heartbroken,” which you can listen to here.