Then and now

A dozen more summers have come and gone, so my memories are minimal: running out of the big show at the Marcus, finally (the sound system was a disaster) and across the Summerfest grounds to where I really wanted to be. Standing on rickety wooden benches to improve our late-arriving view. A string of white lights across the black Wisconsin sky. That song.

I recall it as a perfect summer night, one of my favorite shows by my then-favorite band, but the fact that I have the idea that the weather (in M'waukee in July) was breezy and agreeable reminds me that the mind plays tricks. It was still a great moment in my time.

What it was for the principals was perhaps another thing.

That year was the end of the Jayhawks, and within months, one of the founders, Mark Olson, took his half of the harmonies and left the band for a musician whose stuff always sounds like a bag of wet cats, at least to me. He seems to be a pretty good guy, to have taken care of Victoria Williams for a chunk of years through her MS (just don't make me listen to her sing), and to have recorded an entire anti-Dubya album (see previous parens), but as I confirmed last night, I have virtually no interest in his last decade of music-making.

He had a good band now, though-- perhaps the most versatile I've ever seen--including a guy who played the violin or fiddle or whatever he'd call it with a particularly Italian enthusiasm and a Norwegian woman whose harmonies gratified the room when they got around to the Jayhawks songs (why yes, he has spent a lot of time in Europe). I'm sure it's a drag to feel the audience perk up when they recognize the stuff you tried to leave behind so long ago, but when one is hawking an album with the tag line, "A two year journey through loss and redemption" in the basement of a bar, it's only to be expected.

I'll never listen to that new album--it's just not my thing; even the tracks that reunited Olson and Louris, the heart of that old band, aren't what I want to hear, but that doesn't disappoint me like it once would have. Then again, I don't really listen to the old records anymore, either. It was fun to hear a few of those songs live one more time, though, and it was worth going just to see the current state of what once was. But I tell ya, if Mark Olson ever wants to expand on the story he alluded to last night, and record the the tale of taking his new international bandmates to visit his family on its dairy farm in rural Minnesota, I'd definitely listen. I might even pay.