GranolaBox

So I’m poking around on Facebook one night and find one of those little sidebars about Rufus Wainwright playing someplace in New Jersey. I click, it leads me to a tour schedule and lo and behold, the concert the Queen of my Universe and I have been waiting for was coming to Buffalo!

So we get to Buffalo right at 5:00, which is when the ticket implied the show would start.

Here’s where it gets surreal. We parked and were directed toward a shuttle that took us ACROSS THE STREET to the concert venue. Fair enough… we’re kinda tired.. why walk when you can ride right? The shuttle drove us to the back entrance of the Albright-Knox Museum, who hosted the show in front of their wonderful-and-amazing-for-western NY establishment.

As we followed the signs, an attendant asked for our “passes.” and we pulled out our “tickets” and she led us to a tent outdoors with a huge table of delectable munchies. After a while we realized that we were the only people in the tent without VIP passes. Despite our newly discovered inferiority we ate some munchies and, upon learning that Rufus was playing at 9:30, headed out for dinner, thus ending the surreal phase of our evening.

The show reflected his most recent, starkly acoustic and deeply personal album. The only things on stage were the grand piano and a couple microphones and he played most of the show solo or with his sister Martha on a few songs.

Dude floored me. I didn’t think the stuff from his new album would translate well live in front of 3,000 people, but I was blown away. It was even better live. Many of the songs are about his mother, Kate McGarrigle who passed away a few months ago. Those songs really choked me up because they totally captured my sense of loss when my Mom passed away. He even played a couple of his mom’s songs.

I can’t imagine how Rufus functioned as the brilliant pianist that he is when he was in the throes of drug addiction because the songs brought his virtuosity to the forefront. He introduced one song as the hardest song he’s ever written to play, but he went through it brilliantly until he stopped and announced that a fly had landed on his finger that wouldn’t go away.

The songs from his other albums were great too. I’d read that he’d retired Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” for this tour, but after the BF reminded him of the 7 million hits the video got, he played it for the first time for this show. Thank you Bjorn.

By far the most amusing part of the concert was his between-song audience banter. He was describing the beautiful Albright-Knox architecture then “I wish I could’ve made my entrance from those columns wearing a sexy ‘ancient guy’ costume and holding Sarah Palin’s head on a tray, like Medusa.”

One of many wonderful connections I made to Rufus.

Filed under: Music, Reviews on June 25th, 2010