Photo by Brianna Griepentrog courtesy Pabst Theater Group
Nick Cave Riverside Theater Sept. 27, 2023
Nick Cave with bassist Colin Greenwood at the Riverside Theater, Sept. 27, 2023
Taking his place at a grand piano on a stark stage Nick Cave played a meandering set of finely crafted songs Wednesday evening at the Riverside Theater. This wasn’t the intense and confrontational frontman of The Birthday Party and The Bad Seeds. This was the charming entertainer, abetted by Radiohead bassist Colin Greenwood, displaying piano skills and engaging with the audience.
At their best, Cave’s songs grab the finest details of a situation and find ways to make them universal. He ended “I Need You” repeating the mantra “just breathe, just breathe, just breathe.” He admitted singing “Papa Won't Leave You, Henry” to his newborn son as a lullaby. The song relied on the template of hypnotic, rolling lyrics with rising and falling dynamics that Cave perfected decades ago. The effect of Greenwood often just an instant behind Cave’s changes was a subtle one.
Over the years Cave’s use of religious imagery and Americana hoodoo became grist for his songs. The evening ended with a solo take of “God Is in The House,” while the Grinderman tour de force “Palaces of Montezuma” managed to namecheck Mata Hari, Miles Davis, Ali McGraw and Steve McQueen and “the spinal cord of JFK wrapped in Marilyn Monroe's negligee.” If you heard echoes of Bob Dylan’s stream-of-lyrics here, you were not alone.
His flair for the grotesque long ago settled into hard-earned gravitas. It is hard not to think of his art as therapeutic having lost two of his sons. Undeniably, Cave also displays generous amounts of compassion and love in his songs. “Into My Arms” remains unabashed romance and Cave introduced “And No More Shall We Part” as a weird wedding song. He performed “Stranger Than Kindness,” the song written by his former girlfriend and Bad Seed Anita Lane, that Cave believes she wrote about him.
|
|
Strangely, it wouldn’t be stretch to view Cave as a modern update of Tin Pan Alley entertainer; the absurd notion of a Jimmy Webb prodigy who got lost in a funhouse mirror with an arrangement of “Macarthur Park” still pinned to the wall above his desk.
And there was undeniably engaging humor. Early in the evening he joked about having to choose between red or green socks (we got red) —“I’ll bet Thom Yorke doesn’t say things like that!” Cave seemed to make an earnest attempt to respond to audience comments and even introduced two songs (“Into My Arms” and “Jubilee Street”) as “this is for the person who doesn’t want to hear this song.” For “Balcony Man,” Cave invite folks in the balcony to go nuts.
