Live or ...

Discussion of music tends to focus on recordings. This makes sense, of course, since the majority of music we experience is through recordings. For pop music fans, this is often enough, maybe even better than focusing on live performance since live pop music can be a very frustrating experience. Nevertheless, the musical moments that have meant the most to me have mostly been live.

A case in point: in a previous blog entry, I mentioned that I think Pheobe Snow is one of the all time great R&B vocalists. I would guess that to the extent that anyone is even aware of Snow it's through her one hit from the mid '70s, a pleasant song called "Poetry Man" that most people probably file mentally somewhere in the neighborhood of Carole King or Carly Simon. Not a bad neighborhood, but you wouldn't take out a mortgage to move there.

So why do I think she's one of the greatest singers since Aretha Franklin? Because I heard her live once. In the early '90's, Donald Fagen (of Steely Dan fame) put together a sort of musical repertory company called the New York Rock and Soul Review that performed regularly around town. The NYRSR was basically a bunch of studio cats and semi-luminaries jamming together on R&B songs. At one of the shows that I saw, the theme was soul music from New York. During a medley of Berns and Ragovy songs, the band started playing the intro to the Janis Joplin hit "Piece of My Heart." Fagen announced a special guest vocalist, Phoebe Snow.

Phoebe approached the stage through the audience, parting the crowd like Moses and the Red Sea. She picked up the mic, and proceeded to deliver the greatest vocal performance I have ever heard in any genre in my entire life. Terms like virtuoso, colloratura, soul diva, voice of god don't even begin to do justice to what this was like. The expressiveness, emotional intensity, range, dynamics, power and musicality were literally awe inspiring. As the song built to the chorus, she leapt up and down octaves and made you feel like she really was having a piece of her heart ripped from her. As the song ended, the audience exploded. We screamed for more, but I think we were all secretly glad there was no encore. There was no way this could be topped, and if it were, I don't think we would have survived the experience. If Janis had ever heard Phoebe sing this song, she never would have dared sing it herself.

The NYRSR put out a live album which has two Phoebe cuts: a duet of "Knock on Wood" with Michael McDonald, and a solo version of "At Last". "Knock on Wood" is pretty good, but the song itself doesn't invite the kind of majestic performance that "Piece of My Heart" does. "At Last" comes closer, giving a sense of what Phoebe can offer. I've scoured the web for bootlegs or you-tubes of her doing "Piece of My Heart" to no avail. The only thing live performance I could scour up was this:



Perhaps it's best that this is all I could find. I'm not as young and vigorous as I used to be, and I'm not sure I can spare any pieces of my heart.