16 December 2006
I bought two tickets a few months ago to Ray LaMontagne’s sold-out New York City Beacon Theater performance seconds after they went on sale, and then put them under a magnet on the refrigerator for a whole month so I could savor the anticipation of his upcoming show every time I got a beer. I didn’t mention having the tickets to anyone until a few weeks before the show when I asked my Brooklyn sometimes-boyfriend if he’d like to come along. By this time the orchestra seats were priced over $600 on resale sites. I burned him a CD of Ray’s music so he’d be prepared to sing along.
We arrived as the opening act was finishing, and it wasn’t long before Ray took the stage with zero fanfare, just like when I saw him this summer at a park in Brooklyn, in the rain. But this show was nothing like the outdoor concert this summer: the intimacy of the old theater, the phenomenal acoustics, the die-hard fans in the small audience, all of them knowing how very lucky we were to be there, to be able to say “I saw him when…”
Ray opened with “Empty,” one of the most tender, touching, songs from his new album, Till The Sun Turns Black. It was one, maybe two songs later that he transformed into a man I hadn’t seen at his concert this summer. He had the passion of Joe Cocker, the smooth sexiness of Marvin Gaye, and the urgency of a tapped fire hydrant on a summer day. Plus, that sexy Jesus beard he was rocking earlier this year.
He sang “Barfly,” now one of my all-time favorite songs, just like the album version for most of the song, but towards the very end, he let loose. Where the song on the album would have come to a quiet, whispery close, Ray took this version up to an eleven. Holding his guitar high from his chest, still strumming, bending his skinny legs at the knees so low that he could have sat down in a chair, his gravel voice pleading into the microphone, “I need your sweet love, just give it to me.”
Oh, the feeling that man elicits in me. I had goose bumps from ankles to ears. By this time I was completely on the edge of my seat, leaning forward, grinning ear to ear and, I think, biting my thumb. I looked back at the boyfriend, who was smiling.
He burned his way through “Three More Days”; I was expecting the theater to catch fire by the end of the song. That number will never be better than it was the night of December 16, 2006 in New York City. Keyboard player creating total chaos, brass blaring in the corner of the stage, bass guitarist tearing it up. “Listen up, listen up, gonna give it ’till you can’t say no,” he sang. What woman in her right mind would ever say no to this man?
“I’ve got so much love to give,” he pleaded, singing words not in the album version, bending nearly to the floor. “I’ve got so much love to give.” My temperature went up ten degrees just hearing about it; that feeling of witnessing history filling up my heart.
After the physically overwhelming experience of watching him perform “Three More Days,” I developed a bit of amnesia. Though I do remember that the audience’s exuberance was too much for him to handle– people kept shouting out to hear his cover of Gnarls Barkley’s “Crazy” until finally he said, softly, “I wish you’d stop asking for that song. I didn’t write that.”
He wanted to sing a song that he hadn’t sung before, called “You’re The Best Thing That Has Ever Happened To Me.” Over and over he tried introducing the song, but people in audience kept shouting over him. He was so visibly frustrated that I thought he was about to walk off the stage. Finally some New Yorker in the audience shouted to the rest of the crowd, “Shut the fuck up!”
Ray raised his hands and bowed his head slightly, to show that the man had spoken his thoughts exactly, as the audience roared. He finally got through the sweet, delicate new song, alone on the stage with his guitar, standing in the single spot light.
He closed the show with only one other musician, singing “Can I Stay.” At the end of the song he mumbled into the microphone, more to his musician than to us, “Well, I guess that’s it. See you later.”
He walked off in no particular direction, the reluctant celebrity, making half an attempt of a small wave at the thunderous applause.
Calico Blonde 