three cups full of bottled lightning

“Down By The River” at Lee’s Palace, Toronto, ON

Thanks to Keith from NY here’s the show via archive.org.

“A Plug For Our Sponsor” * First Time Played

How much is Cabot kicking in for the tour bus? Not nearly enough I’d say. Tell me the last time you heard 1,200 people wildly cheer for a cheese company? I suppose I’m highlighting this because, while being a commercial plug, it reflects the pure honesty of the band. Grace. Likes. Cabot Cheese. It’s simple. When I ran into her before the show at the cheese table she shared her favorite grilled cheese recipe and guided me through a tasting. No, I am not making this up.

“Stop The Bus”

iClips Voodoo Experience is now online

Click the image for the show.

Now my insistence that there was another song makes a lot more sense. They did “Be My Husband” here and I missed it due to feed issues. Stop The Bus starts the equipment problems and Grace improvises with keyboard and vocal fills. Grace then offers to strip - she got some takers - but then offers to sing. I’m guessing “Be My Husband” wasn’t on the setlist in which case, especially impressive performance by everyone.

Setlist and full show at Archive.org thanks to Dave Caley.
01 Be My Husband (Nina Simone)
02 Ah Mary
03 Joey
04 Sweet Hands
05 Mastermind
06 Treat Me Right
07 Aint No Time
08 Stop The Bus
09 Your Time Is Gonna Come (Led Zepplin)
10 If I Was From Paris
11 Watching You
12 Sugar
13 Paint It Black (Rolling Stones)
14 (encore break)

Encore:
15 Down By The River (Neil Young)
16 Nothing But The Water Pt. I & II

“Be My Husband” (listen to it change in just a week)

- man, those Canadians are quiet in the quiet parts aren’t they?

“Down By The River”

Dave has kindly posted 16bit and 24bit versions of both shows at his blog.

GPN: 24 bit
Blues and Lasers: 16 bit
Blues and Lasers: 24 bit

Grace Potter and the Nocturnals at the 20th Century Theater via Cincinnati.com. Hey Cincinnati folk, you should also know that the Nocs bought some instruments at Mike’s Music in Clifton on a previous visit.

Grace Potter and the Nocturnals Gear Talk from K Cortez on Vimeo.

Grace remembers Bogarts and hey, so do I.

“Now is a bad time for writing great albums, because it seems like it’s all about having just one big hit song,” she says. “Back when Neil Young and Bob Dylan were plucking away, it was about writing an entire album of great songs. Not that I’m comparing myself to them, but I’d like to try to keep that pattern going.”

…

“The 20th Century club was one of the most epic shows we’ve played,” she says about last year’s visit. “There was magic in the air … we crossed some kind of precipice that night. We went from being just a band to a full-on rock band.”

Take a bow, Cincinnati. If local fans are responsible in even a small way for raising the group’s game, it would be wise to take credit. Potter is in this for the long haul, and if the trajectory continues on its present course, we’ll be able to puff out our chests and say we always knew that she would be huge someday.

Pretenders lyrics quoted because I was born and raised in Ohio.

According to an interview in the Cleveland Free Times which may be, you know, a joke. If you want to hear the song they are referring to - you could do worse than to look in that music player over on the right hand side.

You’ve written some fairly serious songs, but you’ve got a reputation for being something of a wiseass. Are you holding back on the wiseass songs?

No, they’re coming. I’m like a stork, flying with all my wiseass comments. They’ll be delivered soon.

In that vein, I’d read that you wanted to bring your labelmate Hilary Duff into a session to record a song called “Piss on Your Hand.” When the hell is that song coming out?

We recorded it for the record; it is on some weird B-side in Japan. It’s a great song, but I realized that Ween had a song called “Piss Up a Rope,” and I didn’t know that when I wrote the song. I can’t release it because it appears to be derivative although it isn’t at all. I wrote the song because we were all peeing in cups in a van. It’s a foul story, but I’m going to tell you anyway. Sometimes when you’re late for a show, there’s no time to pull over and everybody’s on a different pee clock so there’s nothing to be done but pee in a cup. The punch line of the song is “a little piss on your hand is a small price to pay for relief.” We still play it live once in awhile.

I think you still have a shot with this song.

Yeah, it’s gonna be a hit. Me and Rihanna are gonna do it at the Grammys next year. Timbaland will produce it. It’ll be great.

Nice quote to open the article as well . . .

There’s no way Potter should have evolved this far as a singer-songwriter and performer in a mere 26 years, and it’s equally unlikely that any artist could produce an album as timeless and exquisitely powerful as 2007’s This Is Somewhere. Her band, the Nocturnals, exhibit a dynamic range and emotional depth made even more impressive by their ability to sustain it over an entire album.

Here’s one from way back - a song that never made it to a record.

“Ticket To The Show”

I would be remiss if I didn’t point you to the second set of photos by Patrick Cooley taken in San Francisco at the Independent on 11/15/08

Watch the full screen slideshow here. Original set of photos here.

“Your Time Is Gonna Come” - Toad’s Place, Richmond, VA - 12/07/08