Olympia, Washington
February 26, 2000
The Capitol Theater
I guess it's kinda late to still review the shows... Mary Lou is even a year older by now (though I leave it to you to figure out how old she is)... anyways: There is not much for me to say about the Seattle show, because unfortunately I wasn't aware that it was an early all- ages show and so I arrived late. She did however play a sublime version of "Subway" that I liked very much. Not too sure about the rest of the show, maybe because I didn't like the I-Spy too much. People were sitting at tables and that always reminds me of Elvis in Las Vegas but not of Mary Lou... I stayed on the "balcony" for the rest of the show and the sounds wasn't too good either up there. Funnily enough Mary Lou really liked the show (and that's typical because she usually never likes the shows I attend and since I missed the first half of this one it made sense for her to say that :-)) After that we went to see the Minus 5 show down the road at the Crocodile and even though Mary Lou has played with them before (on the "Working Class Hero" tribute) she didn't do any songs with them tonight. Would've been fun though to see Mary Lou and Peter Buck on the same stage. She probably would've been way to tired to play anyways... The next day saw Mary Lou in Olympia. Actually Jason Traeger (who had a really bad cold) was on first and if he ever planned to do his singer/songwriter thing he disguised it very well. Because from the start his act was more like stand-up comedy involving a guitar and a little kid... Very funny but kinda hard to describe. He only played one "real" song and the rest of improvised children's songs and jokes. He even tried to get a friend of his to do "American Pie" Eddie Vedder style but his friend obviously wasn't into that too much. Next up was Peter Conelly, who did a number of very nice, rather sad songs and a very fine version of Bob Dylan's "To Ramona". Mary Lou came on stage at around 10.30 after having done "Romeo And Juliet" by Dire Straits (!) at the soundcheck and played yet another fine show which included many the regular choices like "Western Union Desperate", "That Kind Of Girl", "He'd Be A Diamond" (the latter one of the many "love gone wrong" songs she played that night) plus a suprising "Salem 76", "Throng Of Blowtown" and even "Camden Town Rain" (okay, it was a request but I wouldn't have thought she'd do that song in Olympia of all places!) She also performed a mighty fine rendition of "I Don't Wanna Get Over You" (her recent number 1 song on her heavy rotaion list, she said) by Magnetic Fields, "New Thing Now" by Shawn Colvin (actually doing a better version than Shawn, even though that's hard to believe, I know) and "Ontario Quebec And Me" by Billy Bragg. She also made me very happy by playing two Richard Thompson songs ("1952 Vincent Black Lightning" and "From Galway To Graceland") plus of course the "new product", "Hard Road" and "Aim Low"... All in all a very worthwhile one and a half hours. She closed with "By The Time It Gets Dark" mentioning that she likes to play that song for Annabelle. Supposedly it's one of her daughter's favorits. In other news: Looks like there will be a full new album out soon, so keep your eyes and ears open. It might or might not be released on Epic...