Greg played at the Unitarian Church in Portsmouth. Local folkies Susie
Burke and David Surette opened. Tickets $32 per. Venue about 60% full.
Sound system poor to mediocre. Vocals muddled. This affected the MC,
the opening act, and to a certain extent Greg as well, although for
Greg, sometimes muddled vocals can be a stylistic choice. This is the
seventh or eighth time I've seen Greg live, and it wasn't among the
top ten (mathematical impossibility intended).

I'm not a song list kind of guy, but he played some flood songs, The
Train Carrying Jimmie Rogers Home, a Jimmie Rogers tune, and I Gave my
Love a Cherry (probably as an editorial comment to the couple in the
venue with the screaming baby, as the song has the line "I gave my
love a baby, with no cryin'." Funny, that. He played Rexroth's
Daughter as well, although it was virtually unrecognizable. He pretty
much ignored requests. Did nothing fingerstyle. His show was, oh I
don't know, "Extreme Country" compared to shows I've seen from past
years. Always a flat pick, never fingerpicking, and everything in
standard tuning, if I remember correctly. He mentioned Fathers' Day,
said he didn't have any songs about fathers, mentioned Steve Goodman
wrote a good song about fathers but he didn't know it, so he played
City of New Orleans instead.

It was at about this point I formulated a theory in my mind that he
might be channeling Andy Kaufmann, in the sense that it was almost
like he was purposefully trying to anger the audience. He seemed to be
intentionally burying each tune by adapting them all to a style best
described as old-style Nashville country, and if audience irritation
was his goal, he definitely hit his mark. Someone requested his song
Daughters, which he said he might do, but in the end he did not. It
would have been, of course, the perfect Greg Brown song for Fathers'
Day, which he previously had said didn't exist. So perhaps he was only
wisely trying to avoid tearing a hole in the space-time continuem.

Interspersed throughout were some lesser known tunes, both originals
and covers, and some good natured complaints about being slowly
broiled underneath the stage lights.

The first time I saw Greg was in Lincoln, Massachusetts in the late
1980s, and the quality of his songwriting, his wonderful voice, his
vocal and instrumental phrasing, his humor and his stage presence were
a revelation to me. I have in the past seen other substandard
performances by him--an entire show of William Blake poetry set to
modern folk music and a mail-it-in performance at a community college
in Gardner, Massachusetts come to mind--but this show was pretty much
the bottom of the bottom.

If he were alive, Jimmie Rogers would'a tossed him off the stage.