Live at the Belly Up: John Hiatt with the Jerry Douglas Band (Belly Up Tavern, San Diego State University, KPBS, 2022)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night I watched a couple of quite interesting TV shows on KPBS: a Live at the Belly Up episode featuring John Hiatt and the Jerry Douglas Band (two names I have been on the periphery of my awareness for a while without my actually knowing much about them) and just before that a show called American Anthems in which singer-songwriter Jennifer Nettles reaches out to various real-life heroes and writes songs about their life-threatening struggles and their courage in the face of them. In this case the hero was Seth Grumet, who in 2010 was diagnosed with a cancerous tumor just as he was training for his second Iron Man triathlon. The song Nettles wrote about him was called “Life Is Sweet” and it was a surprisingly intense, emotional song, far from the dirge usually associated with songs about people surviving cancer. Ironically, Seth was lucky that at least this happened to him a decade before COVID-19, in that the people near and dear to him – including his wife, their three children, and his sister, whose bone-marrow donation saved his life even though it was an incredibly painful process for her as well as him – were able to visit him en masse without the infuriating restrictions I had to put up with during my own recent health crisis (which was nowhere nearly as serious as Seth’s, just to make it clear).

Nettles is “typed” as a country singer but her voice is considerably stronger than that – the way she belted out the high notes on the song she and her songwriting partner Bill Sherman wrote for Seth had me thinking, “White Aretha Franklin” – and the show was not only heartwarming in itself (Seth started a non-profit foundation called “STOMP the Monster,” named after his middle daughter said to him when he told her about his diagnosis, and it raises money to help people with cancer get to therapy appointments, cover day care for their kids, and the like) but a nice antidote to the dreary news from the U.S. Supreme Court. The Live at the Belly Up program was also interesting and engaging; John Hiatt joked about his lack of musical expertise (he said his mom rented him a guitar and paid for lessons, but he got upset with the teacher because the teacher wanted to teach him more than just the five chords Hiatt wanted to learn so he could write folk-style songs; it reminded me of Lou Reed’s marvelous story about how his parents bought him his first guitar and also included in the deal was a certain number of lessons. After a few times with the teacher Reed grew exasperated and brought in some Carl Perkins records to show the teacher what he wanted to learn to play. The teacher said, “You don’t want to learn that! It’s just three chords!” And Reed replied, “O.K., then show me the three chords”) and played a program of 12 songs, all but one of which backed by the Jerry Douglas Band.

The Jerry Douglas band as presented here is actually only part of the group listed on his Web site – the full band includes Vance Thompson on trumpet, Jared Mitchell on saxophone and Doug Belote on drums – but the edition presented here included only Douglas on dobro (a kind of resonator-equipped guitar invented by a pair of instrument makers called the Douglas Brothers – “dobro” was just a mashup of “Douglas Brothers” and I couldn’t help but wonder if Jerry Douglas was a relative of theirs), Mike Seal on electric guitar, Daniel Kimbro on bass (who played a surprisingly jazzy introduction on the song “Keen Rambler”) and the band’s cutest member, Christian Sedelmyer on violin (though given that this is at least nominally a country band I probably should say “fiddle”). Hiatt is an eccentric songwriter with a great sense of humor, as evidenced by the first two songs on the 12-song program, “Long Black Electric Cadillac” (a bit of a misnomer since General Motors isn’t making long black Cadillacs, either gas or electric, bur maybe they should be) and “Perfectly Good Guitar,” which laments the way certain star performers smash up perfectly good guitars on stage.

The rest of the songs – “Feels Like Rain,” “All the Lilacs in Ohio” (is Ohio particularly associated with lilacs? Just wondering), “The Music Is Hot” (actually a laid-back country-bluegrass number that isn’t particularly “hot” at all), “Your Dad Did” (very much in the rockabilly vein), “Mississippi Phone Booth,” “Keen Rambler” (the song doesn’t sound anything like Ella Mae Morse’s “Ond Shank’s Mare” but the two are lyrically similar: both are about people who travel long distances on foot), “Thing Called Love” (which Bonnie Raitt covered and had one of the biggest hits of her career; Hiatt joked that the royalties from Raitt’s version put two of his daughters through college), “Memphis in the Meantime,” “Have a Little Faith in Me” (which Hiatt performed solo, and on which he came as close to sounding like Bob Dylan as he had all night), and the closer, “Riding with the King,” which I presume was supposed to be a song about Elvis Presley – also showcased his deep wit and love of roots music. It was a quite good Live at the Belly Up – much better than the annoying one the week before, a five-year-old rerun with the Soul Rebels and rapper Talib Kwali – and it was filmed in 2022 now that the COVID-19 pandemic has been more or less officially declared over (even though the virus is continually evolving new so-called “variants” and “subvariants”) to promote a new album the stars have jointly recorded and released. Douglas also mentioned that in his high-school days in the late 1960’s he was photographed holding a copy of the Creedence Clearwater Revival album Green River, having no idea that 30 years later he would not only tour and record with Creedence leader John Fogerty but would teach Fogerty how to play the dobro!