Time and Space Converge: Gail Ann Dorsey at Club Passim

It occurred to me, as I was walking from my hotel to Club Passim in Cambridge, MA to see Gail Ann Dorsey that I had first seen her play thirty years ago. Thirty years? 1995. Is that twenty years or thirty years? Thirty years. Ugh. How can that be?

Of course, I first saw Gail playing bass for Bowie on the Outside tour, in Pittsburgh. It was a great concert. The most aggressive I had ever seen Bowie before or since. 1995 was this strange moment for Bowie, with Nine Inch Nails opening for him. I was barely aware of Nine Inch Nails, but there were whole contingents of concert-goers who were there just for that band, and got up and left when Bowie’s band was fully on stage. They didn’t leave when Bowie arrived on stage because he did this thing where he first appeared with Nine Inch Nails. Members cycled off and members of Bowie’s band replaced them. One of the members of Bowie’s band was Gail Ann Dorsey, the new bass player.

That’s how I remember it, anyway. It was thirty years ago. Maybe my memory is off. But I remember Gail, then. She’s the one who took the Freddie Mercury part on “Under Pressure” (yeah, sure, Bowie had given up performing his greatest hits. Right). Beyond that she has tremendous stage presence. “Who’s the bass player?” I remember thinking. Oddly, I remember her singing and just…just…her presence more than anything she did with the bass.

And that was it. Gail Ann Dorsey had taken her place among my personal Bowie pantheon for the next eight years, when I saw Bowie perform five more times. The more I think of it, the more I have come to realize that this is my Bowie. I think of my very favorite Bowie album as Scary Monsters. But I wasn’t paying attention, when I was eleven, when the album was released. Driving to Massachusetts to see Gail this time I coincidentally came across a posted bootleg of Bowie performing in Buffalo in 1983–my mother and younger sister were at that concert. I had no interest. The whole cycle of anticipating an album, listening to it incessantly when it’s new, and going to the concert—that all came later for me. And while I had seen Bowie twice before Pittsburgh, both times were spaced apart from one another in part because I wasn’t really making enough money to be going around buying concert tickets. But Gail’s time with Bowie was the time of my Bowie.

And now, I was walking down old, familiar Massachusetts Avenue to see the gal of my Bowie. Massachusetts Avenue, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Central Square to Harvard Square. I’ve walked it many times. I lived here once, not quite thirty years ago but in 1998. I was at Harvard in grad school and for my first year I lived in an apartment in Central Square. That is until I sublet it to the sister of a friend of mine. That friend went on to get elected Mayor of Syracuse, and now, years out of office, she started giving interviews for her new memoirs. This just happened.

And Harvard—Donald Trump has decided to turn his Sauron eye on Harvard. Harvard, which, last year obeyed way, way in advance by ousting its first African American female president (who bears a resemblance to Gail) without anything like due process after she was accused of plagiarism but was also being called a “DEI hire” by some of the very same people helping Trump make America atavistic again, which I kinda think had more to do with it. So, on this very day, as an alumnus, I got a mass email from the new president telling us that Trump was coming down hard on Harvard for not doing enough about anti-semitism. But hey, we’ve been good on that front (ya know, since we got rid of Gay—we won’t even use the word, we promise). I mean, you can’t say we’re still not being good on anti-semitism, can you?

Yeah, Mr. New Harvard President. I hate to tell you, it ain’t about anti-semitism.

All of this is flashing through my mind when I finally get to Club Passim, which I must have passed a hundred times and never once stepped into or really even realized was there. I didn’t know where the entrance was! But I figured it out. I got there just in time.

And then Gail Ann Dorsey came out and started to play. And who wouldn’t like to hear Gail Ann Dorsey play? It’s true, she’s a bass player. She played the bass for a couple of songs but mostly the acoustic guitar (there was a third stringed-instrument up on stage with her that she never got around to). But why is she known as a bass player? Her voice—actually, I don’t have the language, but did I mention that David Bowie had her sing the Freddie Mercury part on “Under Pressure.” I mean what else could I add? I could listen to her sing the phone book.

Many of Gail’s songs, and the covers she selected to perform, kinda buzz around “can’t we all just get along?” She actually said something almost to that effect (though not exactly), and I think this crowd in Cambridge knew what she was getting at. At one point, while singing Neil Young’s “Days That Used to Be,” she changed the line, “Are you happy with your circumstance, are you driving a new car,” to, “driving a new electric car.” Everyone picked up on it and, if I read the room right, understood it to be a shot at Elon Musk. At another point she was more overt and mentioned the Wisconsin Supreme Court election (and yay! Susan Crawford won). But I can’t help but think that it’s too late for can’t we all get along.

Well, maybe we can all get along this night. Everyone at Club Passim seemed OK with one another. The event became especially communal at the end when Gail closed the show with her one Bowie song of the night, “Space Oddity.” The sing-along. We all sang along. She urged us to sing so David could hear us and pronounced that he was happy. And yes, I teared up. Sorry.

Gail mentioned that she was going to get in her car, which I think she said was also 21 years old, and drive back to upstate New York that very night. I know what town she lives in. It’s a little to the south of where I live, and unless she knows some secret short-cut it’s further away. I was ready to drop and she was driving back. That means there’s more gas in her tank. And that’s a good thing, because I think we’re gonna need some more Gail Ann Dorsey in the months and years to come…