Liz Phair Fries the Egg
The last concert I attended of the summer was David Byrne at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center earlier last month. It was a great concert, and like most concerts I attend, it was outside. Since the pandemic, I have generally avoided indoor concerts and have not been to the Egg since the before times. Nonetheless, I felt compelled to see Liz Phair there last week, on September 24. I was glad I went.
But before I get to that, I should explain the Egg. Officially, it is the Empire Center for the Performing Arts, an egg-shaped building that’s part of Albany’s downtown Empire State Plaza, which is an interconnected series of state government buildings. If you don’t know this about me, I am not a professional blogger or David Bowie chronicler—I work in New York State government, and can walk through an underground concourse from my office to the nearby Egg without putting on a coat. I used to do this frequently, as the Egg gets great performers and does lousy advertising for them (I think I bought day-of tickets for Peter Frampton once and Pat Benatar on another occasion because far too few knew they were coming).
So, what is it about Liz Phair that brought me back? Well, she’s an artist I listened to “all the time,” especially in the 90s. Her first three albums were Exile in Guyville (1993), Whip-Smart (1994) and Whitechocolatespaceegg (1998). With the exception of a new song, “Crystal Ball,” and a couple of later songs, almost her entire setlist came from these three albums. I recognized most of the songs and could sing along with the show opener, “Supernova,” if I were so inclined. But I wasn’t, because I wanted to hear Liz Phair sing.
And that, I got to do. The good news is that Liz Phair still sounds like Liz Phair, except that her live band is louder. The Egg is built for acoustics, but not for this show. Her band included three guitars, a bass and drums, all of which together created a loud, fuzzy 90s sound, which had a kind of ecstatic effect but obscured the singer’s vocal articulation. This is too bad, because Phair is an excellent and clever lyricist. Actually, I think it was her lyrics as much as her singing that put her on the map in the 90s, but I’ll get back to that.
Well, I knew a lotta the words anyway, and the strange audio effect was that I was able to hear the sound of her voice fine, just not every individual word coming out of her mouth. I always liked Phair’s voice, which is at once feminine, take-charge and cynical (she admitted to being cynical at the concert so hey, I’m borrowing her word). She has what, to my ears, is a pretty distinctive way of holding on to words—“You-oooo have got my faaaaaavorite face.” I guess that’s what singers do, but she does it with a kind of, oh, I don’t know, detached irony that I associate with my generation. And I could hear that, for sure.
My generation—that’s part of the appeal. Liz Phair is about the same age as I am. The reality is that I kinda lost track of Liz—she’s released four albums since the 90s ended, none of which I ever got around to. I might—if Liz Phair live still sounds like Liz Phair, those albums are probably worthwhile. But yeah, I guess there’s a nostalgia thing that isn’t quite the same with the type of older artists, like Byrne, who I typically go see live. Yes, I listened to Talking Heads in the 90s, and even in the 80s, but some of my favorite Talking Heads songs were originally released before that. I like those songs, and on some level can reflect back across the spans of time that I have been listening to them, but I don’t have the kind of nostalgic reaction of reflecting on where I was when they were first released.
And, frankly, I don’t listen to Liz Phair as much these days as I did when I was younger. Why? I don’t know. I was really into this concert and almost had the feeling of, what have I been doing wasting my time not listening to Liz Phair? Liz and I are also at an age when I, at least, am glad to see that we can still do the thing. David Byrne is 74, and of course I think, how can he be so energetic and sound so great at 74? But I also can’t relate to that yet. As I approach retirement and am thinking about what comes next, Liz Phair has more to say to me than David Byrne. Seeing a good-looking chick sing loudly, mostly about sex, is very reassuring.
Sex, I think, is part of what drew attention to Phair in the first place. Exile in Guyville has a lot of swears on it, which I specifically remember was a thing in 1993. Then, as now (I think), there were a lot of sexy, young female artists, but they were usually more suggestive than Liz Phair, who was, and is, much more explicit. This is not to say that her songs are prurient. I got the sense, even then, that even her sexy photoshoots had more than a hint of irony about them. Her use of language was often ironic, too, but also put her in the driver’s seat.
A good example of this, maybe the best, is from her 1998 song, “Johnny Feelgood.” And ok—this is a Bowie blog and here’s the tangential Bowie connection: “Johnny Feelgood” is about, or at least sounds like it’s about, an abusive relationship that the abused narrator actually likes. So, what’s the Bowie connection? Bowie’s 1979 song, “Repetition,” also includes an abusive “Johnny,” who is unambiguously a villain. The unnamed object of Johnny’s abuse in Bowie’s song is unquestionably a victim. Yet Liz’s Johnny makes her narrator “feel strangely good about [her]self.” Here is a song where a boundary is either broken in the sense that Liz is saying something she’s not supposed to say, or in that she’s allowing for this character to have agency even within a violent relationship rather than simply be a passive vessel. Or, in that the narrator seems to actually be addicted to Johnny (“it kinda has become an obsession to me”), she’s answering the question of how an abuse victim can stay in an abusive relationship. The song’s answer is more complicated than that she’s too scared to leave. In any case, Bowie, the master of double meanings and ambiguities, does absolutely none of that in his song, which is 100% of what Liz Phair does in hers. This is daring and shows how she can be sexually provocative without being prurient.
The show was pretty stripped down. The band was on stage with a minimalistic set. They performed their songs and left, closing out the Flannel and Fury tour (there was plenty of fury, but no actual flannel). The fuzzy quality of the sound had the benefit of making the experience seem more live (which sounds silly because, of course, it was live), but also the negative of, as I mentioned, not being able to hear all the words. My true main complaint was that the set was pretty short and there was no encore. I could have done with some more Liz Phair. But that left me wanting more, and if she tours again, I’m going to make a point of tracking her down.
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Frankie Cosmos, a newer band fronted by Greta Kline, opened for Liz Phair and joined her on stage for a few songs. I was not familiar with Frankie Cosmos but enjoyed the band’s music, which also had a 90s feel. I thought of it as a neo-grunge band, but I know that’s not the right terminology. Kline, who happens to be the daughter of actors Kevin Kline and Phoebe Cates, was born the year after Exile in Guyville was released. Nonetheless, Frankie Cosmos did a good job of setting the stage and I look forward to hearing more from them.
Setlist
Supernova
6’1”
Help Me Mary
Go West
Johnny Feelgood
Never Said
Glory
(Featuring Frankie Cosmos)
Flower
(Featuring Frankie Cosmos)
Stratford-on-Guy
Extraordinary
Polyester Bride
Crystal Ball
Mesmerizing
Fuck and Run
Divorce Song
Why Can’t I?