folk festival

I couldn't miss this one. A collective performance at the Freight & Salvage of several luminaries - including my adored Christine Lavin - of the American folkie singer-songwriter movement (mostly just one person with an acoustic guitar: occasional substitution of subdued electric or of piano), usually their own compositions, sometimes each other's, sometimes old folk or pop numbers.

Being solo performers, they played mostly separately. Each did a mini-set of 2 or 3 songs, then they all sat together and took turns for another total of 3 songs each. Then they closed with a couple of joint performances, finishing off with "You've really got a hold on me."

In their solos,
Christine Lavin played a male (het) edition of "Good thing [s]he can't read my mind," including a verse on "I am watching chick flicks," which referenced Terms of Endearment and The Way We Were, which would be a bit much even for me. She also sang my (obscure) favorite of her songs, "Fly on a Plane," which utterly stunned the audience: no applause, except from me.
Patty Larkin sang her setting of William Carlos Williams's poem "The Fool's Song."
Cliff Eberhardt sang a tribute song to all the things he's forgotten on tour and left behind in his hotel room. Near the end, it included the line "I left my heart in San Francisco."
John Gorka sang a sardonic toast to being from New Jersey, and also the folk song "Wayfaring Stranger."

Very relaxed evening. The room about 2/3 filled. The performers pointed out that for a couple of years there, they weren't sure if they'd ever get to perform live again, so they were so happy to be here, with an audience - which is pretty much the same thing Richard Thompson said at his concert last month. And we were happy to have them.

It rained that day, for a wonder, but I didn't get wet. Now that BART runs all the way to east San Jose, and the Berkeley station where the Freight is is on that line, I decided to take BART the whole way, and even coming back at 11 PM I still felt toasty enough from the concert that it wasn't too tedious.