Tori Amos

From: Richard Handal 
Subject: Amazing night in Portland reviewed (fwd)
To: [email protected] (Laura)
Date: Fri, 4 Apr 1997 14:34:00 -0500 (EST)

>Subject: Amazing night in Portland reviewed
>To: [email protected] (Really Deep Thoughts)
>Date: Sun, 28 Jul 1996 02:25:47 -0400 (EDT)

This is quite long, but I don't post too often, and it's all Tori content.
So there. 

Although I've seen ten more shows since my last review, (Pittsburgh, May
30), I haven't had much time to be able to write about them, as being on
the road has itself proven to be time consuming. I doubt most people here
want to see me do full reviews of ten more shows anyway, so I'll just do
this one for the incredible night in Portland, Oregon. Maybe I'll post
some general thoughts another time. 

These were my shows 17 and 18 of this tour, and Tori rose above technical
problems to pull out two first class shows an hour apart from one another. 
For me, these shows were only possible in Portland, as the girl energy
there was the most intense and self-assured of any of the ten cities in
which I've seen shows. 

There was plenty of girl power in San Jose, but it was a completely
different kind of thing. It was more of a "we got plenty of lip gloss and
blue toenails and are hanging out with our friends" kind of energy,
whereas in Portland it was more of a "we're pretty much in control of
reality here, and you're welcome to be here with us for a while, just as
long as you don't mind us sitting in one another's laps and drinking
coffee while we talk." Much more the quieter expressions of confidence
that come with having *real* power. I loved it a whole lot! I like nothing
more than to be where there is a culture of mutual support for women where
they feel comfortable enough to simply be themselves, and I know Tori had
to pick up on this, and that it helped her to come up with two quality
shows as she did. As the T-shirt says, "girls kick ass."  :-)

At the third show in Seattle, in between songs, some guy in the audience
yelled out "More pirate!" Tori tried to get the guy to explain what he
meant, and he would only elaborate by saying "More pirate, less pen!" This
did nothing but frustrate her, and she told him, "Listen, *you* do seven
fucking shows a week, and *you* can do `more pirate less pen'!"

But the phrase obviously stuck in her head, as she turned it into a vocal
vamp during Horses here at the first show in Portland. I expect those not
at the Seattle show wondered what she was on about. If they managed to
understand the words, anyway. 

I noticed right away that the lighting was different from the other shows,
and after Space Dog, Tori explained that there were problems. She told us
that there were usually "movies" on a projection screen as part of her
show, and that it was kind of like doing mushrooms. She said, "I don't
care who's here, I love mushrooms. People have been doing them for
thousands of years, and for anyone who has a hair up their butt about it
that's just too bad. And for any police who may be in the house: you won't
find shit. That's the good thing about being very good friends with the
faeries--you don't get caught." That isn't all exact quoting, but is
pretty close. 

As it turned out, she provided more than enough mushrooms for everyone
there that night. In fact, after the first show I told house sound
engineer Mark Hawley that if this is what we got when the movies were
broken, that he should tell Tori from me to THROW THE MOVIES AWAY! The
show was on par with the best shows in Oakland, Seattle, Pittsburgh, and
D.C. 

Anyhow, Tori then went on to introduce Caton. She said that she loved
Caton, and that Caton cried at anything. That on eating guacamole, he
would sob "This is such *great* guacamole." He just sits there and blushes
when she says such things. I expect he's well used to it by now.  :-)  

He really is a sweetheart. And he adds a lot to the shows. I'm glad he's
with her on this tour. He can follow her rhythm and style changes on the
fly in ways no full band ever could, while always enriching the sound
tremendously when he plays, which is for about 40% of the show. I can't
say enough good about him, and can say nothing bad. Gotta love the guy. 

Some nights she's been doing this mini pastiche of Marianne which includes
lyric snippets as an intro to Doughnut Song, and she did a micro one for
this first Portland show, but without vocalizing. Only with the piano.
This kind of thing makes it quite difficult to even do proper set lists,
as since she's been tossing in references from multiple songs, some of the
true flavor of the set list is going to be lost. 

I mean, she's been tossing a verse of Day By Day from the early 1970s
musical Godspell into the middle of Little Amsterdam, (first that I saw in
Oakland, where there were posters for a local theater production of it),
and quoting from the score of The Wizard of Oz--the incidental music
written by Hungarian composer Zoltan Kodaly, which was used when the
witch's guards were marching into the castle--as an introduction to
Crucify, as she did for the second show in Seattle. 

She's been doing much more of this kind of thing as the tour's been
progressing, which says to me that she's still finding ways to make this
tour interesting for herself and have it remain a learning process. The
songs truly are living organisms, and I can certainly see why she refers
to them as girls.  Beautiful girls, they are. 

For the first encore set she did Landslide, which she said was "...for
someone who was supposed to be here tonight, but didn't quite make it." 
Rather cryptic, but later on in the second show it seemed to be that she
was referring to something a woman in attendance had told her in the
afternoon. But I didn't hear what she was saying about that. 

After Landslide, she then went right into Marianne. It was the most
intense, emotion-filled version I'd heard her do on the tour. I was on the
floor about halfway back, and there was a fellow a couple or so rows
behind me who was crying quite loudly, and I was soon a total mass of
tears myself. I doubt I'd ever cried that much before in public. It was
devastating. She kept pounding and pounding the keys and singing louder
and louder on some passages, and it still reverberates in my head and in
my heart. 

"It's only a concert." That's what a friend of mine told me she said to
herself when she first cried at a Tori concert. Yeah--right. 

When she and Caton came back for the second encore, they couldn't do the
song they'd intended, as Caton's pedal was busted, so instead of (I was
fully expecting it to be) Voodoo, we had to make do with Honey. Awww!  ;-)

The other comment I want to make about this first Portland show is that
the version of Silent All These Years was the richest, most heartfelt I'd
ever experienced. Wow. 

It was during the hour between shows that I came to be awash in the girl
power energy in the city, as many people were hanging out in the Starbucks
down the street, which was still somewhat in recovery mode on the heels of
a visit from Tori earlier that afternoon. I had to find out why this
energy was flourishing there in Portland, and I asked one person after
another about it, but they all pleaded ignorance due to geography. "We
live an hour from here. We don't know." 

It wasn't until later back in Seattle when John Stewart mentioned that the
Riot Grrrl movement had been born at Evergreen College just north of there
in Olympia. I still wonder what spawned *that*, but that at least served
as a partial explanation. It really was quite extraordinary. 

One dear, sweet 16-year-old girl from the nearby Portland suburbs answered
me, to my question wondering why there was so much amazing girl power
energy in Portland: "Because it's great." Would that that worked
everywhere *else*. 

The second show was as much a continuation of the first as if it were one
concert as any I'd experienced on this tour. I know some of us had made it
clear to Tori that we were going to many shows, (in Seattle I told her she
was like my new Grateful Dead, which she thought was hilarious), and she
seems to be more aware of all the people going to multiple shows in a
given area, and has responded by providing an increasingly wide variety of
repertoire. I love that woman.  :-)

The second show this night had Tori doing something else she's been doing
some nights on this tour--toying with specialized introductions to
Crucify. This time she did a vocal vamp "Come on, girls" which I didn't
specifically recognize as being a quote from another source, but in
retrospect, (and considering the excerpt of Madonna's Like a Virgin she
quoted as one portion of a musical introduction to Crucify for the middle
show in Oakland), it occurs to me that she may have had in mind Madonna's
song Express Yourself, which has the phrase "Come on, girls" as its
opening vocal. This is exactly the kind of thing that makes for endless
fascination with Tori. I am continually astonished. 

She also did a specialized musical introduction for Pretty Good Year, and
I didn't recognize it either, and therefore can't be certain that it
wasn't quoted from another source, rather than having been extemporized.
My notes tell me it had a vocal refrain of "Will I still love you?" in it. 

Caton managed to have his pedal back for this second show, and we were
finally treated to Voodoo. It's always a high point of the show when
performed, as it allows for the greatest musical dialogue between the two
of them, and it's grown to be a rich contrapuntal experience--much
different than earlier on in the tour when it was more of a guitar solo. 

Following that, Tori said "I really want to play this next song, but I
don't play it very often, so if I fuck up, I'll start it over again." She
didn't fuck up, and we were listening with our jaws on the floor as she
performed Mary. It was my first time ever, and on the way out west in the
car the first day, while in Ohio, I'd drawn up an ultimate wish list of
songs I wanted to hear her do, and this was the final of the six there was
any chance at all of her doing, so I was able to cross it off the list.
I'd previously been able to cross off Tiny Dancer on Seattle. I had no
idea she was ever playing that these days, I only knew she used to play it
in the clubs in D.C. back in the early 1980s, but I've since gone over the
set lists and see that she played it twice so far on this tour. That was a
real treat, too. Maleen's theory about using telepathy to place song
requests has always worked great for me in the past, and continued to work
great in this show. 

After Mary, Tori told this story she's been telling about being back home
with her folks at Christmastime in one recent year, and her dad imploring
her to join in singing hymns with the choir; a story which she'd recounted
for the second Oakland show, and which leads into Muhammad My Friend. 

Then things started to get *really* weird. She never finished Precious
Things, but segued into a variation of Doughnut Song as a bridge, singing
the lyric "devoted satellite" and other brief lyric excerpts from it, and
then went into a complete version of the Beatles song She's Leaving Home. 
Again, I expect the jaws of many others there were once again on the
floor, as was mine. 

She was really into working at this point, and going with the flow that
was underway, but wanted to point out that she *was* working hard this
special night, (there must be some weird laws in Portland that didn't
allow her to have the typical 3 1/2 hours between start times for a
twofer, and which forced her to have but a single hour to rest between
shows), and she said she was "...going to go back to the bus after the
show and watch an Alfred Hitchcock movie, and any boys who `want some'
will have to wait till tomorrow." I expect there was *one* boy in the hall
that night who turned bright red when she said that. 

And as she turned to the harpsichord for the song she was to perform
before Me and a Gun, (either Talula or Caught a Lite Sneeze), a woman from
the audience yelled a request for Putting the Damage On, and she yanked
off the monitor headset she wears when she plays the harpsichord and said
that she was going to show how easy to get along with she could be, and
turned back to the piano and filled the request. After that, she and Caton
played Tear In Your Hand, and went offstage. 

For the first time, she'd skipped Me and a Gun. As she's sworn to herself
that if she ever performs two or more songs live, that one of them will be
MaaG, I'm sure she was just taken up in the uniqueness of the night's
entire proceedings, and figured it was close enough to being one show
rather than two anyway, and I'll be quite shocked if she skips MaaG for
any of the other shows on the tour. 

You can check the set list for the surprising final four encore songs, but
the last thing I had to mention about this show was the Tubular Bells
motif she tossed into Father Lucifer, as she'd also been doing recently in
other shows. 

The experience of this night took my breath away. It was the best of all
possible ways for my western foray to have drawn to a close. I flew from
Seattle back to Maryland two nights later. I have yet to turn on the
stereo in the car since this night, as I can easily conjure up the sounds
still bouncing about inside my head from this journey. And it's quite
lovely. 

I can barely wait for the Chattanooga show on August 4.  :-)

Tori Amos Forever. 

Set lists below. 

Richard Handal


TORI AMOS AT THE SCHNITZER CONCERT HALL
PORTLAND, OREGON 7/21/96 6:30 P.M. SHOW
=======================================

Tori hit the stage at 6:47, left at 8:28
Steve Caton on Guitar indicated by +

Beauty Queen/Horses
Flying Dutchman
Space Dog +
Caught a Lite Sneeze + (harpsichord)
Cornflake Girl +
Doughnut Song +
Leather
Silent All These Years
Precious Things
Smells Like Teen Spirit (Nirvana)
Graveyard
Past the Mission +
Talula + (with much backing tape track) (harpsichord)
Me and a Gun
************
Landslide (Stevie Nicks)
Marianne
************
Honey +
Mr. Zebra
Purple Rain + (harmonium organ)


TORI AMOS AT THE SCHNITZER CONCERT HALL
PORTLAND, OREGON 7/21/96 9:30 P.M. SHOW
=======================================

Tori hit the stage at 9:41, left at 11:26
Steve Caton on Guitar indicated by +

Beauty Queen/Horses
Crucify
Blood Roses (harpsichord)
Little Amsterdam +
Butterfly +
Pretty Good Year +
In the Springtime of His Voodoo +
Muhammad My Friend
Precious Things (unfinished) -->
Doughnut Song-inspired bridge -->
She's Leaving Home (Beatles)
Putting the Damage On
Tear in Your Hand +
************
Famous Blue Raincoat
Black Swan
************
Father Lucifer (with Tubular Bells motif) +
Bells for Her (harpsichord)