Richmond Fontaine—Luminaire, London, 12 October 2007
Here come the superlatives.
If you take hold of country music with your right hand, and in your left you grip punk rock, then you might call yourself Richmond Fontaine. They play country music with fuzzy-noted Telecaster chords, and they play punk rock with pedal steel. Yeah, that’s right. All at once. Of course they’re not the first to do it, and they won’t be the last. But they are, right now, the best. They do pretty and they do dirty and they do pretty dirty pretty damn good too. This is of course the kind of thing that made us all love Uncle Tupelo.
But wait just a minute. Richmond Fontaine are no Uncle Tupelo tribute act, so let’s all just shut up for a minute and listen to this music. And let’s listen to what that guy is singing. It’s Gram Parsons storytelling with a novelist’s eye for detail (now I’m cheating, because Willy Vlautin is a published novelist: http://www.willyvlautin.com/). Richmond Fontaine are a tribute act after all. They’re a tribute act to life, and their songs chart all the worst and best things about it, the beauty and frustration, and that’s what’s great about their music, and that’s what makes their music matter. Richmond Fontaine don’t play to you. They play for you. The music opens up and lets you in. It creates the shared experience in which the stage isn’t a pedestal that raises the performer above the audience, but a contact point between human beings, some of them playing guitars and drums (and pedal steel) and singing, and some of them listening and shouting out songs they want to hear and receiving apologies because their favorite song isn’t going to be played this time but it’s still the best show she’s seen this year anyway. It’s what rock ‘n’ roll does best, and right now Richmond Fontaine are doing the best live rock ‘n’ roll on planet earth. It’s not something I say lightly. They really are that good.