Ryan Adams is refusing all photo pass requests on this tour, so Sam Washburn went to illustrate the show instead. More of his work appears below.

​Ryan Adams | Jason Isbell
Peabody Opera House
January 31, 2012

Ryan Adams has had a troubled relationship with himself and with his music, which forms much of the the narrative of his later career. Many of his fans have held similarly ambivalent opinions about his work. It has been difficult to be invested in his many wildly divergent projects, which have been more restless than artistic. Still, many have remained hopeful.

Hopeful of what? The more recent material that Adams produced with the Cardinals, while often lacking depth, was certainly not bad. It was often very good. And the shifts and stutters of his personal life, while keeping us whispering, had little impact on the sounds coming out of our car speakers. We have always been hopeful that at some point we could again experience the intimate clarity and escape provided by the scarred romantic idealism of Adams' early career. His latest album, Ashes and Fire, seemed to indicate that he too wanted to get back to that place. The album is more settled and confident than his later work, while still recalling those early records. And if Ashes was a hint of this intent, his solo performance at the Peabody Opera House last night was an open proclamation.

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Todd Owyoung

Rhett Miller works up a sweat

​Alt-country hero the Old 97's returned to St. Louis last night, playing for a pleased crowd at the Pageant (6161 Delmar Boulevard, 314-726-6161). Todd Owyoung was ready to capture frontman/dreamboat Rhett Miller in all his sweaty throes of honky-tonkin' -- check out some highlights, including a glimpse at opener Cailtin Rose and a certain St. Louis familiar face, below.

View a full slideshow of the Old 97's at the Pageant.

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Michael Dauphin

​The Lemonheads
Old Rock House
January 28, 2012

Between Evan Dando's Lemonheads set at Old Rock House on Saturday and the Ryan Adams show at the Peabody this Tuesday, St. Louis is being paid visits by two of the more mercurial personalities in alternative rock n'roll. Both have let fits of erratic behavior over the past several years -- largely due to self-destructive demons -- get in the way of their genius within. And without taking for granted the beauty of their work, it's hard to walk into either one of their shows without wondering which Dando or Adams you're going to get.

But when the news came that the Lemonheads would play its flagship 1992 album, It's a Shame About Ray, in its entirety, it actually made sense. Perhaps the best way to keep Dando on point is to confine him to playing songs in the exact sequence they were recorded; there's less of an opportunity to meander too far off.

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Jon Gitchoff

​Bob Seger & the Silver Bullet Band
Scottrade Center
December 9, 2011

There's something to be said for reinventions and longevity, but as Bob Seger proved on Friday, getting it right the first time is still the best way to go. At 66, Bob Seger is no longer a young man, but he's going to rock and roll until his roll can't rock anymore. The packed Scottrade Center was evidence that there will be an audience for his radio classics for many years to come.

Bob Seger certainly got it right the first time; his nearly two hour long set featured all the hits, from closer "Katmandu" to "Travelin' Man" and "Against the Wind." At this point, those songs are so well etched in the public consciousness that any lollygagging or improv-ed jams would have stuck out like sore thumbs in a nail salon. In his four decade-long career, Seger has played with several incarnations of His Band, and some of the guys on stage last night have been with him since the beginning, or at the very least since the '80s. And it shows -- the Silver Bullet band was faultless, from the Motor City Horn section on down to the three back up singers. There were three different percussionists, all playing different kits at different times, but Grand Funk Railroad's Don Brewer rendered the other two as mere decoration, further driving home the rhythms under all the brass and bombastic guitar. It was rock and roll as it began -- the jazz and blues influence clearly defined, the sax upfront where it should be, the guitar properly funky in places and rocky in others.

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Roy Kasten

John Prine stands and delivers at the Touhill

​John Prine | Jason Isbell

Touhill Performing Arts Center

December 3, 2011

Why is John Prine so beloved? He's never had a major hit of his own, never really crossed over from the folkie netherworlds, never, as a touring musician, done much more than simply stand with his acoustic guitar and pick and sing. At 65, the former mailman and army vet has all the sex appeal of a graying squirrel hoarding away nuts and seeds in puffy pink cheeks. He has two good musicians backing him but he doesn't need them.

Still, on a dreary winter night at the Touhill Performing Arts Center he earned the love of a near-capacity crowd. Prine played for over two hours, 25 songs in all, and could have gone 25 more.

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Roy Kasten

Tandoori Knights at Off Broadway

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Tandoori Knights | Magic City
Off Broadway
November 25, 2011

It's said in rock & roll there are no rules, but there are always expectations, and sometimes they can kill the music, as they did with the regicide of Elvis Aaron Presley. The King can get away with murder, but he can't get away from himself or his subjects.

An audience with the King, as in King Khan -- he of the Shrines, the Black Jaspers, the Spaceshits, the Almighty Defenders, the BBQ Show and the Tandoori Knights -- is always more than a gig. It's an event, a bacchanal, a big rock & roll whoop. That said, last night at Off Broadway might have been the exception to prove that rule.

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Kiernan Maletsky

​Paul Simon | Punch Brothers
Fabulous Fox Theatre
November 15, 2011

Paul Simon still takes a wide stance when he gets into it. He tosses his hands for emphasis of his words, he converses his lines with an unseen foil. His voice belies his 70 years. Close your eyes and you can hear the man harmonizing platitudes with Art Garfunkel, the man barreling through four decades of solo career, heading from folk craftsman to dark poet to rock pioneer to wise man. He still looks forward in awe.

How he looks back is a bit more complicated. How do you make sense of such an overwhelmingly diverse career? What must it be like to have entire albums of vindicated, ambitious songs built on sounds that were new to most Western ears and a band capable of delivering them in all their polyrhythmic richness and still get your biggest cheer for the collegiate stuff you whispered out with one other white dude and two acoustic guitars?

"Thank you, Simon & Garfunkel fans," he says, after a raucous response to "The Only Boy in New York."

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Photo by Jason Stoff

Plenty more where that came from.

​tUnE-yArDs | Pat Jordache
Off Broadway
November 8, 2011

Attending a show is participating in it. There is no such thing as a bystander at any occasion of live music; every single person, whether on stage or not, affects the proceedings in a very real way.

But rarely does a show actually feel that way as it's happening. People chatter and lose themselves in cell phones and preoccupations, and there develops this illusion that there is no practical difference between the stage and a big living television screen.

The situation is improved at small shows, where the performers know the audience members and everyone is constantly aware that the community comprises every single person in the building. When the band starts to reach a wider and wider range of ears and the crowd swells, that bond gets harder and harder to maintain. It strains at the disparate group, when the faces are unfamiliar and the performers have existed to this point mostly on everyone's computers and .mp3 players. So when several hundred strangers from St. Louis and a band from Connecticut are able to find the alchemy that results in half the crowd milling congenially around on the patio afterward, as it happened last night at Off Broadway, it is a rare and powerful experience.

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Courtesy of the artist

​Ben Folds with the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra
Powell Hall
November 6, 2012

As he sat behind Powell Symphony Hall's grand piano and sang the phrase "Kiss my ass goodbye," the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra echoed his melody with trumpets and Ben Folds smiled the smile of a boy who was getting away with something. Fantasy sequences in film are frequently scored by a lush, orchestral arrangement, and the joke comes in the pairing of something so insignificant with something so dramatic. For Folds, who learned music by playing percussion in orchestras, this is the dream: Playing his own material, both his precious moments slow jams and his trailer trashing piano-as-a-weapon cuts, with the sonic and moral support of an entire orchestra. Some of his songs were tailored perfectly to the high class setting and some were so inappropriate they seemed necessary. As such, Ben Folds' performance last evening was both outstanding and inherently hilarious.

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Roy Kasten

STL still loves you SSLYBY

​ Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin | Elsinore
The Firebird
November 4, 2011

The perfect pop song is out there, forever out there, and Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin may never find it, but on some nights getting to share in the search is more than enough.

At the Firebird on Friday the Springfield, Mo. band celebrated its tenth year of cardigan pop underdoggedness with some sixteen songs or so from its breezy, playful, wistful catalog -- a concert analog to its recently released Tape Club bonanza.

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