Lucinda Williams

Throughout her career, the live experience that Lucinda Williams has offered to her fans can be fairly described as hit or miss. When she’s “on,” as she has been the past few years, chances are that you’ll start following her on the road from venue to venue, swearing to yourself that each show was better than the one before. When she’s “off,” she can either be seen as a moody or disinterested performer, lacking any sort of stage presence and making you wonder why you didn’t just stay home and blast Car Wheels On a Gravel Road until you started believing that you were Lu’s drunken angel.

So if you’re one of those who have sworn to never see Miss Williams live and person again, Live @ The Fillmore West might be for you. Yes, it is a live album. And yes, she was most certainly “on” for these three nights at The Fillmore when the tapes were rolling.

On this album, Williams has scraped together a ball of mud from Lake Charles and thrown it in our curious faces. The sounds on almost every song are raunchy. It is a great recorded example of what type of show Williams has been putting on for the last three or so years: the band, led by lead guitarist Doug Pettibone, is confident and tight; Williams vocals are straight from the gut; the songs, “Change the Locks” being a great example, are raw and inspired, fresh as the Louisiana-born singer-songwriter’s lyrics that hold together all of her albums.

I’m not promising that the next time Williams rolls her bus into your town that you’re going to get a duplicate version of “Joy,” which you can hear on Fillmore. But the potential for such a performance—for such a night of real music—has never been greater. And for a talent like Lucinda Williams, that should be good enough to convince you to be first in line.