Dressed in his trademark dark suit, Nick Cave kicked off his two-night stand at the Salt Shed Monday with The Bad Seeds looking a bit like Walton Goggins playing Elwood Blues.
He sounded like a mix between Bowie and an apocalyptic Neil Diamond with some Jim Morrison thrown in for good measure. Call it Brother Nick’s Traveling Salvation Show.
I’ve been listening to his book Faith, Hope and Carnage, which is really a philosophical conversation between Cave and Sean O’Hagan. It’s an excellent listen. In it, Cave makes the point that grief, which eviscerates with bludgeoning force, is something all of us must go through. What feels so extraordinary is the most ordinary thing. And when we die, we put those who loved us through it as well. He has twice suffered through the worst grief any adult can endure. It changed him forever, heightened his religious sense and took him creatively in new, deeper directions.
He delivered an incredible concert. You can tell by how he shares the title of each song and projects key lyrics on the screen that he has the soul and sensibility of a poet. The words matter deeply to him. He wants us to pay attention.
When he sings of white vampires in a castle’s ruins or snarls things like “I got a fetus on a leash,” you get a whiff of Tom Waits along with the sulphur and brimstone and the sweeter scents of salvation. Kris Kristofferson, too, whom he references directly in “Frogs”—“Kris Kristofferson walks by kicking a can/In a shirt he hasn’t washed for years”—and alludes to with lyrics like “maybe a long dark night is coming down.”
He alternates between giving off punk rock vibes—spitting on the stage, engaging in call and response “yeah, yeah, yeahs” across multiple songs—and hosting a tent revival. To paraphrase him, these are weeping songs, but we won’t be weeping long.
The highlight for me was the last song before the encore, “White Elephant,” whose vivid, chaotic imagery perfectly sums up the insane and dangerous time we are living through.
Extraordinary show.
“Love asks for nothing/But love costs us everything.”
Truer words…
Photo by Frank Sennett
