“Doin’ it up San Antonio style” — the motto on Alejandro Escovedo’s T-shirt announces his plain jeans-and-boots getup for this rather dressy cocktail-and-finger-foods show in the second-floor salon of the Nature Museum, overlooking Lincoln Park’s swank marinas and jogging paths. With a capo sticking out of his back pocket and a gaunt profile, he looks more like a carpenter than a rocker, which fits the fine craftsmanship of his compositions and storytelling.


Before the concert, he’s mobbed by a few gushing, displaced Texans who wax nostalgic about South Austin, and he mentions a new house out yonder that he has hardly seen for all the touring since the April release of A Man Under The Influence (Bloodshot), his first album of original tunes since the late ’90s.
Before stepping onto the small mobile stage, he answers a few questions about the Chicago popularity of a new country/folk sound that has kept him coming back since his first show here in 1980 at Fitzgerald’s. “I don’t believe in this ‘insurgent’ label,” he says with exasperation. “They call it ‘new country,’ but it ain’t nothing new. Labels are labels — the idea that ‘underground’ means that you don’t sell records is not what I’m about. Right now, I could have the best record I’ve made in my entire life but not sell because it’s ‘underground.’ I make records because I want to sell them.”
If he seems a bit grizzled offstage, he’s nothing but appreciative on. Over the roar of conversational echoes and the clink of free liquor samples, Escovedo kicks off the show with material from his latest album, which he has described as his most melodic and romantic. “I like this gig,” he says between tunes, despite the poor acoustics, technical flubs, and progressively drunken ambient, ” because it reminds me of some kind of high school sock hop,” as he launches into a fitting, howling refrain from 1999’s Bourbonitis Blues: “Everybody says they love me but I don’t know why.” With a brand-new band in tow that retains the time-bendingly eerie pedal steel guitar but does away with the textured strings from his prior pared-down “orchestra,” Escovedo has indeed chosen a less brokenhearted and more linear sound for such new tunes as “Rhapsody” and “Castanets.”
The show masterfully moves between raucous, distorted jam sessions and the confessional cries of older tunes like “Five Hearts Breaking” and “Pissed Off 2AM.” Claiming that this might be the last time he comes through town — “if we come back at all … I’m serious” — Escovedo wears the crowd out with a final medley mixing new songs and influential standards from Iggy Pop and the Velvet Underground. An encore features his most powerfully plaintive acoustic effort, “Last To Know,” and even though he has worked this gig nicely, he wants to play more, despite a pressing WXRT studio appearance. If this is the last, it certainly isn’t the least Chicago has gotten from Escovedo.
9 August 2001, Illinois Entertainer

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