Grace Potter and her band, the Nocturnals, have just concluded, “Paris (Ooh La La),” the third to last song in their hour-long, mid-afternoon set at one of the two main stages at the 20th Anniversary Lollapalooza Festival. As the crowd regains its composure after being pushed to the edge of frenzy, the young man next to me turns, shakes his head, and says, “I feel like I’m witnessing the reincarnation of Janis Joplin.”
“Yeah,” I reply, “except her voice is even better and her band is way tighter.”
I could had added that the songs, on average, are better, too, and that I pity the band that follows Grace Potter. Tina Turner is a better comparison.
Indeed, as I sat, mesmerized, through Potter’s eleven song set, I was reminded of Turner’s famous introduction to her cover of CCR’s “Proud Mary” – “This one starts out nice and easy, but we never do anything nice and easy.” Neither do Potter and the Nocturnals. With Potter on Hammond B3 and guitar, Scott Tournet and Benny Yurco on guitars, Matt Burr pounding the drums, and the amazing Catherine Popper on bass (previously with Ryan Adams & the Cardinals), the group opened their set with the mid-tempo “Ah Mary.” Within a few bars, the sorceress emerged from behind the organ and the sanctification began. Prowling the stage barefoot, sometimes with toes over the front edge, perilously perched six feet off the ground, twirling, dancing, shaking and shouting, we already know that we are in for something special.
Potter is a force, but a measured one. She’s got a set of pipes that let her go from whisper to purr to growl to banshee wail in the course of a few bars. But, she’s careful not to overdo the vocal gymnastics. Again, Tina Turner comes to mind. Potter teases the audience, building, resolving, and building again to a great crescendo that the audience hopes will never end. When it does, the audience begs for more.
Potter has said of the songs on her most recent CD, Grace Potter and the Nocturnals, “You have to either want to dance to it or cry to it,” and that phrase proves an accurate description of her entire set. I’ve never witness such emotion from both performer and audience. At mid-day, yet! As Potter concludes “Paris(Ooh La La)” and the young man intones Janis Joplin to me, she straps on a Gibson Flying V, puts a brass slide on her left hand pinkie, and launches into “Nothing But The Water” with some of the meanest slide guitar this side of Sonny Landreth. She then seamlessly segues into “Medicine” to close her set. Unbelievably, she’s saved the best for last, distilling everything from the past hour – sultry smoothness, screaming and moaning, and a manic dance – into the set closer. The crowd is roaring as she chants the song’s refrain, “She got the medicine that everybody wants.” At song’s end, band members put down their instruments and all five musicians pick up sticks and play Matt Burr’s drum set. When the last shrieks and moans fade, the audience seems more spent than Potter.
Yeah, Potter’s got the medicine that everybody wants.
Photos by Grace Thomas
