SWMBO and I went to see Al Stewart and Dave Nachmanoff live last Friday.
One always hears the phrase “magical evening”, but for us, it was. I am somewhat of a guitarist and Al Stewart is one of the people who helped form my musical style. Dave Nachmanoff is a guitar god, there is no other word for him.
Al might not look quite like the guy on the cover of the Time Passages album any more, but oh, does he ever still have the chops! The thing that topped it off for us that night was when Al, kinda jokingly, asked for requests. SWMBO’s favorite Al Stewart song is Old Admirals and he heard her ask for it. After everyone finished yelling out titles, he turned toward her and said, “I heard this lady first and she said please.” He played it, she cried, and when he finished, he turned to her and bowed.
And then afterwards, we got to meet and talk with them. And it turns out that Dave knew SWMBO’s sister from college days! So I called her on the cell phone and got them together and that made Dave’s night, as well as Sis’s.
A wonderful evening spent with two incredibly talented and genuinely nice guys. If you get a chance to go see them live, do so. You will love it.
I don’t know much about Al Stewart, but I do know that (besides The Year of the Cat) he made a song based on KVJ’s Sirens of Titan, even including the tag “I was a victim of a series of accidents, as are we all”. Gasp!
So a big bump for that, and props for giving KVJ props!
Al Stewart always seemed like an “intellectual” songwriter to me. I remember listening to “Murmansk Run/Ellis Island” in school…who else in popular music is writing songs about Murmansk convoys? What a cool guy.
Far fucking out! I’ve been an Al Stewart fan since before Cat. My favorite stuff is off of 24 Carrots, and I’d sell my mother to the Bedouins for a digital copy of his backing band’s failed solo album Shot In the Dark.
I tried to get my friends to go to see Al Stewart some 15 years ago. He was playing this little venue, like 300 seats, and I really wanted to go. Friends showed no interest, and I didn’t want to go alone. Sigh.
Sounds like you had a fantastic evening. Glad you enjoyed. I have a few of his songs on my big everyday random-play playlist. Think I’ll cue up some now in honor of this thread.
Anybody who can make the lines “…Smolensk and Vyazma soon fell. By autumn we stood with our backs to the town of Orel.” work in a song deserves some sort of recognition.
Ooh, loved his stuff back in the 70’s and 80’s. Gotta go see what’s on my iPod by him. Surely I must have Roads to Moscow and Nostradamus, along with his ballad of Warren G. Harding!
Don’t know much about him other than his two big hits but I must say… Year Of The Cat is one of those songs that flashes me back to a great time in my life. When that song was really popular I was bangin’ a hot chick, going to great parties, smoking great weed and not a trace of remorse about anything in my life!
“On a morning from a Bogart movie,
in a country where they turned back time,
you go strolling through the crowd like
Peter Lorre contemplating a crime.”
He has a poster for sale, which I got and had him autograph.
Someone looked at his body of work to date and figured out that, of his 400+ songs, 168 of them were historically based. The poster is Al and Dave and their guitars, surrounded by images of all 168 folks. http://www.alstewart.com/news.html Scroll about 2/3 of the way down the page.
I used to work in a warehouse that shipped out his albums (GRT/Janus releases). Of course everyone took home a copy of Year of The Cat. My fave from that album is On The Border.
The original pressings of Modern Times and Past, Present and Future had photos of Dr. Strange on the cover, and I bought them for that reason alone back in the 70s as a teenager, though I thought the song “Modern Times” was an incredible downer (I like it more now) and while I played the side of PP&F with “Nostradamus,” “Terminal Eyes” and “Roads to Moscow” over a hundred times, I don’t think I played the other side more than twice.
I saw him at the Weely* Festival back in 1971. It was a three day, open air festival, and, as generally happened with festivals in those days, before very long they got way, way behind with the running order. The setup for most of the rock bands was taking far too long. (The worst culprit, IIRC, was King Crimson, who had what was, for the time, a very elaborate light show that took ages to erect. By the time they actually played it was midnight, and much of the audience was asleep. Mott the Hoople got to play at dawn, which they were probably upset about, but which actually worked rather well.)
At any rate, someone must have eventually decided that most people were there for the hard rock, and it was decreed that all the acoustic, more folky acts on the bill (of which there were quite a few) would only get to do one song each, while the rock bands were futzing around setting up for their full sets. Needless to say, those of us who were not there only for the hard rock, thought this sucked.
Eventually Al Stewart got his turn. He came on and said ** “Well I hadn’t planned on this. I don’t usually do this song in concert, but…” And he played Love Chronicles. It is just one song, but it is about 20 minutes long, probably almost as long as his scheduled set would have been anyway.
I am quite impressed that he actually knew it well enough to play it more or less impromptu like that.
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*Yes, that is how you spell it.
**Not verbatim, but in the spirit of what he really said.
I saw him once on christmas eve a long, long time ago. He must have had a bad day or something, because he was pretty much the opposite of every others posters description.
