Alynda Lee Segarra has so much backstory to her it is hard to know where to begin: one moment she is busking in New Orleans, the next she is running away from home, there she is taking the A Train to ABC Rio, here she is in Germany stuck in a traffic jam, now she is 12 years old at Central Park’s Summerstage for a Sheryl Crow concert: queer, gay friendly, Americana, murder song, writer of wrongs, it is 2014, her band Hurry For The Riff Raff have just broken mainstream (no, not pop), and she is dedicating “End Of The Line” to songwriters everywhere.
You can’t love every band you hear and you certainly can’t hear every band you’d love, Hurray For The Riff Raff’s SIXTH release, but first I was aware of, February’s Small Town Hero didn’t click with me and I wouldn’t have been at Summerstage if Dr, John (a no show at the last minute) wasn’t headlining. But I learnt my lesson and watching Alynda direct her band and the audience with an easy going intensity through 70 minutes of roots Americana, the price of trying to listen to everything became clear: I missed this one.
In a summer skirt over knickerbockers and with fiddler Yosi Pearlstein by her side, the first thing I heard as I arrived a little late was Alynda yodeling to the terrific “Look At Mama” and straight away, and I am sure I’m not alone here, I thought, wow, this is something. And I’ll add a thought: I didn’t know the song and the more I enjoyed the band the less of the material I knew, till by the end of the afternoon set I only recognized two songs and one was a Lucinda Williams cover.
But the problem with not knowing a bands material is it is difficult to hear what they are doing conceptually, the set felt like a self-portrait, maybe because Alynda was in New York (her home town) with her other hometown (New Orleans), a trip if you will, but also a winding road, but that’s a guess. By the third (or fourth?) song she is wailing on the absolutely gorgeous “Here It Comes”, “If the water rises higher I think I might just have to swim and nd if the river grows wider I think I might just throw myself in” and the line between the personal and the political is blurred to the place of obfuscation.
This is songwriting with the highest quality and it never waivers and the band, the times where it jams, jams very well, but the tightness here only allows for an occasional letting go: an odd place for a woman who cut her teeth on the LES punk rock scene to find herself. The otherness, check out the band name, is the place where Lynda places her bets, it is her commerce, it is the scene the band basks in. The problem there is, queerness and transgendered folks are not the anomaly they were, try as Alynda might she can never get close to the outsiderdom of, say, Jayne County. Her otherness is nearing status quo and why not, the more the better, yet her position as a 20 something rebel girl is a little , well, not so much the other side of the telescope.
This becomes clearer with one of her best and also one of her worst songs. The problem that Springsteen had with “The Ghost Of Tom Joad” is the exact same problem as Alynda has on this great, yes, great song: how can you, why would you, protest fiction: does she really think “Delia” or Delilah” does anything to effect violence against women? Yes, her image here, “He shot her down, he put her body in the river, he covered her up but I went to get her” may be the best couplet of the year but it is at work for the wrong song. With all that happens to women, this is what you want to complain about? I dunno.
Which leads me to violence against women. I am not making light of it here, but women live an average of five years longer than men and men do most of the dying in most of the wars. Men are unnecessary in ways women aren’t unnecessary. As long as one man can impregnate 100 women, only one man for every 100 women is actually needed, and nature kills us off. Sure, no one wants men raping and murdering women, an epidemic as long as there has been agriculture, indeed, longer, but compared to the epidemic of men being slaughtered, well, do the math. And any way, if you wanna protest male violence towards women, like Springsteen protesting financial equality, it is bizarre to do it about fiction.
AND IT IS STILL GREAT GREAT GREAT.
So go figure, right?
On stage the band have all the power of a mainlining Americana, with a bassist who slips from stand up to electric bass, a violinist who is always in the center of the action and a leader more comfortable on banjo. They cohere nicely and have a very very cool vibe, and still enough of a song band where on such a tight set it is hard to find a song that wasn’t a highlight so you have to dip deep into the songs to find the places where time stands still. On “Ode To John” (memo to HFTRR: no one is born an orphan), the world did indeed standstill when Alynda sang “Yoko took the moon down from the sky laid it down by her bed and cry” which nearly made me cry, everything this very tender and tough singer can do she did here. This moment is really what it is all about.
So I missed Hurray For The Riff Raff and now I haven’t missed em, and a fat lot of good it did Alynda and friends when they were struggling, but hey, maybe you can listen as well now.
Grade: A-
