NEW YORK, NY- This isn’t a traditional concert review, though I’m happy to run through the basics.
Old 97’s are one of my favorite bands to see live, and Webster Hall is one of my favorite New York venues for live music.
Alt-country, power-pop, or cowpunk – genre categories are helpful but incomplete descriptors. If you like a bit of self-ironizing pathos delivered through melodic hooks, if witty wordplay is your kind of foreplay, if your Sunday long-run playlist includes both Johnny Cash and The Clash—this band is for you.
Since they formed in 1992, Old 97’s have retained their original lineup—not an easy feat for any group of creatives who’ve logged countless miles together. A night with these scalawags is by turns rowdy and irreverent and sincere and sweet. Rhett Miller, Ken Bethea, Murry Hammond, and Philip Peeples always deliver. And the crowd always knows the right places in “Big Brown Eyes” to sing-shout their
parts.
Lizzie No, a brilliant young songwriter / guitarist / harpist, is joining Old 97’s for part of this tour. Her opening set reminds me of what it means to be clear-eyed and unafraid in a time of deep crisis, and that earnestness and humor can (and should) co-exist. It was a joy to see her return to the stage for a playfully provocative rendition of “Good With God.”
That’s the two-minute concert review. If you’d like to stay for the rest of the ride, I’ll reflect on my past 6 months as filtered through 27 years of listening to and loving this band. There’s heaviness ahead, but I promise the overall vibe is positive.
I. On the Corner of 6th and Where Do I Go
After all the approved treatments stopped working, the doctors in Taiwan put my mom on a clinical trial. In chemo, you try to stay one step ahead as the cancer mutates to resist drug after drug.
8,000 miles away in New York City, I’d be walking down 6th Avenue when the thought would come: One day, sooner than I’d like, I’ll be standing in this spot, knowing my mom is gone.
It was a practical, not pessimistic, frame of mind. I was trying to prepare myself.
From summer 2020 to 2025, I flew to Taipei twice a year, spending as many as seven weeks there at a time. Until the quarantine requirement eased in fall 2022, I spent the first two weeks of each trip in one room, pacing 10K steps daily in tight circles and reporting my temperature when the health department worker called each morning. (A 21st century twist on “calling time & temperature just for some company”?) I worked at night, joining video calls as late as 4am.
Once out of quarantine, I’d accompany my mom to the hospital on tougher days, and to the grocery store and park on good days. I was permanently exhausted and infinitely grateful.
You toss a ball in the air, and there’s a breath of time before it falls to earth again. We fit a lifetime into that one breath.
II. And the Pictures Wrapped In Cellophane
Since my mom passed in August, I haven’t sat still long enough to do any music-related writing. Thoughts are always jostling, elbowing for space in my brain. But stillness invites reflection, and what I reflect on lately is the intolerable vastness of absence.
Gotta start again somewhere.
If you’re reading this, there’s a good chance you know me. And if you know me, there’s a good chance we met at an Old 97’s show.
This was the first band that wove its way into my everyday. I went to high school in the Dallas suburbs, and an older and much cooler friend had “Big Brown Eyes” on a mix CD. She’d turn it up loud and sing along. In that car, I felt like we were heading someplace where I’d belong.
At Tower Records, I bought Fight Songs. In the many years and moves since then, I got rid of nearly all my CDs. I kept that one; I’m sentimental like that.
Albums are portkeys, and Fight Songs takes me back to when gas was 89 cents a gallon, summers were endless, and I would never lose anyone I love.
I dashed into Webster Hall just 10 minutes before Lizzie No was set to take the stage. I showed the security staff my photo pass, entered the photo pit, and knelt to unpack my cameras.
“Well, hello!”
I looked up. My friend Joe was on the other side of the barricade.
I stood to hug him. “Were you wondering how long I’d bumble about before I realized I’d set my bag down in front of you?”
“It didn’t take too long, kid,” he replied, and then introduced me to his wife, Shelly. They’d driven in from Pittsburgh the night before.
During changeover, I ran into more friends. George was wearing a Burger King cardboard crown on which he’d written “No Kings” in bold, black Sharpie. “Damn, why didn’t I think of that?” I said to him. The rally was earlier that day.
Up in the balcony, I pointed my camera at the crowd below. I snapped a few candids of my pal Michelle smiling brightly through the show. During the encore, I sidled up to the railing to get a clear shot. Someone tapped my shoulder and I turned around, nervous I’d jostled them or was blocking their view. It was Marcy, a longtime friend of the band’s. She smiled as she made room for me, and said she was glad to see me there doing my thing.
On my walk home from the show, I sent video clips to a couple of high school friends. Matt lives in Auckland now; Carol, in San Francisco. We aren’t in close touch, so these shows are a nice excuse to reach out.
In the refrain of each familiar Old 97’s song, I’m simultaneously in every car and every room and with every friend with whom I’ve ever sung along to these lyrics. The memories rush in to fill the absences in the here and now. Home is not just in the rearview mirror.
IV. Look At All the Beautiful Things You Found
I moonlight as a music photographer and daylight as an environmental advocate. There’s a through-line to the two gigs: I help paint a picture of a less fractured world. It may sound like a stretch, but I think each job helps me do the other one a bit better.
I really believe storytelling will save us. It could be a narrative, harrowing but hopeful, that puts a face to the wonky, seemingly faraway worries of the climate crisis. It could be a song, played loud through headphones or live in a club, that brings us back to our idealistic younger selves and reminds us that the future has always been waiting for us to shape it.
When you thought none of this was worth it / When you thought everything was broken / Oh you didn’t know yet / Someday you’d watch this big green river flow.
For a long while, my mom disapproved of my concert-going and photo-taking. Even so, I was too excited about Twelfth to not bring a copy back to Taipei. The inside sleeve of that album, which has my photos of Rhett, Murry, Ken, and Philip in the recording studio, now sits on the living room TV console. My mom had my dad wrap it in cellophane to protect it from fingerprint smudges when she showed it off to visitors.
I will never feel like I’ve done enough to repay my parents’ sacrifices. But I’d like to think I’ve made them at least a little bit proud in ways they never expected when they left behind everyone they knew and took their five-year-old daughter across the ocean with the dream of giving her a future with a wide-open horizon.
I was reflecting on all of this Saturday night when Old 97’s walked on stage. It isn’t easy to shoot when your head and heart’s a mess, but I think I managed some keepers.
I’ve never known how to thank the band for their kindness over the years. I did bring Levain cookies to Pier 17 once, and it was so rainy that the cardboard box nearly fell apart before a kind venue staffer took pity on me and brought it inside. (Yes, of course I gave him one of the cookies.)
This essay is, I suppose, a circuitous thank-you note to the guys for allowing me to document them onstage and off. Every time, it’s a dance with meaning and memory. It’s home within the space of a song played live, played loud.
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The Very First Song That the Radio Sang: Old 97’s at Webster Hall
