No offense to my Long Island brethren, but my dream had been to see Billy Bragg Friday night at the Bearsville Theater, a red barn of a place upstate in Woodstock. As it was, it was all I could do to get past what I diagnosed as a dead fuel pump that left us stranded on the dismal side of a dangerously rushing Sunrise Highway, before a call to AAA for a tow, a ride from my better half's colleague to downtown Riverhead, and on to the Suffolk Theater last Thursday for the first show of Bragg's American tour.
And what a show. It was easily two full hours — a performer who gives you your money's worth. British folk, electric folk, protest punk, however you slice it, he immediately left no doubt about where he stands ideologically, opening with his ringing cover of Leon Rosselson's "The World Turned Upside Down," about the tragedy of the Diggers, the 17th-century peaceniks who sought nothing more than to live together communally and work the land collectively. "From the men of property . . . the orders came to cut them down."
As the tour had just begun, Bragg said he was still working out what to say from the stage. It didn't take long, as he mentioned he'd watched the Republican National Convention from his hotel room the night before, and then tore into "Help Save the Youth of America," a 38-year-old indictment that has lost none of its urgency: "When the lights go out in the rest of the world / What do our cousins say / They're playing in the sun and having fun, fun, fun / Till Daddy takes the gun away."
It may come as no surprise that a songwriter and activist would be a raconteur. The surprise was the extent and the humor of it. Tales of trying to ascertain the results of a soccer match by reading faces from behind the microphone. Tales of his first New York performance in 1984, with an audience nonplused by "a guy with a Cockney accent shouting at them."
Presumably the city is mostly empty, this sweltering July, and hence the appearance out this way. "The Framptons," as Bragg said he'd first heard it, way back when, maybe a retirement community for aging rockers, before relating how Peter Frampton had lost all his teeth using a talk box for his famous electronic spoken-word effect.
If you haven't been, the refurbished Art Deco Suffolk is a beauty. I'd seen the Smithereens there a few years ago, with Marshall Crenshaw in place of the deceased front man, Pat DiNizio. It was rocking, all right, but almost too loud for the venue. This was better suited — one man, one guitar, occasionally a guy on keys accompanying. Let's hope they book more such acts in the future, in place of, if I may say so, the tribute bands.
In the meantime, music fans, Bragg will be taking August off, as they sensibly tend to do across the pond, but then, fair warning, he hits Webster Hall in the East Village on his return swing, Oct. 18.