Oh, wow, Mavis Staples. You’re 71 years old, and this could be one of your greatest years. You’ve had your share of great ones, but we’re all subject to an ineffable fluctuation in energy and passion as time goes by. Why yours should be at their highest tide this year is some kind of divine mystery, but since they are, you expend every last bit of them to put on the greatest rock ‘n’ gospel live show in the world.
You brought that show to the Cedar last weekend (because you can ride on over from Chicago anytime you want), and said you wanted to lift us up enough to last us for six months. I think you might have done it. I stood in the center of the room, toward the back of the crowd, because this is where I imagine myself standing when I listen to James Brown at the Apollo or Sam Cooke at the Harlem Square Club. I know I’ll never get closer than this to those nights in ’62 and ’63.
You played a long, generous set that focused mainly on the new You Are Not Alone (thank you for the reassuring title, Mavis, and back at you!), produced by “Jeff Tweedy from the Wilco band.” Tweedy has written some very fine songs for you, none more fine than “You Are Not Alone,” which, with its breathtaking refrain (“Open up this is a raid, I wanna get it through to you”), announces he clearly intended to write something that might become a cornerstone in an already overstuffed songbook. Elsewhere, “Only The Lord Knows” is more playful but no less ambitious:
I pick up the paper, I put down the paper
Turn on the TV, I get confused
People on this side say the people on that side
They lyin’, say they lyin’, everybody’s confused
You sing these lines as a woman affronted by a world that is much less sane than you are. After naming all these frustrations of life in the modern world, you arrive at the point where you should tell us what the solution is, but instead you provide a sort of punchline: “Only the Lord knows, and he ain’t you.” You speak often of the Lord’s truth, but with all due respect to your beliefs, I think that His truth is merely a synonym for your own, and that you know this. When confronted with confounding questions, you told us, “You can ask the lord.” Pause. “Or you can ask me.” I’ll ask you, because if the Lord ain’t us He’ll have to be you, until we find some kind of truth in ourselves.
But for all your wisdom and self-assurance and energies at high tide, you’re not young anymore, and all the passion in the world can’t compensate for bodily fatigue (I sighed to hear you sing about being on your way to heaven). You took a breather in the middle of the set, and if we didn’t know it before, this is when it became apparent what a remarkable band you have backing you up. Guitarist Rick Holmstrom (a regular Link Wray!), bassist Jeff Turmes, and drummer Stephen Hodges played a pair of instrumentals, transforming from a great house band to a great rock ‘n’ roll band (a trio this good should have a name of its own, though I’m sure they’re proud to take yours), Holmstrom nearly becoming the star of the show. But the star was still you. You stayed on the stage, sitting and drinking from a water bottle, and you were the one to watch, because as much joy as we felt watching the band smoke, yours was greater, and it showed.
There were triumphant songs and there were sad songs, and if you sound amazing at age 71 on the former, nothing can be more astonishing than when you hit the low, low registers (with a mournful chuckle embedded even lower) on the latter, singing about losing Pops and other calamities. The last sound you uttered at the Cedar was a deep, deep croak, barely a whisper. Even Howlin’ Wolf would have to admire how low you went, how much language you packed into a single wordless sound.
