Turn the Page - John Statz
September 8th, 2008 - by Eddie
This show fell towards the end of a tour that also featured stops in Chicago, Des Moines, Omaha, Hays, Wichita, Oklahoma City, and Fayetteville, and I must admit right up front: the Amarillo show was the reason for this entire tour. The HPPR Living Room series is one of those shows that you book more than a year in advance on reputation alone. My reason for hitting the road set, I booked some other shows to get me down to Texas and back.
While I had great listening crowds all along the tour, the Living Room Concert takes the cake as the best I’ve ever played for. The deal with the show is that you play to an audience in the HPPR studio and it is recorded to be played later on the radio, with listeners throughout Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, and into Colorado. The really attractive portion of the show is that you play unplugged, COMPLETELY unplugged, not like MTV Unplugged. There is nothing better for acoustic musicians than playing with no microphones, cables, or other amplifiers directly to an intimate audience.
I was a little worried about turnout, seeing as I’ve never played Amarillo and nobody would know who I was at all. However, they had been playing my record on the radio for the last few days and that brought some folks out. When it was time to play and I entered the studio, a small room that holds 60-70 people, it was full! Man, they really like their songwriters down there in Amarillo, they listened, and I mean really listened. They weren’t just sitting there quietly to be polite. Even when I played a few obscure covers by Midwestern folksingers like Jeffrey Foucault and Greg Brown, I was surprised to find that most of the audience had heard of them. In between songs I told stories and described what the songs were about. Songs about World War I, delta floods, Dubya, and of course the occasional love tune. Looking out into the crowd it was great to see the back row straining a bit to listen, and the front row tapping their fingers or toes. Sometimes I’d just close my eyes and sing a song like it really was in my own living room. Two sets and an intermission and it was over, but what a treat.
After the show it was great to talk to some Texans and hear what they thought. I had played a cover of Townes Van Zandt’s “Waitin’ ‘Round to Die” and was honored when it turned out one of the audience members had been a friend of Townes’, and he said that he enjoyed my version of the song. After talking to many supportive listeners, I packed up my gear and loaded up the touring vehicle (a classy 2005 Dodge Caravan). You can bet that I will be back to Amarillo as soon as I can.
-John Statz
High Plains Public Radio Living Room Concert Series
Amarillo, TX
August 1st, 2008
John Statz - Best Girl of ‘16
