Review & Photos: Jason Isbell’s Optimism Shines Brightly at the Joy Theater

Long before Jason Isbell brought his Southern gothic anthems to the Joy Theater, New Orleanians of 1947 found post-war optimism in its 11,000-square-feet of art deco architecture when it first opened with a Lucille Ball movie donning the neon marquee. Renovators reopened the Joy in 2011 as a venue for music and culture “dedicated” to “providing world class entertainment” to the Crescent City.

In his two-night tenure, two-time Grammy-winning singer-songwriter Jason Isbell delivered the Joy’s requisite optimism. Isbell served it up on sad songs with assistance from his band, the 400 Unit (named after a psychiatric ward), and the audience sang along.

His characters are as real as those in William Gay’s short stories, and their circumstances just as tragic. But in the tradition of Flannery O’Connor, Isbell offers grace to his characters, singing their stories of acceptance or rejection before a holy trinity of stained glass windows.

Isbell prefaced a crowd favorite, “Codeine,” one written while still off the wagon, by acknowledging south Louisiana’s love for the zydeco accordion. “I know y’all appreciate the accordion. I love the accordion.” That’s when Gary deBorja left his keyboard for center stage where he played blue treble keys and pulled wide the Hohner’s red bellows. The crowd sang along, “One of my friends has taken her in and given her codeine.”

Photo by Alex Johnson.

No doubt six years with the Drive-By Truckers was formative training in storytelling, songwriting, and the “duality of the southern thing.” A younger, wild-haired, Isbell says in the 2009 documentary, The Secret to a Happy Ending, that he loves how people cheer for them to “play that song about the Depression, or the one about ruining my life!”

For example, one of Isbell’s saddest songs, “Elephant [in the room],” is about a woman dying of cancer who, with “Seagram’s in a coffee cup” and despite her “Sharecropper eyes, and the hair almost gone,” she tries not to let the past nor future affect how she lives for today. After the narrator has “buried her a thousand times,” as if on cue, the Joy’s audience erupted with cheering applause as Isbell sang, “There’s one thing that’s real clear to me: No one dies with dignity.” As the cheer faded, a man at the front raised a cocktail in amen and screamed, “Hell yeah.”

Isbell switched guitars about every other song, and he and Sadler Vaden ripped solos, their heads following the rhythm down to their hands at the base of their fretboards. Isbell played slide on a beautiful Gibson ES-335 during “Speed Trap Town,” and dueled with Vaden’s Gibson Les Paul, trading jams in a long and loud version of “Never Gonna Change.” With soul, he rang home “Cover Me Up” and couples held on tightly, swaying and singing.

He played “Decoration Day” both nights, written in the early days on the road with the Drive-By Truckers. As the stage lights burned red and his slide guitar whined, he sang about the Lawsons’ blood feud, a revenge cycle as fatal and American as the Hatfields and McCoys or Mark Twain’s Shepardsons and Grangerfords in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

But the Joy’s Isbell, and the Isbell who spoke with us last week, is a wiser and leaner version of himself with combed hair. Famously sober, he’s traded the raucous Jack Daniels-slugging rock-and-roll stage presence of his earlier career for that of a professional musician, polished and shining, smiling as he performs atop the crest of his career to date. He’s riding a swell of happiness inspired by wife and baby, and it’s contagious. He told us in the interview that his one-year-old daughter “usually helps me warm up before the shows.”

Whatever his current routine, we can only hope he keeps it up. We have to thank him for “If It Takes a Lifetime,” the opening song on Something More Than Free, which won the Grammy for Best Americana Album. Humbly, he reminds us that “A man is the product of all the people he ever loved,” and if every drunk member of the audience can keep his “spirits high,” we’ll all “find happiness by and by.”

Isbell’s shows are ones to sing along and drink to, but if you happen to listen to what you’re singing, Isbell’s true optimism might sink through. Live good and sing loud, be happy and never too proud to admit we all want that something in the air that’s more than free.

Saturday, October 22, 2016

Go It Alone (SE)

Flying over Water (SE)

Different Days (SE)

24 Frames (SMTF)

Something More Than Free (SMTF)

Decoration Day (DBT–Decoration Day)

Speed Trap Town (SMTF)

Life You Choose (SMTF)

Traveling Alone (SE)

Codeine (HWR)

Elephant (SE)