Bill O Writes

NORTH TRURO – “Life is nothing but a sweet serenade,” Peter Wolf proclaimed during his Sunday night concert at the Payomet Performing Arts Center, but the former lead singer for the J. Geils Band knows there’s a lot more to it than that. With a rock style that blends in blues, soul and R&B, Wolf is more about begging, screaming and shouting than serenading.

Lean as a splinter, he took the stage in black pants and a black shirt with a silver-beaded jacket that reflected the stage lights. Elbows pinned to his sides, he moved with his body coiled, as if he’s spent a lifetime dancing in tight spaces – even though he’s played on many of the biggest concert stages.

The 17-song show covered Wolf’s career from the Geils Band’s 1970 debut through the most recent of his eight solo CDs, “A Cure for Loneliness, which was released in 2016.

Highlights included covers of bluesman Otis Rush’s “Homework,” the Stonesy vibe of “Some Things You Don’t Want to Know” and the hard-rocking “Hard Drivin’ Man.”

Duke Levine on electric guitar, Kevin Barry on electric guitar and lap steel guitar, and Tom West keyboards provided the perfect amount of lead-in and mid-song solos to dress up the songs, satisfying the Wolf Pack, as the singer’s fans call themselves. Drummer Tom Arey and bass player Marty Ballou guided the band through the mid-tempo rockers of Wolf’s solo songs and the slightly quicker pace of the Geils’ classics.

In addition to being a stellar frontman, Wolf is an entertaining storyteller. He reminisced about following Bob Dylan all over New York City in the early ’60s and recording in the ’80s with Aretha Franklin, who was a “Dynasty” fan and spoke with an English accent a la Joan Collins.

The main set closed with “Love Stinks,” one of the J. Geils Band’s biggest hits and a rousing version of “Looking for a Love.” After a break of just a minute or two, the band returned for “I Need You Tonight,” a song off Wolf’s first solo CD.

Wolf thanked the crowd for “many years of loyal support” and then jive-talked through the rapid-fire verbal mish-mash introduction to “Must of Got Lost,” another Geils classic.

At 72, Wolf may have lost a little of the frenzy in his voice, but not much. As he moved to the very back row of the Payomet tent during “Must of Got Lost,” he also showed that he hasn’t lost much of his energy since the ’70s and ’80s, back when the J. Geils Band was playing steamy summer shows at the Cape Cod Coliseum in South Yarmouth.

Fans of Joan Osborne have long known she’s a fan of Bob Dylan. She included a cover of his “Man in the Long Black Coat” on her 1995 debut, “Relish,” which included the international hit “One of Us.”

But she’s not just a casual fan. She’s enough of a fan that she put together a show called “Joan Osborne Sings the Songs of Bob Dylan, which she performed at two-week residencies at New York City’s Café Carlyle in March 2016 and 2017.

She’s also taken that tribute on the road, including Sunday night’s show at the Payomet Performing Arts Center in North Truro. The 90-minute, 14-song concert served as a preview for Osborne’s “Songs of Bob Dylan” CD, which will be released Sept. 1.

The new disc might just as easily have been called “The Many Moods of Bob Dylan.” On “Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat,” she was joking, scornful and mocking. On “Tryin’ to Get to Heaven,” she was wistful. On “Buckets of Rain,” she was soothing and flirtatious. On “Tangled Up in Blue,” she was reflective and resigned but also assertive.

One of the night’s highlights was “Masters of War,” (the oldest song in the set, which included tracks ranging from 1963 to 2001). She delivered Dylan’s scathing condemnation of the military-industrial complex with barely restrained anger. As she said afterward, “that’s a very intense song.”

Osborne can effectively cross the borders of rock, R&B, soul and jazz, as she showed throughout the night, which ended with an almost mournful rendition of “One of Us.” She was helped quite ably by Kevin Bents on piano and organ and Andrew Carilllo on acoustic and electric guitar.

The trio changed the arrangements and the tempo of most of the songs, especially the better-known ones. She made the case for that in introducing a slowed-down jazz-blues version of “Rainy Day Woman #12 and 35.” One of Dylan’s biggest hits (No. 2 on the Billboard charts), the “everybody must get stoned” song is “so familiar that it gives us license to change it,” she said.

My lovely companion asked if I thought she was messing with it too much. My quick answer was, no. Longer answer: What would be the point of doing a tribute like this and not taking the songs in a new direction?

Among the performers who made stand-out versions of Dylan covers are Jimi Hendrix, Stevie Wonder, the Byrds and George Harrison. Osborne belongs on that list.

The show included nine songs from the new CD and four Dylan songs that aren’t on the new release, giving Osborne and Dylan fans reason to hope there may be a volume two down the road.

Were your arms tired Saturday morning? Probably so, if you were at Friday night’s Melody Tent show by Michael Franti and Spearhead.

Some performers lead sing-alongs. Franti does that, but he also likes to lead wave-alongs, and for much of the night he had audience members swaying their arms to his mix of reggae, rap, R&B, and rock.

Franti didn’t leave all the work to the crowd. He was dashing up and down aisles and zipping along the edge of the rotating stage. He invited fans to join him on stage to sing and dance (one big dude got belly-down on the stage and did the Worm quite impressively). In short, this is a guy who knows how to engage the crowd.

Franti’s music is upbeat, both in its tempo and in its lyrics. The visuals back up that spirit. “Love out loud” was printed in big letters on Manas Itiene’s bass drum and the guitar strap on Franti’s battered acoustic guitar has block letters saying “stay human.”

Early in his career, Franti was blatant with his politics, in his work with the rap duo The Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy and on the early Spearhead CD “Stay Human,” which focused on the death penalty.

Lately he’s more focused on a Marley-esque “one world” message with a feel-good vibe. As he said in introducing “Good to Be Alive Today,” “Every person on this planet deserves to be happy, healthy and equal.” He also mixed in plenty of love songs, the best of them being “Crazy for You” and “Life Is Better With You.”

Another highlight was “I Got Love for Ya,” one of seven songs Franti played from last year’s “Soulrocker” CD. The song was inspired by his son’s graduation from high school, and Franti worked in a bit of U2’s “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” before finishing the song by smashing the bottom of his guitar against one of Itiene’s cymbals.

Got to give a nod to the rest of Franti’s tight band: guitarist J Bowman, bass player Carl Young and keyboardist Michael Blankenship.
Near the end of the 100-minute show, Franti talked about his Do It for the Love charity which provides concert experiences for people who are seriously ill or have a disability. Beyonce, Kenny Chesney, the Red Hot Chili Peppers – whatever performer they’ve dreamed of seeing. (“I never thought I’d buy so many Taylor Swift tickets,” Franti joked.)

The charity, which has sent 900 families to shows so far, lists its mission as “hope and healing through live music” – which pretty much sums up Friday’s show and Franti’s career.

From the Cape Cod Times, Aug. 22, 2014

NORTH TRURO — “Minnie Pearl meets Diana Ross,” said Kathy.

“That’s funny. I was thinking Macy Gray meets Dolly Parton,” I said.

“How about Tracy Chapman meets Zooey Deschanel?” asked Tracy.

We’d just seen Valerie June’s eccentric talent and personality on display at the Payomet Performing Arts Center. Add up our summaries and we had her pretty well captured.

June’s 2013 CD, “Pushin’ Against a Stone,” was one of the year’s best. On the disc, Tennessee-born June sounds like an Appalachian Macy Gray on one song, a ’60s girls group on another and Alison Krauss on another. It’s rock-solid stuff.

On that debut CD, June got some help from legendary keyboard player Booker T. Jones and guitarist Dan Auerbach of the blues-rock duo the Black Keys, among others. In her show Wednesday night, she was on her own, except for her guitar, her banjo and her “baby,” a banjo ukulele.

June describes her mixture of country, folk, blues, rock and soul as “organic moonshine roots music.” She added some country flavor to the traditional gospel song “This World Is Not My Home.” She sang her own “Rain Dance” as a twangy scat song, accompanied by some jangly guitar.

On the blues chestnut “Rollin’ and Tumblin’,” her banjo strumming picked up speed, like a train accelerating on a downhill track. On other songs, including “Workin’ Woman Blues,” she attacked her guitar strings with the ferocity of folk-punk player Ani DiFranco. At the end of Sam Cooke’s “Bring It On Home to Me,” she coaxed the (willing) crowd into a sing-along.

Her vocals were served up with a mix of Memphis twang and old bluesman growl that sometimes made it hard to decipher the lyrics, but the emotions came through. You get the sense that June is still exploring the songs and not just churning them out the same way every night.

June played 16 songs, some of them barely two minutes long, during her 85-minute show, filling the rest of the time with stories, talking about cooking in her apartment in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn or scribbling down notes in the blank back pages of a novel when some song lyrics came to her in the middle of the night.

She said her CD title, “Pushin’ Against a Stone,” was a tribute to those who’d helped her along the way. “The more you go up the hill, the more dust that stone gathers. You push it a lot and it rolls back. You get people helping you, you get all these hands, and you end up rolling it pretty good.”

June wore spangly sandals, a blue polka-dotted skirt and a red leather jacket, with her massive dreadlocks in a gravity-defying tower. Lifting the banjo strap over her hair is “the hardest part of the day,” she said. “When you like your job and your hair, you just roll with it.”

June has too much energy to release it all through her vocals and strings. She finished one song with a short rooster-strut dance step. On another, she sat on a stool but kicked one or both legs while she played guitar.

Two-thirds of the way through the show, it struck me that June is a wiser, music-world version of the movies’ manic pixie dream-girl character, with her eccentric, at times girlish personality (think Deschanel in “500 Days of Summer”). Time spent with June is time well spent.

photos by Suzie Glover: from left, Ariel Parkington, Sarah Parkington, Nora Parkington and Rose Parkington; Lou Cataldo, Aaron Spade, Joey Spampinato and Johnny Spampinato

Imagine a bar with a jukebox that plays Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley, the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. Easy to picture a joint like that, right? Now imagine a jukebox that plays Leadbelly, Dolly Parton, Prince and Radiohead. It’s a bit harder to picture what that bar would look like, but if you’re musically adventurous, it’s one you’d want to check out.

The Spampinato Brothers are the personification of the first jukebox, and the Parkington Sisters recreate the second one. Both Cape-based bands performed Thursday night, and a few lucky folks were in the audience for both shows.

Born in the Bronx (but we’ll forgive them for that), Joey and Johnny Spampinato are among the Cape’s rock royalty. Bassplayer Joey was a founding member of NRBQ and has performed with Berry, Keith Richards and Eric Clapton. Guitarist Johnny is a member of the Incredible Casuals and was a longtime member of NRBQ. Aaron Spade of the Casuals joins them on guitar. At Thursday’s show at the gazebo at Nauset Beach, Lou Cataldo, who’s played with the Freeze and a zillion other Cape bands, sat in on drums.

The Spampinato brothers play good old, power-pop rock ’n’ roll – kind of like the great British group Rockpile but with some American grittiness thrown in. (And if you’re not familiar with Rockpile, whose only studio album, the classic “Seconds of Pleasure,” came out 33 years ago, well, it’s never too late to catch up.)

In Thursday’s show, they played a mix of Spampinato Brothers originals (“Let Him Think on That” with Everly-Brothers-by-way-of-the-Beatles-style harmonizing and the goofy “A Bear Is a Bear Is a Bear”), some NRBQ gems (“It’s a Wild Weekend” and “That I Get Back Home”) and classic covers (Frankie Ford’s “Sea Cruise,” Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode” and the Beatles’ “You Can’t Do That”).

The Spampinato Brothers show was part of the Arts Foundation of Cape Cod/TD Bank series of free concerts, which continue at 6 p.m. Mondays-Fridays in eight towns through Aug. 1.

Two towns over and a couple of hours later, the Parkington Sisters performed a hometown throwdown at the Wellfleet Beachcomber.

Opening for the Parkingtons was the Sacred Mounds, a hipster-rock duo that’s a weird combination of mostly Ween and a little White Stripes. Their set included a song about the pro wrestling world of 1986.

Classically trained musicians, the Parkingtons perform what’s been described as “indie-folk.” That’s not quite right. On stage, they are less restrained and less delicate than they can be on CD. They rocked. This is, after all, a band that has toured with the Dropkick Murphys, a Boston-based Celtic-punk group.

The Parkingtons’ is not the traditional rock lineup. They performed violin (Ariel, Sarah and Nora), viola (Sarah and Ariel), electric guitar (Sarah and Rose), acoustic guitar (Rose), percussion (Nora, Rose and Sarah), keyboards (Rose and Ariel), strap-on Roland synthesizer (Rose and Nora), solo vocals (all of them) and harmonizing vocals (all of them).

“Cruel,” a gonzo, funky country ballad, was an early highlight. The earnest folk ballad “Me Oh My” was made extra intense by Ariel and Nora’s violin work. “Drowning in Blue” sounded like what would have happened if Sinead O’Connor in her primal rock days had tried to make a disco song (and succeeded).

The second half of the show leaned more on covers, including Parton’s “Jolene,” Dan Auerbach’s “Trouble Weighs a Ton” and Leadbelly’s “In the Pines,” which started more like the “O Brother, Where Art Thou” sirens than Kurt Cobain’s tortured version, but slowly ratcheted up in tension.

Younger sister Lydia, a former member of the group, came on stage near the end of the show to sing lead on “Sailor,” which was delivered as part country stomp, part sea chantey.

The Sacred Mounds joined in for the last few songs, including the Parkingtons’ “Deerheart,” a ballad that featured six vocalists; Prince’s “Controversy,” which was somewhat sloppy but still stellar; and Radiohead’s “Karma Police,” a show-closing audience sing-along.

By year’s end, I’ll have seen some bigger names perform, but I doubt I’ll have seen a better show.

photo by Frank Ockenfels

Some musicians basically have two songs – a fast one and a slow one – and everything they do is a variation on them.

Brandi Carlile is not like that.

She opened her Friday night show at the Cape Cod Melody Tent with “Raise Hell,” a new song with a KT Tunstall feel. “Pride and Joy,” a song from a few years back, sounds like it was inspired in part by “High and Dry” and a couple other Radiohead songs. Her best-known song, “The Story,” is a country-rocker with the quiet-loud-quiet dynamic perfected by the Pixies and Nirvana. Her vocals can make you think of Patsy Cline, Amy Ray or Adele.

In lesser hands, that might be too many musical personalities, but Carlile is a rising star with the ability to hop genres. Named by Rolling Stone magazine as one of 10 “artists to watch” when her self-titled debut CD came out in 2005, Carlile continues to merit that attention.

The set fell into four segments: a bunch of country-rockers, a batch of rootsy songs (including one of the night’s highlights “Caroline”), two covers (a snippet of Bonnie Tyler’s “Total Eclipse of the Heart” and a fun no-holds-barred version of Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody”) and then a half-dozen songs that displayed her full range of talents, from the pretty ballad “Turpentine” to the rocking “Dying Day.”

Her richly talented five-man band joined her for the first encore song, “Pride and Joy.” Carlile switched to piano for “That Wasn’t Me,” joined by twins Tim and Phil Hanseroth on vocals, and finished the show alone on acoustic guitar with the forceful ballad “That Year.”

Carlile can be a bit restrained on her CDs, but there was no such problem at the Melody Tent. She can easily switch moods and styles, doing it with plenty of charm and stage presence.

Opening the show was Andy Hull, taking a break from his duties as lead singer of the Manchester Orchestra, an Atlanta-based rock quintet. Playing alone with an acoustic guitar, he came across as a less-engaging version of Damien Rice. His set included songs from a CD trilogy that a press release says is about “a sailor who, upon discovering his wife cheating on him with his brother, runs away to sea and gradually descends into a vengeful rage,” which sounds like it would be better served by the full-band treatment.

Carlile’s set list

1. “Raise Hell”  (from the “Bear Creek” CD)

2. “Dreams”  (“Giving Up the Ghost”)

3. “What Can I Say”  (“Brandi Carlile”)

4. “Hard Way Home”  (“Bear Creek”)

5. “Before It Breaks”  (“Giving Up the Ghost”)

6. “100” (“Bear Creek”)

7. “Caroline”  (“Giving Up the Ghost”)

8. “Keep Your Heart Young”  (“Bear Creek”)

9. “Save Part of Yourself”  (“Bear Creek”)

10. “Josephine”  (“The Story”)

11. “Total Eclipse of the Heart” (Bonnie Tyler cover)

12. “Bohemian Rhapsody” (Queen cover)

13. “Turpentine” (“The Story”)

14. “Dying Day” (“Giving Up the Ghost”)

15. “The Story”  (“The Story”)

Encore:

16. “Pride and Joy” (“Giving Up the Ghost”)

17. “That Wasn’t Me”  (“Bear Creek”)

18. “That Year” (“Giving Up the Ghost”)

The King of Pop. The Queen of Soul. The Duchess of Coolsville.

OK, Rickie Lee Jones doesn’t have quite the international acclaim of Michael Jackson or Aretha Franklin, but Jones, who won the Grammy Award for Best New Artist in 1980 (beating out the Blues Brothers, Dire Straits, the Knack and Robin Williams), has her own devoted following, including the folks who filled the tent for her July 29 show at the Payomet Performing Arts Center in North Truro.

Jones performs without a predetermined set list. Good thing, as she had to adapt right from the start. A bit of feedback came from her acoustic guitar when she took the stage, so she switched to the piano for her opening song, a cover of the Band’s “The Weight.”

Mavis Staples also covered that song when she opened for Bonnie Raitt at the Cape Cod Melody Tent last month. Staples performed with a full band; Jones did a more stripped-down version with Ed Willett on cello. But more striking was the different vocal styles of Staples and Jones. Staples comes from a gospel background, while Jones’s pop music is rooted in jazz. Staples sings with force and clarity, letting you hear the words and react to their meaning. Jones stretches out notes and slurs words, playing with the sounds and interpreting the emotions for you. Different techniques, equally powerful.

Jones’s technique also made for an interesting comparison on “Reason to Believe,” a song composed by Tim Hardin that’s best known for a cover on Rod Stewart’s smash 1971 album “Every Picture Tells a Story.” Stewart’s version is bitter and punchy, while Jones slowed it down to make it somber and teary. Again, two different approaches, both of which work.

“The Weight” and “Reason to Believe” were among six songs Jones played from a CD of cover songs, “The Devil You Know,” coming out Sept. 18. Sunday’s show was about looking ahead, to that album, and looking way back, with eight songs from Jones’s first two albums, which are filled with quirky characters, sort of a West Coast answer to Bruce Springsteen’s Asbury Park oddballs. Just four songs came from the studio albums between those early years and the new one.

Most of the songs on the new CD, including the Rolling Stones’ “Sympathy for the Devil,” were very familiar to the AARP-eligible hipsters in the audience Sunday night, but one of the highlights of the show was a lesser-known song. “Masterpiece” by Ben Harper, who produced Jones’s new CD and supplied guest vocals on her last one, is a gorgeous love ballad. Jones’s rendition was slow and bluesy and perfect for cuddling.

Other highlights included early Jones songs “We Belong Together” and the show-closing “Last Chance Texaco,” on which Jeff Pevar played slide guitar. Pevar, who has performed with Ray Charles, Wilson Pickett and Crosby, Stills & Nash, was an essential part of the trio, playing guitar, mandolin and organ. Willett on the cello, meanwhile, provided dramatic flourishes on “Living It Up,” struck some discordant notes on “Sympathy for the Devil” to convey Satan’s dirty work and plucked strings for a heartbeat rhythm on “It Must Be Love.”

Jones introduced her next-to-last song by saying, “I do this song, it’s a nice song, but I still haven’t reconciled the journey it’s taken me on.” That would be “Chuck E’s in Love,” the 1979 Top 10 hit that introduced her to the world and is still by far her biggest hit. It must be odd to have an early song overshadow the rest of a rich and sometimes daring career, but Jones seemed to have fun performing it.

Counting Crows calls their latest tour the Outlaw Roadshow.

Now bear in mind that The All Music Guide described Counting Crows’ debut CD as “modern music for people who don’t like modern music” – and that was almost 20 years ago. So “outlaw” is maybe overstating things a bit. The Crows mostly play it safe, not that that’s necessarily a bad thing.

The July 19 show at the Cape Cod Melody Tent featured three opening acts, which is definitely a bit out of the norm.

Brooklyn-based We Are Augustines, the trio that opened the show, sounds like an Americana-version of “Joshua Tree”-era U2 with a huskier-voiced singer. On a ballad, lead singer Billy McCarthy’s vocals were in the general neighborhood of early Tom Waits. The band’s CD, “Rise Ye Sunken Ships” is worth a listen.

Next up: Kasey Anderson and the Honkies, who come across as a grungy version of the Wallflowers, with a bit of a cowpunk/garage vibe on one song. When they slowed it down on “Your Side of Town,” the song could have passed for a Drive-By Truckers ballad. The band’s “Like Teenage Gravity” is one of the tunes that Counting Crows recorded for a recent CD of cover songs, but the Honkies drew the biggest response with set-closer “Two More Bottles” (chorus: “It’s alright / It’s midnight / And I have two more bottles of wine”).

Out of the three strong opening acts, it is Field Report that has the most potential. In concert, they sound like Jackson Browne fronting an ultra-mellow Wilco (on recordings, singer Chris Porterfield’s vocals are more like David Gray’s, but again, a lot more mellow). The six members create a captivating groove. Porterfied used to be the pedal steel player in a band that also included Justin Vernon (aka Bon Iver), but I won’t hold that against him. Field Report got major buzz at this year’s South By Southwest, and I’m eager to hear the band’s debut CD, coming out Sept. 11.

The Counting Crows’ 85-minute set covered most of the group’s career, with the odd exception of the band’s most recent CD of original material (“Saturday Nights & Sunday Mornings,” which came out in 2008).

Four songs came from the band’s latest disc, “Underwater Sunshine (or What We Did on Our Summer Vacation), a collection of cover songs. One of them was a lively version of Bob Dylan’s “You Ain’t Going Nowhere.” Head Crow Adam Duritz had brought out the guys in all three opening acts for “hanginaround,” the closing song of the main set and they all came back out for Dylan song, the first of two encore songs, which had about a dozen people crowded around the microphones.

The other three covers were “Start Again” by Teenage Fanclub, “Hospital” by Coby Brown and “Untitled (Love Song)” by the Romany Rye – and you’re really keeping up with things if you’re familiar with all three of those performers. All in all, Counting Crows did a good job on “Underwater Sunshine” (and in concert) of putting their own sound on a wide-range of covers, but for the most part, the covers were less satisfying than the band’s originals.

And what is the Crows’ sound? The band’s debut came out when Nirvana and Pearl Jam were in their prime. For people who preferred the Band and Buffalo Springfield, the Crows’ debut was “modern music for people who don’t like modern music.” That quote sounds like it could be an insult, but it’s really just a clever description. Counting Crows’ debut was a bit of a throwback, but it was a throwback to some classic stuff.

Lyrically, the Crows can be a little too focused on waiting and traveling, and sunlight and rain. But their vibe on the upbeat songs is spirit-lifting; their vibe on the downbeat songs is perfect for repeat plays on dismal days (whether it’s the weather or your mood that’s bleak).

Musically, the Crows draw back on some classic folk-rock sounds, but they were also a little ahead of the their time, or maybe right on time, with an alt-country sound that’s not too far from Uncle Tupelo or the Jayhawks, bands that had more of a hip factor. They might not have the most original sound, but two decades later Counting Crows are still putting together a mighty good roadshow.

Counting Crows set list:

Intro (“Lean on Me” by Bill Withers)

“Round Here”

“Untitled (Love Song)” (The Romany Rye cover)

“High Life”

“St. Robinson in His Cadillac Dream”

“Hospital” (Coby Brown cover)

“Black and Blue”

“Catapult”

“Start Again” (Teenage Fanclub cover)

“Omaha”

“If I Could Give All My Love -or- Richard Manuel Is Dead”

“Children in Bloom”

“Goodnight L.A.”

“A Long December”

“Hanginaround”

Encore:

“You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere” (Bob Dylan cover)

“Holiday in Spain”

What happens when a blues singer falls in love? In the case of Bonnie Raitt, she dedicates the closing song of her concert, a cover of Elvis Presley’s “A Big Hunk o’ Love,” to her new boyfriend.

The rest of her June 24 show at the Cape Cod Melody Tent included familiar Raitt songs in a range of styles: feisty pop (“Thing Called Love”), flirty soul (“Come to Me”) and forlorn blues (“I Can’t Make You Love Me”).

Among the highlights were songs that showed off Raitt’s gift as an interpreter. Not only can she pick out some great songs, she manages to make them her own, whether it’s John Prine’s “Angel From Montgomery,” Bob Dylan’s “Million Miles” or Gerry Rafferty’s “Right Down the Line.” The last two were among five songs she played from her new CD, “Slipstream.” Raitt’s version of “Million Miles” is sexy and bluesy. Her reggae-blues take on “Right Down the Line” is a clever reinvention of a ’70s classic-rock song.

Raitt is among the few women inducted into the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame for both instrumental and singing ability. Her slide guitar work on “Love Sneaking Up on You” and “Thing Called Love” showed why she made it onto Rolling Stone magazine’s list of 100 greatest guitarists.

Raitt kept things moving but still managed some between-song chatter, including several reminiscences about the days when her father, Broadway singer John Raitt, performed at the Melody Tent. Her set list stuck closely to recent shows on the East Coast.

In response to requests, she said, “I see a couple signs up there for really obscure songs. I wish I still knew them.” But the 16 songs she delivered in a 105-minute show included plenty of crowd pleasers, among them “Something to Talk About” and “Have a Heart.”

As happy as she may be, Raitt was at her best when singing about heartbreak and heartache. She delivered the first verse of “Angel From Montgomery” a cappella before the band kicked in. Her vocals on “I Can’t Make You Love Me” got more than a few eyes teared up. That’s why they call it the blues, right?

Mavis Staples, making her Melody Tent debut, opened the show. She got her start in her family’s gospel group, the Staple Singers, when she was 10; 62 years later she performs with inspiring energy and passion. Like Raitt, she crosses genres. Sunday’s show included a funky version of the traditional gospel song “Wade in the Water” and a soulful cover of the Band’s “The Weight,” which drew the first of the evening’s many standing ovations.

Raitt joined Staples for a rousing cover of “Will the Circle Be Unbroken.” Staples closed her eight-song set with a blast from her family’s past, a rendition of the Staple Singers’ 1972 No. 1 hit, “I’ll Take You There.”

The best show I saw all year was the Cape Cod Christmas Cavalcade. As usual, Chandler Travis collected an impressive assortment of local talent. Highlights included the Swains Sisters and the Blood Siblings on “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reinder,” Christine Rathbun’s monologues, Greg Greenway’s “Psycho Santa” (done to the tune of Talking Heads’ “Psycho Killer”), Polka Dan’s Beetbox Band’s “Here Comes Santa Claus” and Chandler and Zoe Lewis’ duet on “Baby, It’s Cold Outside.”

Some other great ones:
— Garland Jeffreys at the Narrows Center for Arts in Fall River
— the Drive-by Truckers at the House of Blues in Boston
— Elvis Costello at the Cape Cod Melody Tent in Hyannis
— Tinariwen at the Paradise Rock Club in Boston
— Wilco at the Wang Theater in Boston
— Eddie Vedder at the Providence Performing Arts Center
— Alison Krauss at the Cape Cod Melody Tent
— the Lemonheads at the Wellfleet Beachcomber
— the Ticks, the Greenheads and Earth Junior at opening night at the Beachcomber
— the Flakes at the Woodshed in Brewster
— Daddy-O at the House of Bud’s in Hyannis
— Tripping Lily at the Cape Cod Museum of Art in Dennis
— Taylor Swift at Gillette Stadium

And then there were the nighly campfire sessions by Darryl Purpose, Trace Wiren and others at the 25th anniversary reunion for the Great Peace March for Global Nuclear Disarmament (in Ventura, Calif.).