Eclectic Company: Mature, Married Lovesongs Live

I don’t know how long it’s been since I came home humming the hooks from many new songs I’d just heard from the stage, or woke the next morning with those same tunes running a pleasurable tape loop in my head, but I know that it happened one night last week and the next morning with adult lovesongs from Living Stereo, a duet album, from Lucky Stars: New Lullabies for Old Souls, an album of quietly joyful songs and instrumentals, and from The Nu-Look (Dixon) and My Long-Haired Life (Jones), earlier solo albums, from husband-and-wife musicians and songwriters Don Dixon and Marti Jones.

It’s been 22 years since Bonnie Raitt’s exciting, tune-filled comeback blues rock album Nick of Time was released to across-the-board critical acclaim (plus three GRAMMY awards including Album of the Year) and an expert’s analysis that this record marked the first mainstream rock/pop project to truly express mature love in defiance of the usual rebellious love songs pitched to teens. Well I’m here to testify that now that I’ve heard the real deal in Dixon and Jones’s “Trouble Is As Trouble Does,” “You Remind Me,” “These Arms Of Mine,” and “Why, Why, Why [Am I Addicted To You?],” I know Nick of Time was a one-sided vision, reflecting only the yearnings and sorrowful realizations of a middle-aged woman (albeit in the lyrics and tunes of mostly male songwriters), who hoped and prayed, to the point of willingly suspending her disbelief, that this time, really, she’d be rescued by true love. (And wasn’t it less than a decade before the fiery relationship giving rise to Raitt’s self-penned title song was ashes and dust?) Because listening to Dixon and Jones pace through a perfectly-tempoed and thoroughly satisfying set of deceptively simple songs reflecting on the gamut of daily events and emotions that make up a long-lasting married life (theirs is rounding on 25 years), I’m willing to believe there can be enduring, grownup, shared joy and tribulations, work-at-it-every-day love, and to hope that this time maybe, just maybe, I’ll find it for myself.

At New York’s City Winery, Dixon and Jones stood comfortably at ease in front of an open guitar case in which rested all their acoustic and electric guitars and basses, dressed in relaxed stylish clothing and modest but visible wedding rings, gently joking and egging each other on, mostly non-verbally. Anticipating another performance on their short tour, one reviewer called them pop/rock sweethearts, and that’s just how they were, from their opening cover of Shreveport soul singer Brenton Wood’s 1967 hit “Gimme Little Sign” (you know it, the chorus’s lyrics are “just give me some kind of sign, girl”) to their closer, Jones’ most requested song, "Follow You All Over The World."

"Follow You," written by Red Clay Ramblers’ pianist and UNC Creative Writing professor Bland Simpson, describes an unendable love affair — “All my friends say, ‘Quit’ / They tell me I'll get over it / But every time you call / My heart is in a whirl” — that speaks of a physical/emotional connection that rationality can’t divide. But it works too in the Dixon/Jones repertoire, because it’s one of the tunes Dixon produced (before they were an item) for Jones’s debut solo record, Unsophisticated Time, which followed her relatively brief stint in the mid-‘80s Akron, Ohio indie band, Color Me Gone. Hearing that song in the 1980s, I envied the singer, wishing I could feel so strongly drawn to anything or anyone. Meeting it again on the City Winery stage, with Dixon and Jones sharing a few private smiles throughout, it was too good to follow with an encore, no matter how hard we clapped and stamped for one, so they didn’t give in to us.

Jones’ voice is sometimes compared to Dusty Springfield’s, sometimes to Annie Lennox’s — both flattering associations — with a nice warm mid- to low-register voice and a balladeer’s phrasing. Plus she’s a strong rhythm guitar player, which, by the way, is an often overlooked virtue, especially when critics are waxing lyrical about the flashy instrumentals of lead guitarists and other soloing musicians. Dixon’s understated bass lines and sturdy harmonies endlessly surprised me, because I’m used to his lead vocals and the energized stage antics of his band and solo shows. In early years, Dixon was one-half of the powerhouse duo at the heart of North Carolina’s bedrock band, Arrogance (they were busy in the ‘70s and ‘80s, then reunited in 2000 to gig yearly in the North Carolina Triangle (Raleigh/Durham/Chapel Hill)), whose music and music biz lives fueled the artistic dreams of hundreds of younger area rockers.

After Arrogance separated, Dixon turned primarily to producing many famous others, including R.E.M., Chris Stamey (The dBs), Tommy Keene, James McMurtry and The Smithereens, just to scratch the surface, while recording his own solo projects and cutting back on live shows. In recent years he’s worked with Beach Musicians “Dip” Ferrell and The Jeffords (discussed in TJN Vol. 1:7), releasing Don Dixon Sings The Jeffords Brothers (2010), and with Jones, releasing Lucky Stars: New Lullabies for Old Souls in 2008, and Living Stereo, just a few weeks ago.

Many of Dixon’s songs made their way into the City Winery set, including one of my all-time favorites, “Most of the Girls Like to Dance (But Only Some of the Boys Do),” and an incredible Beach Music number that should be a Top 20 hit: “The Night That Otis Died,” sung so soulfully by Dixon and Jones together, their vocal parts almost impossible to separate, that it was hard to remember that Dixon had recorded the original as a solo for The Nu-Look, released in 2008. Find out more about Don Dixon and Marti Jones at www.dondixonmusic.com.

And in the end, what did the couple say about mature love that was so revealing? It all boiled down to “Love is an ocean / sail through the tempest / wait through the calm / for the freshening wind.”