Late June of 89 found me back in Kentucky for several days. I had no teaching or class duties that summer, so there’s little doubt I would have headed home to see Dad for his birthday on the 25th, a Sunday. By the end of the following week, I was back on the road, but before returning to IL, I made a two-night stop in Louisville to see various friends.
Mark H and Lana had driven over from St. Louis for the weekend so that Lana could visit with family in the area; Mark broke away from that to hang out with me for a couple of days. Along the way, we met up with two of my long-time pen pals. Becky still lived in town, in between her junior and senior years of college, so we got together with her one evening. The next day, we were with Kristine and her husband—by this point she was in vet school, spending the summer in Louisville doing training at a clinic. The four of us spent a muggy afternoon at Churchill Downs, where the highlight of my limited horse-betting career occurred. One race had a small field, five or six horses, one of which was a prohibitive favorite. Mark and I quickly calculated that if we bet on each of the other horses to win, we’d make okay money so long as any of those non-favorites crossed the line first. Needless to say, our gambit paid off—we’d have done better if we’d been disciplined enough not to make a couple of side bets, though.
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The trip wouldn’t have been complete without a stop at a record store, of course; it was that weekend that I learned Marshall Crenshaw’s fifth album, Good Evening, had hit the stores. Mark always carried his boom box with him, so I got to listen to it in our hotel room the night I bought it.
I noticed two things right away. First, the title—was he telling fans this was the last record he was doing for Warner Bros? (It was, as it turned out.) Second, Crenshaw had a hand in writing a much lower percentage of the material on Good Evening (only 50%) than any other of his records. That also spoke to me of an unsettled situation with the suits—was the record company pushing that on him in hopes of spurring sales?
The production, from David Kershenbaum and Paul McKenna, is plenty slick, but I’ve wound up enjoying most of the songs on this album over the years. It’s time to take a listen to a few.
The opening track, “You Should’ve Been There,” got things off to a good start. It’s one of two songs on Good Evening that Crenshaw co-wrote with Leroy Preston, formerly of Asleep at the Wheel. And it’s got Wisconsin’s BoDeans doing backup vocals.
Crenshaw tended to have excellent taste in what he chose from other songwriters. Here’s “Valerie,” a fun Richard Thompson tune.
A couple tracks later, we get some John Hiatt: “Someplace Where Love Won’t Find Me.”
On balance, it wasn’t a bad call to use outside material, as two of Marshall’s own contributions are my least favorite songs on the disk. However, he did write the very good “On the Run,” and he made a good call in playing it on Letterman (though I kinda doubt it happened in 91, since he released Life’s Too Short that year).
Whoop! Whoop! Danger, Will Harris, danger! We have a Diane Warren sighting! What did I say about good taste in choosing others’ songs? Here’s the most prominent signal of record label involvement on this project; I wonder if there were expectations of releasing it as a single. Actually, I think Marshall does a fine job with “Some Hearts”—certainly a hundred times better than Carrie Underwood did when she made it the title song of her first album.
It feels like many of my posts right now are circling around just a few artists. It’d be remiss of me not to mention that Syd Straw is one of the two female backup singers here.
Good Evening ends with my favorite, a cover of Bobby Fuller’s “Let Her Dance.” Just a great, great tune, and Crenshaw does it complete justice. Twenty years later, it was fun to hear the original come on at the end of Wes Anderson’s Fantastic Mr. Fox. And somehow it took me all these years to learn that Phil Seymour has a cool version of it as well.
All told, Good Evening was not Crenshaw’s best, but there’s plenty worth hearing every so often.
The Music of My Life 
Although Good Evening was not a forgotten album for me, I had forgotten that I’d heard Let Her Dance first on that record. It sure sounded familiar over stop action animal puppets tearing through food in a hypothetical supermarket, but the source eluded me at the time.
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