One of the best live shows I've seen was the Old 97s at the Gypsy Tea Room in Dallas. This was right before the 2001 release of Satellite Rides, and the band seemed happy to be performing new material like "Rollerskate Skinny" and "Book of Poems". Plus, they were playing a run of hometown shows after a long absence, so the crowd was excited to have their local heroes back for a few nights. Packed into the Tea Room shoulder to shoulder, fans sang along with every word of "Busted Afternoon" and "Big Brown Eyes", and at least attempted singing along to "Doreen". They fed off the band's excitement, and in turn the Old 97s fed off the crowd's rambunctious energy. Ken Bethea deployed his perfectly compact solos, Rhett Miller did some of those mini-Pete Townsend windmills on his guitar, and Murry Hammond stepped up for awkwardly graceful versions of "West Texas Teardrops" and "Valentine".
That show completely erased the distinction between the Old 97s' early alt-country material and their later power-pop songs-- a distinction that's been particularly divisive among fans and critics and that once seemed impossible to resolve. No longer: Alive & Wired, the band's first live release, duplicates this feat, finding a Texarkana middle ground between the two genres. Granted, there have always been traces of pop in the nerd-country of their first three albums, just as there has always been a little lingering country on Fight Songs and Satellite Rides. But if these two sides of the band once seemed fairly neatly divided on studio albums, the live setting helps Old 97s collapse them completely.
Recorded at Gruene's just outside of New Braunfels, Texas, Alive & Wired collects songs from each of their six albums, along with B-sides "The Villain" and Hammond's cover of Merle Haggard's "Mama Tried". The band's energy ebbs on slower songs like "Lonely Holiday", but crests on faster numbers like "Melt Show" and singalongs like "Rollerskate Skinny". By culling from early releases and rescuing tracks from last year's tepid Drag It Up, the band showcases a surprisingly deep and ridiculously rich canon of loser anthems ("Wish the Worst"), dark ballads ("Salome"), odes to romantic doubt and suspicion ("The Other Shoe"), cowboy calls ("West Texas Teardrops"), and frenzied barnstormers ("Doreen")-- all written and played with generous humor and genuine exhilaration.
Granted, Alive & Wired can't live up to the Old 97s' Tea Room show, in the same way that no live album can match the experience of actually being there. The record lacks the sensory elements that make such performances so memorable-- the glare of the neon signs on the wall; the smell of body odor and beer; the rough, rhythmic jostle of the packed crowd; the acrid taste of cigarette smoke. These sensations inform and infuse the band's songs-- not just the romantic desperation and confliction of Miller's lyrics, but the snap of the music-- to such a degree that an Old 97s live album seems incomplete without them.
