Nicole Atkins at the Magic Stick
February 27, 2011
A show on a Sunday night. It’s hard to get people to come out on a Sunday. I’d hate to think that the Oscars actually impacted attendance. Opening that night was the band Cotton Jones. For the first half the set I wasn’t feeling it at all. It didn’t help that the sound guy didn’t have microphone 2 for the keyboardist turned up properly. Come on, sound guy! The second half of their set staring sounding better. Maybe they saved their best songs for last.
Nicole Atkins played her most well received songs, “The Way It Is”, and “Maybe Tonight” towards the beginning of her set. She eschewed the common practice of putting those off to the end. Later in the set we got to hear a few songs with a more rockabilly, honky-tonk vibe to them.
Nicole Atkins came onto the stage wearing a flowing black dress. While she might have looked formal, she had a very informal rapport with the audience, telling them stories and interacting with them. Did you know Nicole Atkins was once in an all girl metal band named CÜNT? (It took me forever to find out how to type an umlat into this thing. There definitely would have been a mistranslation on my part without it) Apparently her mother had a hard time discussing that with the neighbors. Between songs, she stopped to ask a young guy up front named Matthew if he was enjoying the show or not, because he seemed a bit unmoved by it all. He looked noticeably embarrassed. She told us that the last time she played Detroit, there were only 10 people in the audience, and thanked everybody there for coming out. A turnout of 50 people might have been an improvement over her last time here, but it still made the Magic Stick seem kind of cavernous.
Here is the one video I took of Nicole, a New Jersey native, discussing her own experience with the Jersey Shore and “guidos” (her word, not mine):
That other person shouting back at her is Mary from The Detroit Cobras. She was Drunko Numero Uno for the night, and I wish I had more of their exchanges on video.
Nicole thought it was great that there was a bowling alley downstairs, and suggested that everyone should get together after the show and play. Maybe I should have stuck around to find out if it materialized.