Music & Concerts
Gospel diva Sandi Patty bids D.C. farewell with hit-packed concert
It’s a bittersweet period for fans of gospel legend Sandi Patty who brought her “Forever Grateful Farewell Tour” to Takoma Park, Md., last weekend
Sandi Patty brought her ‘Forever Grateful Farewell Tour’ to the D.C. area last weekend. (Washington Blade photo by Joey DiGuglielmo)
It’s a bittersweet period for fans of gospel legend Sandi Patty, who brought her “Forever Grateful Farewell Tour” to Takoma Park, Md., last weekend.
Though her bread and butter and greatest fame was among white U.S. evangelicals, she never shunned gays (which is more than we could say for Anita Bryant) and though always careful to never say anything too overtly supportive — she’d rocked her base enough with an early ‘90s divorce and paid a huge price for it — she’s had gays in her camp for years and never batted an eye at her legions of gay fans.
Returning to the same church (Sligo Seventh-day Adventist) where she wrapped her “Everlasting Tour” last year at this time, Patty — this was the 70th show of her 120-city tour slated to wrap with a San Juan cruise in early 2017 — pulled out all the stops and delivered her most elaborate stage show since her “Le Voyage”-era shows circa 1993.
In recent years, most non-seasonal Patty concerts have consisted of her singing to tracks while longtime pianist Steve Potts accompanied her (though “Another Time Another Place Tour” vet Jay Rouse has been with her the last couple years). On a lucky night, the church choir would back her on a few numbers. But for this show, Patty has a four-piece band, several family members doubling as backup singers (including husband Don Peslis and son Jon Helvering), the five-man “popera” group Veritas and on many if not all nights, a choir as well. The lighting and video, featuring many classic Patty career clips, is also far more elaborate than in recent years.
Only a curmudgeon would balk at the set list which featured a robust array of Patty classics such as the tender “In Heaven’s Eyes,” gospel barn-burner (and Patty concert staple) “Yes God is Real,” sing-along classic “Love in Any Language” and, of course, “We Shall Behold Him,” the 1982 GMA song of the year that was Patty’s first big hit (though she’d made her major-label debut in 1979).
While some may lament that too many classics like “Upon This Rock” or “Let There Be Praise” were glossed over in mere seconds in several lengthy medleys, it covered a lot of classic ground the same way it’s done at a Janet Jackson concert. Sure, if somebody like Bruce Springsteen took this approach, it would sound like a groan-inducing sellout or lounge act, but since so many of Patty’s most-loved songs are stylistically similar and feature rafter-raising (and vocally taxing) climaxes that make Celine Dion’s material sound positively reserved, it made sense to take the medley approach. Especially effective was a few lines of “The Day He Wore My Crown” added to the “Via Dolorosa” medley since the spring leg of the tour and a duets medley that found the jaw-droppingly talented Veritas guys standing in impressively for Larnelle Harris and Wayne Watson on Patty’s classic duets.
Sandi Patty’s farewell tour is her most elaborate concert production since the early ’90s. (Washington Blade photo by Joey DiGuglielmo)
Although it’s nice to see material from Patty’s latest (and she claims final) studio album “Forever Grateful” included such as “Anthem of Praise” and “All I Gotta Do,” perhaps a better choice for the latter slot would have been a medley of “Face to Faith,” “Willing to Wait,” “Someone Up There Loves Me,” “Pour on the Power” and maybe “Somebody Believed,” those tear-it-up gospel numbers Patty was always so great at delivering. Or maybe even an alternate praise medley with second-tier hits like “Shine Down,” “King of Glory” and “Come Let’s Worship Him.” Oh well — when you have a 35-year body of work to pull from, you can’t cover everything. The only legit complaint was that the choir wasn’t high enough in the sound mix and got lost more often than not.
Patty was in resplendent voice throughout. At 60, her robust soprano sounds as booming as ever. She does sound different than she did 30 years ago — there’s a heavier body to her timbre than there used to be but for me it’s a handy tradeoff. She may have had a more bell-like clarion purity to her vocals back then, but there was also a slight brassiness to her upper register that, to my ear, has been calibrated by age. She said in a pre-show Q&A session that wanted to go out on top and not be one of those singers who hung on too long. Ehhhh, I see what she’s saying but hate to see her hanging it up when the money notes are still so gloriously there.
I’m hoping, of course, that she’ll pull a Cher or Tina Turner on us and after five or seven years of home life and grandkids realize she misses the thrill of the crowd, or at least the pull of the studio. Even when eschewing her trademark high notes on lower-key albums like “Simply Sandi” or “Christmas Blessings,” Patty is always compelling. While it left many fans cold, the latter, a 2014 release that was her jazziest effort ever, made for enticing evidence that she might be wholly compelling and convincing doing non-seasonal material in that vein. A stool, a little jazz combo, some standards — she could totally pull it off.
However if she is content to raise heirloom tomatoes or teach (which she will be doing) or whatever, she has more than earned the right having spent 35 years schlepping around the country. Her oeuvre is a staggering body of work, especially from, oh, say 1981-1993, a particularly white-hot decade-plus that stands the test of time the same way the Beatles canon or the Beethoven sonatas do.
Patty was peerless because she was the right artist at the right time with the right voice and the right drive with access to the best songwriters, producers (especially Greg Nelson) and arrangers at a time when she enjoyed a nice, long run before the internet started eating savagely into budgets and major record labels.
Sandi Patty with (in back from left) Scott Lawrence and James Berrian of the group Veritas and her son Jonathan Helvering, a gifted singer in his own right. (Washington Blade photo by Joey DiGuglielmo)
And nobody ever talks about this, but her heyday also happened to be when big was in. It’s no coincidence that “Dallas” — and everything’s bigger in Texas — was the biggest show of the ‘80s right at the time Patty was belting out “We Shall Behold Him” and “Upon This Rock.” The planets aligned and she didn’t just hit the gospel music zeitgest, she was it. And yet — another oft-missed point — you never felt bludgeoned by her. As an adult, I’ve come to admire her tender moments like “There is a Savior” and “O Calvary’s Lamb” to a degree approaching the big stuff.
Her career eventually self-corrected to the point that she was by the 2010s probably about where she would have been anyway had her divorce from John Helvering — whose mug is curiously whitewashed from the tourbook and flashback photos, though he was at her Ohio concert two weeks ago — not wiped the luster off her ‘80s dominance (she never won a Grammy, had an RIAA certification for gold or platinum or filled an arena on her own after that). Personal travails notwithstanding, it coincided with a period of artistic experimentation on albums like “Find it On the Wings” and “These Days” that didn’t always fully jell. But of course you expect that in any lengthy career. Her lowest lows artistically were never egregious. There was always something to love on every album.
But for a moment last Sunday night, it might as well have been 1986 or 1988 again and Patty held court in all her glory. For us long-time total geek-out fans, she has enriched our lives immeasurably.
SET LIST
1. Anthem of Praise
2. Praise Medley
3. MEDLEY: Agnus Dei/A Mighty Fortress/All Hail the Power (Veritas)
4. Joyful Joyful We Adore Thee
5. Love Will Be Our Home
6. Farther Along
7. The Prayer
* testimony
8. In Heaven’s Eyes
9. MEDLEY: Upon This Rock/They Could Not/In the Name of the Lord/How Great Thou Art
INTERMISSION
* Star-Spangled Banner video montage
10. I Can Only Imagine (Veritas)
11. The Lord’s Prayer (Veritas)
12. Love in Any Language
13. All I Gotta Do
14. Yes, God is Real
15. MEDLEY: Another Time, Another Place/More Than Wonderful/I’ve Just Seen Jesus
16. Revelation Song
17. MEDLEY: The Day He Wore My Crown/Via Dolorosa/The Old Rugged Cross
18. We Shall Behold Him
19. It Is Well With My Soul
20. How We Love (Beth Nielsen Chapman cover)
* In the In-Between was performed at a pre-concert Q&A session
Music & Concerts
Underdog glorious: a personal remembrance of Jill Sobule
Talented singer, songwriter died in house fire on May 1
I’ve always prided myself on being the kind of music consumer who purchased music on impulse. When I stumbled across “Things Here Are Different,” Jill Sobule’s 1990 MCA Records debut album on vinyl in a favorite Chicago record store, I bought it without knowing anything about her. This was at a time when we didn’t have our phones in our pockets to search for information about the artist on the internet. The LP stayed in my collection until, as vinyl was falling out of fashion, I replaced it with a CD a few years later.
Early in my career as an entertainment journalist, I received a promo copy of Jill’s eponymous 1995 Atlantic Records album. That year, Atlantic Records was one of the labels at the forefront of signing and heavily promoting queer artists, including Melissa Ferrick and Extra Fancy, and its roster included the self-titled album by Jill. It was a smart move, as the single “I Kissed A Girl” became a hit on radio and its accompanying video (featuring Fabio!) was in heavy rotation on MTV (when they still played videos).
Unfortunately for Jill, she was a victim of record label missteps. When 1997’s wonderful “Happy Town” failed to repeat the success, Atlantic dumped her. That was Atlantic’s loss, because her next album, the superb “Pink Pearl” contained “Heroes” and “Mexican Wrestler,” two of her most beloved songs. Sadly, Beyond Music, the label that released that album ceased to exist after just a few years. To her credit, the savvy Jill had also started independently releasing music (2004’s “The Folk Years”). That was a smart move because her next major-label release, the brilliant “Underdog Victorious” on Artemis Records, met a similar fate when that label folded.
With her 2009 album “California Years,” Jill launched her own indie label, Pinko Records, on which she would release two more outstanding full-length discs, 2014’s “Dottie’s Charms” (on which she collaborated with some of her favorite writers, including David Hadju, Rick Moody, Mary Jo Salter, and Jonathan Lethem), and 2018’s stunning “Nostalgia Kills.” Jill’s cover of the late Warren Zevon’s “Don’t Let Us Get Sick” on “Nostalgia Kills” was particularly poignant as she had toured with him as an opening act.
Jill was a road warrior, constantly on tour, and her live shows were something to behold. My first interview with Jill took place at the Double Door in Chicago in early August of 1995, when she was the opening act for legendary punk band X. She had thrown her back out the previous day and was diagnosed with a herniated disc. To be comfortable, she was lying down on a fabulous-‘50s sofa. “I feel like I’m at my shrink’s,” she said to me, “Do you want me to talk about my mother?”
That sense of humor, which permeated and enriched her music, was one of many reasons to love Jill. I was privileged to interview her for seven of her albums. Everything you would want to know about her was right there in her honest lyrics, in which she balanced her distinctive brand of humor with serious subject matter. Drawing on her life experiences in songs such as “Bitter,” “Underachiever,” “One of These Days,” “Freshman,” “Jetpack,” “Nothing To Prove,” “Forbidden Thoughts of Youth,” “Island of Lost Things,” “Where Do I Begin,” “Almost Great,” and “Big Shoes,” made her songs as personal as they were universal, elicited genuine affection and concern from her devoted fans.
While she was a consummate songwriter, Jill also felt equally comfortable covering songs made famous by others, including “Just A Little Lovin’” (on the 2000 Dusty Springfield tribute album “Forever Dusty”) and “Stoned Soul Picnic” (from the 1997 Laura Nyro tribute album “Time and Love”). Jill also didn’t shy away from political subject matter in her music with “Resistance Song,” “Soldiers of Christ,” “Attic,” “Heroes,” “Under the Disco Ball,” and the incredible “America Back” as prime examples.
Here’s something else worth mentioning about Jill. She was known for collaboration skills. As a songwriter, she maintained a multi-year creative partnership with Robin Eaton (“I Kissed A Girl” and many others), as well as Richard Barone, the gay frontman of the renowned band The Bongos. Jill’s history with Barone includes performing together at a queer Octoberfest event in Chicago in 1996. Writer and comedian Julie Sweeney, of “SNL” and “Work in Progress” fame was another Chicago collaborator with Sobule (Sweeney lives in a Chicago suburb), where they frequently performed their delightful “The Jill and Julia Show.” John Doe, of the aforementioned band X, also collaborated with Jill in the studio (“Tomorrow Is Breaking” from “Nostalgia Kills”), as well as in live performances.
On a very personal note, in 2019, when I was in the process of arranging a reading at the fabulous NYC gay bookstore Bureau of General Services – Queer Division, I reached out to Jill and asked her if she would like to be on the bill with me. We alternated performing; I would read a couple of poems, and Jill would sing a couple of songs. She even set one of my poems to music, on the spot.
Jill had an abundance of talent, and when she turned her attention to musical theater, it paid off in a big way. Her stage musical “F*ck 7th Grade,” a theatrical piece that seemed like the next logical step in her career, had its premiere at Pittsburgh’s City Theatre in the fall of 2020, during the height of the pandemic. The unique staging (an outdoor drive-in stage at which audience members watched from their cars) was truly inspired. “F*ck 7th Grade” went on to become a New York Times Critic’s pick, as well as earning a Drama Desk nomination.
In honor of the 30th anniversary of Jill’s eponymous 1995 album, reissue label Rhino Records is re-releasing it on red vinyl. Jill and I had been emailing each other to arrange a time for an interview. We even had a date on the books for the third week of May.
When she died in a house fire in Minnesota on May 1 at age 66, Jill received mentions on network and cable news shows. She was showered with attention from major news outlets, including obits in the New York Times and Rolling Stone (but not Pitchfork, who couldn’t be bothered to review her music when she was alive). Is it wrong to think that if she’d gotten this much attention when she was alive she could have been as big as Taylor Swift? I don’t think so.
Music & Concerts
Tom Goss returns with ‘Bear Friends Furever Tour’
Out singer/songwriter to perform at Red Bear Brewing Co.
Singer Tom Goss will bring his “Bear Friends Furever Tour” to D.C. on Sunday, June 8 at 8 p.m. at Red Bear Brewing Co.
Among the songs he will perform will be “Bear Soup,” the fourth installment in his beloved bear song anthology series. Following fan favorites like “Bears,” “Round in All the Right Places,” and “Nerdy Bear,” this high-energy, bass-thumping banger celebrates body positivity, joyful indulgence, and the vibrant spirit of the bear subculture.
For more details, visit Tom Goss’s website.
Aussie pop icon Kylie Minogue brings her acclaimed “Tension” world tour to D.C. next Tuesday at 7:30 p.m. at the Capital One Arena. Tickets are still available at Ticketmaster.
The show features songs spanning her long career, from 1987 debut single, “The Loco-Motion,” to “Padam, Padam” from her album, “Tension.”
Sinners and Saints bar vandalized in suspected anti-LGBTQ hate crime
The true cost of cutting DEI
Trans performer, juggler premiering one-woman show
Indian Supreme Court orders government to reconsider trans blood donor policy
Adams Morgan queer bar broken into and vandalized
Looking back at 50 years of Pride in D.C
Wes Moore signs HIV decriminalization bill
D.C. Black Pride 2025: Events, parties, and empowerment
Marjorie Taylor Greene’s bill to criminalize gender affirming care advances
Frank Kameny’s legacy lives on
-
a&e features3 days agoLooking back at 50 years of Pride in D.C
-
Maryland4 days agoWes Moore signs HIV decriminalization bill
-
District of Columbia4 days agoD.C. Black Pride 2025: Events, parties, and empowerment
-
Congress5 days agoMarjorie Taylor Greene’s bill to criminalize gender affirming care advances