Juliana Hatfield at Boot & Saddle: Still standing, still rocking
Most anniversary tours are superfluous victory laps, brandishing a faded brass ring once seized and sometimes lost. But on Monday night, when Juliana Hatfield took the stage of the Boot & Saddle on the first of a two-night stand, to perform her 1993 album Become What You Are, it felt like something both more profound and less complicated, not a triumphant boast but a simple statement: I'm still here.
Most anniversary tours are superfluous victory laps, brandishing a faded brass ring once seized and sometimes lost. But on Monday night, when Juliana Hatfield took the stage of the Boot & Saddle on the first of a two-night stand, to perform her 1993 album Become What You Are, it felt like something both more profound and less complicated, not a triumphant boast but a simple statement: I'm still here.
Or rather We, since the tour marks the reunion of the short-lived Juliana Hatfield Three, with bassist Dean Fisher and drummer Todd Phillips joining her for the first time in more than two decades. (The reunion also produced a new album, Whatever, My Love, showcased in a brief second set.) Although the trio lasted long enough only to record and tour behind a single album - Fisher and Phillips recorded with Hatfield both before and after, but not at the same time - it nonetheless provided the foundation for Hatfield's brief, blazing moment in the pop-culture sun. "My Sister," a minor-key anthem about her love-hate relationship with a fictitious sibling (actually her older brother's girlfriend), topped the Modern Rock charts and got Hatfield on the cover of Spin; the melancholy "Spin the Bottle," which also wound up on the sound track of the Gen X touchstone flick Reality Bites, confirmed her place in alt-rock history.
Although already a veteran of college rock darlings Blake Babies, Hatfield squirmed in the spotlight. Lumped into countless "Women in Rock" packages beside the likes of PJ Harvey and Liz Phair, she responded by suggesting to an interviewer that women were biologically incapable of being great guitar players. (One shudders to think what the feminist blogosphere would have done with that.)
But as she played through Become What You Are on Monday night, the contortions of her left hand on the guitar neck made clear that, even if it never flaunts its complexity, the album is full of unexpected turns and odd chords. Hatfield's breathy, vibratoless voice is almost childlike in its lack of guile, but her lyrics are full of poison, much of it injected into her own veins.
With its mixture of bravado ("A Dame With a Rod," "I Got No Idols") and self-lacerating vulnerability (the loner's anthem "For the Birds"), Become What You Are sounds less like a product of its times than of Hatfield's. It's the work of a woman in her mid-20s boldly striking out on her own, then peeking over her shoulder to see whether anyone is following. Twenty-plus years later, most of Hatfield's peers have drifted away from music, but she's still standing, and, anniversary shows notwithstanding, it doesn't seem that she wastes much time looking in the rearview mirror.
