Tom Rush at the Union Chapel
As we listened to Tom Rush interpreting Jackson Browne’s “These Days” on Sunday night, it was impossible not to reflect that here was an 85-year-old man singing a song written in 1964 by 16-year-old. All time is eternally present, as the poet wrote.
Rush recorded “These Days” in 1970. He wasn’t the first, but Browne was among the songwriters whose work he promoted by placing their songs on his albums when they were still little-known. Others were James Taylor, who saw him as a mentor, and Joni Mitchell, whose “Urge for Going” was also in Sunday’s repertoire in Islington’s beautiful Union Chapel.
Renarkably, this was Rush’s first London gig since the 1960s, when he was one of many singer-songwriters touted as the “new Dylan”. Goodness knows why he’d never been back, because — for those who’d never seen him before — he turned out to be a wonderfully humorous raconteur as well as a still-agile guitarist and a singer who knows how to work around the limitations imposed by age.
We were reminded that here is a man who learned “Drop Down Mama” from Sleepy John Estes and “Panama Limited” from Bukka White at a time in the 1960s when he was at Harvard and sharing the stage of Boston’s Club 47 with those blues legends. And then he could veer off into the rousing country of Lee Clayton’s “Ladies Love Outlaws”, made famous by Waylon Jennings, or to the knowing senior-citizen wit of his own “The Remember Song”. “Siena’s Song”, written for his daughter when she was a child, proved enough to give doting fatherhood a good name.
And, of course, there was the song for which he will always be remembered: “No Regrets”, recorded for The Circle Game in 1968, made a hit by the Walker Brothers in 1975, its cadences now subtly reshaped by the lightly grizzled baritone of the man who wrote it, and still among the very finest of letting-go songs.
* Tom Rush’s most recent album, Garden Old, Flowers New, is available via his website: http://www.tomrush.com
