New Haven has seen much better days in the live music department. Twenty years ago (before my time in the City of Elms) there were half a dozen good live music venues. 15 years ago when I moved here there were still four solid places to see music. Now, with Toad’s Place on life support despite the best efforts of the booking people, there are really only a few places with live music and most of those are one or two nights per week. One of the best venues is the Sunday night shows at BAR. I’ve seen some pretty good shows there in the past few months. The room sounds pretty good, the sound system is decent, and they’ve been getting better and better acts. Sunday, January 5 was Mary Lou Lord, a singer songwriter I’d heard of more than I’d heard.

The first thing I noticed about Lord is that she’s real short and real cute. Her voice isn’t huge, but it’s also not thin or tinny. She’s a hell of a singer and very sure using all of her range. She’s not going to scare Leo Kottke with her guitar playing, and she has occasional tempo problems within songs, but she’s a very capable accompanist. After her voice, her greatest asset has to be an incredibly charming stage presence. She’s very at ease on stage, and she’s an engaging performer.

She started her set with a series of her own songs, many about relationships. She writes super lyrics that go with straightforward folky changes. One lovely, bittersweet song was about Elliot Smith, with whom she toured and whom she clearly liked both musically and personally. Apparently Lord is known for what she did next; a whole bunch of covers. Included were “Straight to Hell” by the Clash, songs by Elliot Smith and Shawn Colvin, and some others I recognized but don’t know who wrote them. In between tracks she kept up the funny stories and commentary, including at one point a short homage to Lemmy of Motorhead fame. It’s not often a pixyish songwriter takes time out of a set to smoke cigarettes and talk reverently about heavy metal’s Ur speed freak.

However, the highlight of the evening for me was when she did a cover of Richard Thompson’s “Vincent Black Lightning.” I’ve been a Thompson fan for a long time, I’ve seen him solo a bunch of times and with a band once. Many years ago my girlfriend at the time was a hippie who insisted we go to the Newport Folk Festival. I was not terribly pleased, but when I saw that Thompson would play it improved my opinion a great deal. Most of the set was songs I’d heard before, and he did his usual bang up job with them. One song, though, I’d never heard. A song about a guy and his motorcycle and the pretty girl he’s after. I was floored, it was a seamless combination of Irish characters (James and Red Molly), Thompson’s British melody and slinky fingerstyle guitar, with this incongruous but brilliant addition of the James Dean/Marlon Brando outlaw biker mythology. I was sure it was a Thompson nugget I’d missed on Harry the Human Fly or something, but after spending weeks pawing through my records I couldn’t find it. I assumed it was a cover and that I’d never hear it again, but I was wrong. It was on his NEXT record.

To me, it was one of those songs that is simply uncoverable. Mind you, I’ve gone on stage to play and sing “Sympathy for the Devil,” “Cinnamon Girl,” and just about every legendary blues song in history, from “Ramblin’ on my Mind” through “Bright Lights, Big City” and “I Just Wanna Make Love to You” and on to “Red House” and “All Your Love.” But that Thompson song was such a signature I couldn’t possibly hear anyone else singing it. His voice, the propulsive alternating bass line, the accent. All of them would have to be there for that song to work. However, Mary Lou Lord did a magnificent job with the song. She simplified the arrangement a little (few can play like Thompson), retooled the vocal style a bit by singing with a little more breath to get a touch of rock’n’roll sneer, and went about her work fearlessly. It was an impressive display, and by the time she finished I was completely won over.

The final piece that made the puzzle such a good one was the crowd. I’ve lived in New Haven a long time, and I got to see a lot of good friends and people who aren’t good friends yet, while there was an unusual scarcity of local assholes. Mary is recommended, and so is BAR on Sunday nights.