Venue: The Showbox - Seattle, WA
Date: October 20, 2006
Opener: Alice Smith
Citizen Cope (aka Clarence Greenwood) has three shows scheduled for this weekend in Seattle, and they’re all sold out.
The Venue—The Showbox— is located in the heart of downtown Seattle, near the famous Pike Place Market where people throw fish and other people buy giant bouquets of flowers. Still, by 9 PM on the first night of Cope’s three-night Seattle run, the crowd inside has completely forgotten about anything beyond the doors of the Showbox.
Alice Smith
Citizen Cope comes onstage quietly, until he’s recognized by the eager, packed house. But it’s too early for his set. He’s just there to announce “a really incredible artist that’s about to come out here.” The crowd trusts his opinion and welcomes Alice Smith warmly.
Smith’s face, as she begins to rip into "Fake is the New Real" is almost deadpan. It takes much of the first song to match up her face with the mind-blowing voice coming out of it.
At one point, she’s at least three or four feet from the mic, and her voice comes through as if her lips were on it. This is a lady who can sing. What’s more, there’s really nobody to whom she can be compared. Her music ranges from soul to gospel and rock, circus music, r&b, folk-blues and funk, and often all within the same song.
By mid-set, she’s relaxed a bit and the crowd is completely sold. After she leaves the stage, her guitarist stays behind, handing out CDs to at least a hundred or more people who have shoved each other hard and eagerly against the stage, hands in the air, calling out, “Over here, please. Right here.”
Citizen Cope
After a rather long break between sets, Cope hits the stage with what has, at least in Seattle, been his biggest hit to date. “Bullet and a Target” is an instant sing-along, joining the voices of one of the most diverse crowds I’ve seen in a long time. Middle-aged women and college girls, hippy boys and hip-hop kids, 30-somethings on dates and groups of men all join in, “What you’ve done here is put yourself between a bullet and a target.”
This is followed by biggest hit no. 2, last year’s “Sideways,” the extended live version.
To hear Cope on CD, you may never think of his music as something that would inspire such an enthusiastic sing-along, but it happens, nonetheless. In a recent interview, he told me (about "Sideways"), "They'll come and sing along with all the words at my shows ... but they do that with a lot of my songs." Obviously, he wasn’t exaggerating.
For the next hour, plus, Citizen Cope and his incredibly tight back-up band slalom through his canon of songs, both old and new, inspiring sing-alongs on even the newest of songs for which the crowd couldn’t possibly have had time to memorize the lyrics before the show.
Alternating at almost a per-song rate between acoustic and electric guitars, Citizen Cope is part Bob Marley, part Dave Matthews, part Bob Dylan. However one would choose to describe his music, the crowd doesn’t seem to care. They love him and every single word he sings.
