Jonny Lang's Date with Destiny

Inheritance of the prodigy: a gift and a curse, a blessing and a burden, and reconciliation of these nettlesome and ironic dualities has proved elusive if not impossible in the history of our time. Happy Birthday. What does one get for the 19-year-old rock star who has everything? A box of condoms? A Bible? Some fresh air?

While watching Jonny Lang do his thang, one is immediately struck dumb by his stage presence and it is a short leap to comparisons, which are as endemic to the human species as swimming is to the salmon. Through a rocko-historical-entertainment kaleidoscope at the Austin Music Hall, I swear I saw 14 different people up on stage. I saw Jonny Lang. I saw Leo Dicaprio. I heard Stevie Ray Vaughan. I imagined Val Kilmer and Kevin Bacon. I heard Joe Cocker. And, being the tragic writer, I smelled trouble.

It would be easy to spend the length and breadth of this space waxing musically and poetically (inseparable, these) about blues, guitar and the seemingly limitless horizons of a Real Genius. It would be simple play to play on the play, and to wallow in the wake of a naturally sexy, dynamic young star with a fresh faced grin and the obvious air of someone in love with what he does and is. Never take the facile path, some wise and sad someone once mumbled, to the reception of the few.

We are gripped by an age where childhood is abbreviated and adolescence is elongated. where youth's fountain is sought with an unparalleled fervor, where biotechnology and medicine enable the clamoring throngs to try and subvert the evolutionary process of decay using nipping, tucking, sucking and the psychoanalytical time machine. In this epoch, wisdom is an anachronism, for Native Americans and rest homes. Where old is, well, old and the flower of youth has become a plastic construction and arrangement, overvalued after the fact and strained for after its necessary span has come to a close.

To JLang, then, and the incredible odds he faces nightly, as his star brightens, the noose tightens, and we begin to wonder if he will be allowed to experience firsthand the lovesickness and tender failures his borrowed
songs are replete with.

On Jan. 19 he turned 19, and yet his deep, soulful beltings, from a voice with equal parts grinding gravel and innocent grace, remind one of a long, arduous journey into the cruel, finite world. There was once a time when precocious meant Shirley Temple. Now it means Jon Benet Ramsey. The publicity trail, littered with Jennifer Capriati and annoy queen Drew Barrymore, makes veterans and casualties of the smattering of truly talented individuals. And so I can't help but recall Stevie Ray as I admired the showmanship of a kid from Fargo whose mother moved him to the strange music mecca of Minneapolis at the ripe age of 14 so that the coronation could commence.

I can't help but worry about Jonny Lang as I watch the women swoon-the 15 and 50 mix of the crowd in Austin was amazing-as mothers stand with their breathless daughters and I can positively feel their legs weaken and their libidos glisten.

The lyrics are blues, unrequited love, lost romance, broken promises, missed chances and airy, breezy dreams of reunion. And the guitar is fast, clear and then slow, improvisational...not cheesy speed white boy guitar, this boy is an honorary Soul Brother, that much is apparent.

His face is clean, lean, and he has the skinny muscularity that usually doesn't last, unless you're snaky, pill-driven, impossible Iggy Pop. He has a wide-mouthed grin that swallows an audience, and this jamface never leaves him, in slow moments or not-so-slow. There is a picture on one of his burgeoning websites-and the popularity and reach of the Internet are surely a PR man's dream-of JLang with Steven Tyler, which would make a dentist weary. Big Mouths Club of Rock America, with Mick Jagger in the brochure as a founding father and Stevie Wonder with a magical montage tucked into the pages.

He is a conglomeration of stars, yet with his own magnetism and definition. With early and extreme soul, JLang is carving out his place in the sun and if appearances are to be trusted, he is a nice boy. He dutifully reflects his influences-I heard the Prince in his funky moments even before a quick website glance revealed that the Knight of Nomenclature wrote a Lang staple called "I Am"-and proceeds from them through Buddy Guy and into a unique spiraling trajectory that hints at synthesis, of the aforementioned Cocker, plus Delbert McClinton and of course, SRVaughan. Snippets of Clapton and Robert Cray, to boot. For we operate with relational thinking intact and we remember the stars that have fallen from the stratus in the past.

Simply, the cat can play his ass off, he looks good, and the sky is the proverbial limit. Sound familiar? Scare you? Outside the venue, one has already banished the vague unpleasant taste of its below-average acoustics, because our hero has transcended the din to craft out a marvelous performance. Instead, the focus is on the Scene, the horde of leopard-skinned hormones pulling at the fence separating it from destiny, so few feet inside, unseen but anticipated with blind, animal fury.

Somewhere beyond the huge trailer and the waiting limos, HE is there. Noted: 20-something diehards, primping and preening, short of breath and long on fantasy, waiting impatiently for a glimpse, a shred, a glance, a glimmer. Over-the-hill wrinkle battlers, squeezing the last ounce of self-esteem from their constricting garter belts and liquored confidence. Waiting for the sign.

It will not come, but part of the duty of a groupie is in the endless, fruitless wait. For on that one night when fate convenes and one is called, well, it is worth the flap, the smoke-filled halls and the sale of ego. His rendition of the old Dead fave, Good Morning Little Schoolgirl, for them was a call to arms... and legs. And the rest, in the narrow and unseen places, the call is a pull, a summons, a sorcerer's spell cast upon the willing.

Such is the blessing of the rock star. Such is the burden. He is headed to the West, and to Hawaii, probably, no assuredly, even as we stand there in the cool air of waning electricity. They hope against hope, these stockinged, heeled warriors. But they have to know. You ever been to Hawaii? To perform? To be loved? Me either. But Jonny Lang is in transit, in his unworld which is the only real world to the few, the proud, the preordained. So where is the development? Where is the space to grow? Where is the languid repose of the college Friday afternoon, when the spirit and mood are of time, nothing but time, an eternity of unfolding and dilatory evolution. At age 19, JLang is forever trapped in the vortex of his skills, and one wonders against wonder if he will stay true to himself. Will he get to fall in love with someone who really cares for him, as opposed to one of the more clever followers who seduces him in worship, or one of his stardom cellmates, fucked up beyond recompense by the same impossible demands and doomed to self-destruct under the maddeningly bright and unforgiving lights of exposure? Was it Fiona Apple padding by the trailer juggling her existential angst? Or was it a ghost, the ghost in JLang's stirring and one might tentatively assume autobiographical cut, Wander This World?

We are all in love with Jonny Lang, enamored of his graceful, knowledgeable fingers, his pure sex appeal and his grin which stretches expansively as the Badlands across a face which is on the minds of millions. He is a true rock star, this lucky motherfucker. Or is he lucky? What is luck? The residue of design? Something coincidental? Transcendental? It is a responsibility. And for someone who should by all rights be ignoring his calculus homework for an anonymous and hence glorious pitcher of beer in some dusty roadhouse, the position he has on the other side of the lens is a precarious one at best. They say that youth is wasted on the young. Maybe that is true. Superstardom is imposed on the young, and it is this fact which gives us some of the buzz we feel as we wander away from the crash site. There is something enticing about someone who is too young to be doing it, doing it. And doing it with unrivaled élan.

But the sense of foreboding, which I am sure was not a majority nag Saturday night when the heavy echo of a great bluesman's guitar hung about like a shroud of mystery and fog, has not abandoned me in the sober milieu of the keyboard and low-wattage weekday shuffle. It dogs me in my anonymity, and it is not the simple answer that I am envious of the Kid. It just means that I know my history. The warmup act for JLang's traveling turnon was a gal named Beth Hart, whose Janis Joplin act is really damn good. Janis. Jim. Jimi. Eight more JLang moons to 27, for those who know numerology and the mystic science of the omen.

The distant smoke of the fire which consumes. The scarcely perceptible uttering of the Muse, warning of the price attendant in greatness. Blessings, curses and the all-embracing pride in the unusual, the prodigious. As the tour continues, I brace myself for the news that will hopefully never come, the informing, the return of the tragic and the birth of a legend which is usually cemented in its death, whether real or, perhaps worse, symbolic.

BraveNews World
Email Webmaster
Staff Info