Laurie Anderson on the left and her husband Lou Reed on the right performing in Chandler, Arizona this afternoon to benefit the Yongey Peace Prevails Center of Phoenix. The show started quite early, at 3:00 p.m. – the encore was finished before dark! The first highlight of the day was Shangao Cai and the Phoenix Chinese Art Ensemble performing three traditional pieces, one Chinese, one Tibetan, the last Mongolian. Before I move on to Lou Reed’s and Laurie Anderson’s performance I have to say I was shocked at how many people left during the concert – I can only imagine it was not what they expected. As for us, we were thrilled with the show. The best I can describe it is as though it were a Post-Bush American interpretation of a traditional Hindu Raga. Raga is Sanskrit for color or mood and that is just what these two legends of the music industry created. Where a Raga performance picks a ground note for a drone, Lou and Laurie used a drone that didn’t always follow a continuous tone but would shift between the artists from a synthesized noise to Laurie Anderson’s violin, to Lou Reed’s guitar or a device in front of him we could not identify from the audience and at other times the drone was replaced by Laurie Anderson’s storytelling with a simple melody playing beneath, before the drone would come rising back up. As I said, I was thrilled by this performance since it felt we were afforded the opportunity to see these two artists genuinely work their craft and not dredge up their famous past. Steve Hunter of Alice Cooper fame joined the duo for a while, adding another layer of ambiance for the audience to try and digest. How nice it was to see these artists paint their canvas live and in real-time for those of us lucky enough to attend.

To see a traditional Raga performed by Veena Sahasrabuddhe click here to watch on YouTube.