British soul man James Hunter’s support set for Chris Isaak at Wolf Trap Thursday night was one of the rare occasions when I get dispatched to review an opening act. (No that I count them or anything, but it was my 100th piece for the Paper of Record.) I hadn’t planned on sticking around for Isaak afterwards, but I did and he turned out to be pretty great, too. He had to be, to avoid being upstaged by Hunter. When Isaak took the stage half an hour after Hunter finished, 30 people remained in line at the top of lawn, sans a view of the stage, to have Hunter autograph their merch. Including my girlfriend, who an hour earlier had never heard of the dude. We’d politely declined when offered backstage passes earlier (which has never happened to me before, actually), but then we ended up standing in line, at Miss Crooks’s gentle insistence, to have Hunter sign the CD I bought and, er, the poster she wanted for her office. This spells trouble, methinks. But $10 for a cool Hatch Show Print poster is a bargain. (Isaak, meanwhile, was charging $10 for glossy 8″ x 10″ photos of himself. And people were buying them.)
I’m way too young, obviously, to have seen Mr. Dynamite in his prime, but I’ve seen Sharon Jones a couple of times now, and I bet Hunter could pull that caliber of show as a headliner, no problem. I worried I might suffer a vicarious groin-pull just from watching him dance during his last number, “Talkin’ ‘Bout My Love.” Hunter does look more than a little like a slightly softer version of the famously flexible Belgian martial artist and actor Jean-Claude Van Damme, whose brief tenure as a star of films that actually got released in cinemas petered out around the same tim Hunter’s career was taking off. And it’s not like you’ve ever seen the two of them together in one place, is it? I mean, if Steven Seagal can have a career in music . . .
James Hunter at Wolf Trap, Thursday, August 21, 2008
The Setlist
01 She’s Got a Way
02 No Smoke Without Fire
03 Baby, Don’t Do It (Five Royales cover)
04 Hand It Over
05 Jacqueline
06 Don’t Do Me No Favours
07 Talkin’ ‘Bout My Love
The Band
Lee Badau — baritone saxophone
Damian Hand — tenor saxphone
Kyle Koehler — keyboards
Jonathan Lee — drums
Jason Wilson — bass
James Hunter — vocals, guitar
SWAGGER, NOT STYLE 