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There's an old saw about the lady and the tiger behind two closed doors. Pick one door and you get the lady. Pick the other and it's the tiger. Alexis P. Suter is both the lady and the tiger.
I've seen her many times before, and even introduced her once at a theater in Vermont. That said, never in my memory can I remember being so wrong in my expectations of what I was about to hear.
At Caffe Lena on Aug. 29, Suter took a sold-out crowd to blues-rock heaven, backed by a band that challenged the Stones for raw intensity.
Together for more than two decades, the group -- fronted by two brothers, Jimmy Bennett on electric guitar and his younger sibling, Peter, on bass -- showed off the hard-to-accomplish skills of lending nuance to arrangements that blew through the Caffe like a tsunami in Hurricane Katrina: razor sharp, loud and intense.
Two Sets
Suter played two sets for a total of an hour and a half onstage. She channeled blues legend Howlin' Wolf on his classic Chicago blues standard "Built for Comfort Not for Speed" (she weighed 285 pounds, which is less than the last time she played Caffe Lena a year ago on the day her 101-year-old mother died), but most of her repertoire was originals, including several from her just-released "Just Stay High" album -- which she says is not about getting stoned.
Her mother was a Pentecostal minister and gospel singer, but Suter often mixes the sacred and the profane in her vast repertoire. Not this night. She stuck to the secular.
She performed the Beatles' "Let It Be," which brought her to tears. She led with songs from the new album, but covered material reaching back into a career that began a quarter century ago. Vicky Bell assisted on vocals. She also co-writes many of Suter's best works.
Standout songs included "God Gave Me The Blues," "Some People," "Breathe" and "Be On Your Way," as well as the title track of her new album. Also performed was "Tell My Baby What's Wrong," "Knockin' on Heaven's Door," "I'm A Ram," "The Shape I'm In," "Big Man" and encore of "Take Me to The River."