Critic's pick: Ashlee
Simpson with Pepper's Ghost @ Ryman Auditorium (
by Marc Hirsh
originally published in Nashville Scene, April 7-13, 2005
For those paying close attention to her Saturday Night Live debacle, it was clear that Ashlee
Simpson’s unforgivable
sin wasn’t her lip-synching, exactly, it was the smokescreen of
inconsistent
excuses that immediately followed. The band played the wrong song. It
was acid
reflux. Everybody does it. All of it
announced to the world, I screwed up and
I’m not going to take responsibility for it. But six weeks later, I
had the
pleasure of finding myself at a
Christmas concert thrown by a Boston Top 40
station, and a funny thing happened: on a bill that crammed 14 acts
into five
and a half hours, Simpson delivered the night’s third best performance,
no big
deal when dealing with Gavin DeGraw and Simple Plan but pretty
impressive when
you consider that she also smoked a phoning-it-in John Mayer and even
Gwen
Stefani, who hid behind her marching band and Harajuku girls. And she
did it by
doing what she should have done in the first place: singing her
pleasantly
catchy pop/hard rock songs with confidence and a clear absence of
electronic
assistance, like a post-Britney Pat Benatar for the tween set. It’s the
closest
Simpson has come to contrition for the whole mess, and it’s good enough
for me.
Not convinced by my defense of Ashlee Simpson,
above? Maybe
you’ll take the word of her tourmates Pepper’s Ghost, whose
just-released Shake The Hand That Shook The World was
recorded in ProTools-free analog with Andy Johns, who you might know
from some
records called Exile On Main Street, Led
Zeppelin IV and Marquee Moon. With songs that
recall the Flamin’ Groovies (“How
’Bout It Now?”), Badfinger (“Heavy Body Bag”) and late-’70s/early ’80s
cock
rock (“Hang On My Shoulder”), the