John Hiatt
Live At The Hiatt

Every now and then you can still find some nice surprises in record stores. It may also happen that, while browsing without a clear idea of what to buy, you come across cardboard CDs like the one that landed in my hands a few days ago, that is, a CD edition of a John Hiatt concert that until 2006 was probably confined to some bootleg.

It is a great London performance from October 30, 1993 released in 2006 for the "Performance Classics" series from Hip-O Select, featuring John Hiatt in top form and accompanied by a very solid rock band. The Guilty Dogs, with Michael Ward on guitar, Davey Faragher on bass, and Michael Urbano on drums, are a determined group with no frills.

It was the tour of the album "Perfectly good guitar" and the four played rock with great impact perfectly, even though they started with "Through your hands", an acoustic piece, but proceeded with the most brilliant American music, varying from rock'n'roll of "Child of the wild blue yonder" to the swamp of "Loving a hurricane" and the rock-blues of "When you hold me tight" and "I don't even try."

"Perfectly good guitar" is also represented by the splendid title track and "Something wild", a piece that was initially entrusted by John Hiatt to the verve and voice of Iggy Pop in "Brick by brick".

He has a warm and powerful voice and demonstrates it even in a slow and very bluesy piece like "Feels like rain", while with "Slow turning" it returns to a Creedence-style rock. It then closes with a slow and dreamy track called "Lipstick Sunset."

Ultimately, the CD in question is the summary of a beautiful concert where the music reaches a high level of emotionality and quality; it's not very long (lasting less than an hour) and shows how John Hiatt is perhaps not a very well-known artist, but of great stature and deserving of much more notoriety.