Revered rocker overcomes a cold for special San Francisco show
Legendary singer/songwriter and producer Nick Lowe has a love affair with San Francisco that stretches back to the late 1970s — a time when he was in a pub rock band called Rockpile. He’s since performed at most venues and in multiple configurations, and now has friends in the city.
“I’ve got very happy memories in town. I love playing here,” he tells SFGATE.
“San Francisco was one of the first cities that really liked our band,” Lowe, 77, continues. Local impresario Bill Graham “had us on whenever he could,” opening at large venues or headlining Wolfgang’s.
Of course, by the time Lowe and co. were playing the famed North Beach haunt, he had already made a name for himself as a songwriter and producer for the likes of Elvis Costello, the Damned, the Pretenders, and many others. His solo work — today a whopping 15 studio albums — includes canonical earworms such as “Cruel To Be Kind,” “I Love The Sound Of Breaking Glass” and “(What’s So Funny ’Bout) Peace, Love and Understanding.”
After performing at Hardly Strictly Bluegrass this October — at least his fifth appearance at the festival to date — Lowe returned to the City by the Bay on March 31 for an acoustic show at the recently reopened Castro Theatre. While he has spent the past few years touring with Nashville rockers Los Straitjackets, Lowe was preceded by Minneapolis-raised sibling duo the Cactus Blossoms.
“It’s a double-header,” Lowe said ahead of the performance, adding that he hasn’t played an acoustic set in a year. “I love being able to do these acoustic shows, because I can play a few different songs which don’t work so well with a twangy rock ’n’ roll group.”
Following the Everly Brothers-tight harmonies of the Cactus Blossoms — whose mostly acoustic set and soaring melodies sounded enormous in the 1,385 capacity space — Nick Lowe appeared center stage to thunderous applause. He brought with him a “souvenir” from a flight to San Diego: a slight cold. Is there anything worse than someone sneezing in your direction during a flight? Lowe asked the audience with a promise that he was not fishing for compliments.
“I’m hopped up on Sudafed and I think I can get the job done,” he continued, “but I’m going to crave your indulgence.”
Armed with just his acoustic custom Gibson Western Classic SJ-200, Nick Lowe more than proved he is the “Jesus of Cool” with a voice that no virus can dampen. Lowe’s 15-song set explored the expanse of his catalog — from the twangy questioning of opener “Where’s My Everything” and the poignant but catchy “I Live On A Battlefield” (both from 1994’s “Impossible Bird”), to the reggae-influenced “Heart” (1982’s “Nick the Knife”) and the devastating “House For Sale” (2011’s “The Old Magic”).
Beyond his timeless voice and instrumental dexterity — which rang out clear as a bell through the Castro’s updated sound system — Lowe’s true skill is his ability to create music that’s both incredibly tender and immediately catchy; heartbreaking and hopeful. Songs such as “Lately I’ve Let Things Slide” were punctuated by a brief humorous aside, while “Love Starvation” (from his latest release, 2024’s “Indoor Safari” with Los Straitjackets) highlighted Lowe’s deft blend of thematic desperation and pop sensibility.
“I do try and keep it hopeful. If you put a little humor into a sad song, it has a sort of a duel effect: It can elevate the sadness, the poignancy of a song,” Lowe told SFGATE. “But it also injects a bit of humanity into it, and a bit of hope. It helps if you make it catchy.”
Lowe made quick work of exploring hits and deeper cuts from his oeuvre. “There are certain songs that I have to do; people are disappointed if I don’t do them, and I’m very happy to do them too,” Lowe said ahead of the show. “I’m not one of those people who rolls their eyes and says, ‘Oh my god, I can’t play this bloody thing again.’ I love doing those popular songs, which I’ve been lucky enough to have, but you would go nuts if you couldn’t stick something else in.”
Among the biggest hits on Lowe’s set list: a delicate “Cruel to Be Kind,” that sparked an immediate sing-along, and “(What’s So Funny ’Bout) Peace, Love and Understanding.” (“Won’t it be great when this song is redundant?” Lowe quipped.) He also performed “The Beast In Me,” which was covered by his former father-in-law, Johnny Cash.
“It rarely happens that I have a song foisted on somebody,” Lowe told the audience at the Castro Theatre. “I wrote this song for [Johnny Cash] one night when I was quite drunk.”
Lowe recounted performing the tune the next morning — in a pitiful state, hungover and unpracticed — to a room full of Cash’s family and bandmates to little interest and much embarrassment. “God bless him, he heard something in it, and for the next 12 years, whenever I saw him, he’d say, ‘How’s the song going?’”
Lowe eventually finished the track — “I haven’t done the maths, but I think that works out as one word every two months” — which was released on “Impossible Bird.” Cash got the jump on the tune, though; his cover appeared several months before Lowe’s original on the Grammy-winning “American Recordings.”
“I wish I could just write a timeless song at will. Some sort of magic happens to make a song timeless,” Lowe told SFGATE. “I don’t have any secrets. It’s the public that seems to dictate whether a song will live on and be noticed. The only arbiter I can go by is if I actually enjoy standing up in front of people and playing it.”
After ending his set with the clap-along late ’70s gem “I Knew the Bride (When She Used to Rock and Roll),” Lowe returned to the stage with the Cactus Blossoms’ Jack Torrey and Page Burkum for a two-song encore. The brothers provided pitch-perfect harmonies for Lowe’s 1979 song “Without Love” and the somber Rockpile track “When I Write The Book”; the trio left some in the audience wishing for a third act, where more of Lowe’s solo hits, productions and B-sides with projects like Tartan Horde could be explored and stretched out.
Nick Lowe’s return to San Francisco proved, once again, that his capital-P Pop Music is eternal. From his debut “Jesus of Cool” (retitled “Pure Pop for Now People” in the U.S.) on through to his present day influences, which include rock, soul, folk and even Broadway musicals, Lowe’s pop cred remains unchallenged.
“It was very uncool to say that you were pop back then,” he recalls. “People didn’t expect someone like me to announce that they were pop music fans. I was supposed to be doing something a little bit more raucous. But it lingers on.”