By Annie Holub
Arizona Daily Wildcat
November 13, 1997

The Ani DiFranco Experience

Photo courtesy of Righteous Babe Records Arizona Daily Wildcat Ani DiFranco: onstage and off, she's the shit.

Ani DiFranco live is like the best day you ever had, the best week you ever had, a time so great you wish you could convert it to a virtual reality world where you could escape whenever you felt the need.

The last time Ani DiFranco played in Tucson, in June of 1996 at the Rialto Theater, the show was sweating emotion; it was about "500 degrees outside," as DiFranco recollected on stage Tuesday night at Centennial Hall, and people were packed into the venue, creating a tight close-knit atmosphere of fans who share a common love.

Tuesday's show, despite the cool weather and rain, was no different. When you see a performer who inspires you, who takes your pathetic civilian heart out of its internal cavity and tells it why it needs to keep beating monotonously every day, one thing is inevitable: You're going to lose your voice.

Rory McLeod, who opened the show, is one of those guys who is such a damn good musician that he can't just settle on playing one instrument at a time. McLeod could sing and play harmonica almost simultaneously. A regular one-man-band, on one song he played the harmonica and spoons and sang while stamping his feet. I don't know how a Brit could sound so much like a purebred American folk musician. He reminded me of going to the Fourth Avenue Street Fair when I was a kid.

It's a good thing I'm a writer and not a broadcast journalist because I'd sound pretty stupid saying, "Word-of mouth punk-folk phenomenon Ani DiFranco gave a riveting live performance Tuesday night at Centennial Hall" while my voice cracks and grinds from singing along to songs off of DiFranco's 1995 and 1996 studio albums, Not a Pretty Girl and Dilate, respectively. The current tour is to promote her double compact disc live album, Living in Clip, which is basically as close to the virtual reality of a live show as one can get these days.

DiFranco performed mostly newer material, which was somewhat disappointing for those of us familiar with her energetic live renditions of older songs. But only somewhat.

She played some new songs which were nothing short of mesmerizing. The entire audience, which is usually saturated with high-pitched screams whenever Ani spits out her brilliant lyrics, was completely silent, awestruck, watching as she sang wistfully and beautifully while wrenching every note possible in that particular key out of her guitar. She can do things with that box of wood with six strings on it that would make Jimi Hendrix smile. Only Ani DiFranco can run an acoustic guitar through a Crybaby pedal and make it rock.

DiFranco speaks to her audience, telling stories about things like weird perfume bottles in drug stores, and even in a place as big as Centennial Hall, she created conversation. She'd be talking and someone would yell out something and Ani would say, "Yeah, exactly!"

That right there is the essence of folk music: people being able to actually communicate with each other through music, learn from it, build upon it.