Concert series opens to packed house

Musicians David Wilcox and Tim Lauer and comedians Mack and Jamie repeatedly brought nearly 700 guests to their feet in the opening night of the third-annual Starry Nights Concert Series.

The first concert in the three-event series, which benefits the Sisters Schools Foundation, completely sold out 350 general admission seats from the single outlet in Sisters in just one hour, according to Sisters School District Superintendent Steve Swisher.

The balance of the audience included event sponsors and their friends and families.

Show organizers introduced a new twist to the event for 1999, opening the evening with comic entertainment rather than musical acts.

Mack Dryden and Jamie Alcroft, known best as the comedy team Mack and Jamie, were recruited by event co-chair Jeri Fouts from the Celebrity Ski Challenge in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

"We've worked with Jeri Fouts for 10 years at the celebrity ski event," Jamie explained. "She decided she was going to put comedy into Starry nights, and she knew we had a good sense of working a family crowd."

In order to work the crowd, Mack and Jamie did their homework in Sisters.

"We shopped town and bought everything but the antlers," quipped Mack.

"And what we need in Sisters is more shops that sell gifts and collectibles," the duo noted.

The team also studied the newspaper and asked around about local officials they could tease.

Of Central Oregon's modest commercial airport, Jamie said, "You know you're in a small-town airport when you're shuttled from the plane to the gate in a golf cart."

Mack and Jamie's interpretations of thank-you letters from Sisters Elementary students filled the Sisters High School cafetorium with laughter.

They saw a bit of an oxymoron, however, in the name "Outlaw Honor Society."

A former newspaper reporter with the Southern Mississippi Sun, Mack enjoyed joking about the southern culture of his upbringing.

The duo ended their act with a medley of songs played by Mack on the guitar, while Jamie proceeded to tape up his entire face for the singing parts.

Starry Nights co-chair Susan Arends said the comedy "adds a nice dimension" to the event.

"We wanted to give the audience something new and I'm very pleased with the results," she said.

The evening's headliner, guitarist and singer-songwriter David Wilcox, was accompanied by Nashville keyboard, percussion and production wizard Tim Lauer.

Lauer is a three-year Sisters Starry Nights veteran, having accompanied Kim Carnes in the event's first two years. Carnes and Lauer met Wilcox in Santa Fe at Fouts' ski challenge, and Lauer and Wilcox kept in touch.

"When (David) came to Nashville, we wrote and recorded a couple songs," Lauer said.

But until last Saturday evening, the two had never before played on stage together. The limits of their stage partnership were easily masked by their musical prowess, as Lauer responded invisibly to Wilcox's fluid and spontaneous key changes.

The duo opened their set accompanied by six young singers from Sisters Elementary School with a song Wilcox told the audience was "about the place where you live."

Second-graders Ellen Gott and Felicia Pledger, third-grader Phyllisha Page and her fifth-grade brother Brandon Page, fourth-grader Sean Kolb and fifth-grade Sisters Starry Nights veteran Blake Poyner led Wilcox and Lauer through four verses of Woody Guthrie's "This Land is Your Land."

Gott and Pledger sang a duet on the first verse, followed by Kolb and Phyllisha Page on the second verse, and Poyner and Brandon Page on the third verse.

All eight musicians sang together for the choruses and Wilcox added the rarely performed fourth verse deriding the concept of private land ownership.

Following "This Land..." Wilcox and Lauer gracefully escorted the audience through a 12-song set with two encores.

Songs included Wilcox's "Underneath" off his latest CD of the same name and the Wilcox/Lauer joint composition "Home Within Your Heart," also off the new CD.

Wilcox characterized his music as "emotional snapshots of times in my life, like coming home from vacation and looking at snapshots of where you've been."

With tremendous emotion and complex musical themes, he talked the audience smoothly through these moments in his life.

"The thing about performing I love is when I feel people hearing these songs for the first time," he said. "It makes them new for me."

Wilcox, who released his first album "The Nightshift Watchman" in 1988, performed with a guitar-tuning regimen that left some local musicians in awe.

"You can't copy him; he's purely original," said musician and event sponsor Ed Fitzjarrel.

Starry Nights Committee Member and 25-year music veteran Mark Kershner called Wilcox "very innovative. I liked his purity, honest emotions and pleasing chord structures."

Lauer offered his own style of spontaneity, amazing even Wilcox with his ability to improvise bass lines and percussive styles to match Wilcox's songs.

On the opening song "Step Into Your Skin" Lauer shook a plastic container filled with popcorn that he fashioned from materials in their cabin the morning of the concert.

"We've never played this song together," a thrilled Wilcox told the audience. "He's just wingin' it."

Encores included Wilcox's rendition of Kate Wolf's "Give Yourself to Love" and his own "Sunshine on the Land," during which the audience joined to sing along during the choruses.

"One of the really interesting things about David is the honesty and directness of his lyrics," said Wilcox's manager Tim Simonson. "He feels real strongly about not only telling a story but also reaching and affecting (the audience)."