If you were lucky enough to catch Lucero in their hard-partying early years, you might’ve thought to yourself, ‘Gee, these guys completely kick ass, but they won’t last.’ Would the Memphis band be the alt-country Replacements and burn out just when it was getting great? But the opposite happened, and they managed to put out a string of timeless albums that simultaneously rode the final fumes of the 90s alt-country boom while serving as a precursor to the modern Americana movement. Through it all, Lucero has always been an excellent live act, with whiskey-soaked performances that have earned them a cult following of diehard fans. The band’s current tour finds them resting on their laurels in a way – even though they are still putting out excellent albums, including 2023’s Should’ve Learned By Now – with performances that feel a little more dialed in and refined than the wildness of the past. Case in point was their show at the Aladdin Theater in Portland, Oregon on a rainy Wednesday, November 13th.
Despite confessing to the crowd midway through the set that he may have partied a little too hard in Seattle the night before, you wouldn’t have known it from Ben Nichols’ performance onstage at the Aladdin. Donning his signature workingman attire of a pearl snap shirt, jeans, and ball cap, the gravelly-voiced Lucero frontman led the band through something of a great hits set. This seemed to be just fine with the fans eagerly packed close to the stage, who delivered raucous applause on songs like the organ-soaked “On My Way Downtown,” a version of “I Can Get Us Out of Here” filled with Springsteen-esque rock and roll glory, and the melancholy romance of longtime favorite “Sweet Little Thing.” The band slowed things down for “I’ll Just Fall” before delivering a cowbell-heavy blast of anger with the newer tune “One Last F.U.” Nichols swapped out his electric guitar for an acoustic to lead the band through an intimate-sounding version of the Americana tune “Texas & Tennessee” before the steady clip of the quietly powerful “Time to Go Home.”
The band stripped things down even further for the folk-leaning tune “Loving” – prefaced with an audience member passing a skateboard to the stage for the band to sign – with Nichols accompanied by Rick Steff’s accordion. Other newer songs that shined in the set included “Everything Has Changed,” with its super catchy and dark, subtly cool Fleetwood Mac-style rhythm, and “Among the Ghosts,” carrying a dark punk edge. Nichols referenced the success of his brother’s 2023 film Bikeriders before playing the Lucero song of the same name. In this setting, it was clear this twenty-year-old tune had been given a second life as it bristled with bar band excitement and got the audience psyched up just in time for the band to lean into “Nights Like These,” their alt-country ode to living the rock and roll life. They sealed the deal and capped off one of their tightest sets this writer has seen with a bouncy and energetic performance of the older tune “Tears Don’t Matter Much.”
In a time when alt-country is seeing a small resurgence due to acts like MJ Lenderman and Tyler Childers, it feels only right that Lucero gets the recognition they deserve for helping forge the path with their Memphis-style country-rock. Stretching past the ninety-minute mark, their set in Portland offered proof of the lasting power of their songs. This was especially true when Nichols and Steff returned to the stage for the acoustic guitar and accordion tune “The War,” which felt especially poignant during these times of world wars and political uncertainty. They brought the rest of the band out for a version of “Here at the Starlite” that was swampy and thick with Brian Venable’s guitar slicing through the darkness to make for one of the best songs of the night and to close out on a high.
