ITEM PHOTO BY SPENSER HASAK
A good Knight for the Empress of Soul
By Bill Brotherton
LYNN — There was a real love fest inside Lynn Auditorium Saturday night.
Gladys Knight, the seven-time Grammy-winning Empress of Soul, spent 80 minutes singing about affairs of the heart and professed her love for the fans who continue to buy tickets to her shows and have supported her for more than 50 years. They, in turn, responded with cries of “We love you Gladys” and loud, rapturous applause after nearly every one of the 20 songs she performed.
That’s what friends are for.
Let’s get down to the real nitty gritty: Atlanta native Knight, 72, looks great and can still sing the hell out of every song she tackles, no matter the style. Saturday night, she and her exceptionally tight five-piece band and four backing singers wowed the crowd with a slick but far from rote Vegas-style performance.
The night ended with a rousing version of “Midnight Train to Georgia,” her signature song, one of the greatest R&B singles to ever grace the Billboard charts. It was glorious, as were most of the hits from her 1973-’74 heyday: “You’re the Best Thing That Ever Happened to Me,” “I’ve Got to Use My Imagination” and “If I Was Your Woman” were terrific. That goes double for “Neither One of Us (Wants to Be the First to Say Goodbye).
The crowd went crazy for “I Heard It Through the Grapevine,” the 1967 Gladys Knight and the Pips Motown classic that Marvin Gaye made his own a year later. Fans were up and dancing.
Knight and company didn’t shy away from contemporary hits. Knight, who can still unleash that gritty growl when needed, showed on truncated versions of Sam Smith’s “Stay With Me” and Prince’s “Purple Rain” that she can handle anything.
As if we didn’t already know that after hearing her wondrous cover of Barbra Streisand’s “The Way We Were” and the “The Man I Love”/”Stormy Weather”/”Someone to Watch Over Me” tribute to Ella Fitzgerald.
Her between-song stories and banter occasionally went on too long. And the five-song Prince medley by her four talented backup vocalists — they are pips — could have been cut to just “Purple Rain,” which admittedly was a monster. I’d rather have heard more of the songs she recorded with the Pips.
But these are mere quibbles. The love overboard quotient was off the charts Saturday night from performer and fans. It was an excellent Knight of music.
Bill Brotherton can be reached at [email protected]