Pop : Andersen Stages Folk at McCabe’s

Eric Andersen advised all fellow singer/songwriter types at McCabe’s on Friday to follow his lead and let recordings age for 18 years prior to public consumption. “It’s like wine, y’know,� he said, “as long as you don’t get hit by a heavy frost or something.�

Andersen’s “Stages� LP was indeed wrapped up in early ‘73, but--in one of those rock ‘n’ roll stories too good or too sad to make up--the master tapes disappeared between Columbia’s Nashville and New York offices, and surfaced in a label vault search only last year. Newly released in its original form with a few fresh tracks tacked on, “Stages� isn’t quite the perfected, fine vin rouge that hard-core Andersen fans might suggest, but it has some strong material unworthy of terminal tape oxidation.

Album and show alike served as a reminder that, in folk, Andersen stood as a midway man between the schools of sensitivity (in response to a request, he joked that “James Taylor wrote that song�) and Continental sophistication (he was a contemporary of Dylan’s). Delivered in his low, approaching-Zevonesque voice, a great line in the opening “Baby, I’m Lonesome�--�I’d rather lose you than lose your feeling for me�--had new, topical meaning, what with “lost� albums and timeless emotions the matters at hand.

Andersen was joined for an encore of “Blue River� by pal Joni Mitchell, who stuck around to sing “Cherokee Louise� and a jazzy version of James Brown’s 1986 near-hit “How Do You Stop.�