A handful of songs into Benmont Tench’s recent performance in Chicago, he paused to take inventory before choosing the next number, ticking off the names of the artists on one hand: “Tom, Tom, Jerry, Chuck…” He is legitimately on a first-name basis with most of those people, but it wasn’t bragging, he was talking about those artists in the same the way the fans in the queue outside had been doing while waiting to get inside, people for whom rock and roll is not a stylish accessory or background for an evening’s conversation, but instead is regarded as art that they are in an active relationship across time, over decades.
Tench is one of those folks, too, despite also being the guy that Bob Dylan likes to call when he doesn’t feel like playing piano, or who gets asked to step in on piano and organ when it’s time to pay tribute to The Band, or more recently, as part of the house band for the Patti Smith tribute concert at Carnegie Hall in March, getting namechecked by Bruce Springsteen — “Hit it, Benmont!” — at the start of “Because the Night.”
