[6'1" off of Phair's first album, Exile In Guyville.]
A surprisingly diverse collective of executive lesbians, aging schlubs, malnourished hipsters and former alterna-girls crowded Hiro, a smallish venue that brings to mind the Tokyo night club where Uma Thurman went medieval on Lucy Liu’s ass in Kill Bill: Vol. 1. Liz Phair charged the stage, and the crowd went apeshit. Some of us might’ve cried a little bit.

Even though it’s been 15 years since Exile in Guyville’s release, girlfriend looked good in an borderline-slutty leather vest and short shorts ensemble. Whatever. She’s the blow-job queen. She can wear what she wants.

Someone very clever in the audience yelled the album’s first cut, "6’1.” Phair immediately launched into the rocker, dipping a half-octave too low into the first line: “I bet you fall in bed too easily with the beautiful girls who are shyly brave…”

But homegirl’s clear, deadpan voice recovered as the set progressed, and she and her boyish backing band plowed through Guyville’s 18 songs with aplomb.

One of the many great things about EIG, as a whole, is that its desultory emotional tone somehow manages to be musically seamless. Rollicking tracks like "Help Me Mary, Soap Star Joe," and the album’s only real so-called hit, "Never Said," are paired with real downers like "Canary and Shatter." This made the live experience an emotional rollercoaster. At some moments the crowd was silent and weepy, then during post-feminist anthems like "Fuck and Run," "Flower" and especially the "Divorce Song," we almost drowned out the chick with the microphone.

That chick with the microphone has a notorious rep for having a nasty case of stage fright, but that wasn’t apparent Thursday. What was apparent, however, was both her and the fans’ gratitude for an opportunity to revel in a work of genius.

“Let me ask you a question,” she said at one point in the night. “How many of you listened to this record to get over a break-up?”

Pretty much everybody in the room, including Liz herself, raised a hand.

As the band approached Strange Loop, Exile in Guyville’s jammy closer, the crowd knew the record was over, and so, too, the end of the show.

But, of course, there was an encore, which included Liz’s later, inarguably weaker catalogue. She started with Whip Smart’s sweet piano ballad "Chopsticks," which begins with the classic line, “He said he liked to do it backwards I said, ‘That's just fine with me, That way we can fuck and watch TV.’”

The encore was the only time she hesitated that night, but the struggle provided us with one of the show’s most charming moments. During Phair’s re-imagining of the Troggs’ tune "Wild Thing," she kept fucking up the chords, and picked out a googly-eyed, side-burned young thing to play the guitar part. Luckily for him, kid knew what he was doing, and lingered on the stage too long after the song, prompting Phair to tell him to take a hike.

She ended the night with a timid rendition of "Polyester Bride," the mild and breezy single off of her last album of any interest, 1998’s whitechocolatespaceegg, and with that she thanked us again for making the night incredible and was out.

No, Liz Phair. Thank you for the incredible night. I no longer want you to perish in a fiery aero-crash.