Former Fugees singer and eight time Grammy winner Lauryn Hill gave a terrible performance in Oakland on Wednesday night. That normally wouldn’t be news here but it was so bad, and her demeanor so bizarre, that half the audience walked out before it was over. From 75-100 people left just 4 songs into her set, demanding refunds. She was two and a half hours late on stage and performed a mismatched jumble of old and new songs along with a 14 piece band. According to concert goers her voice was barely audible and most of her old hits like “To Zion” and “Ready or Not” were set to throbbing techno beats.

Wearing a long wool coat and long skirt, she looked and acted crazy, huffing and puffing on stage. At several points her voice cracked. She wiped her face with a black handkerchief that she clutched throughout. At one point she told the audience that if they were uncomfortable with her, it was too bad.

Both the San Jose Mercury News and the San Francisco Chronicle had similar conclusions about her odd performance.

How bad was this concert? Well, calling it a fiasco would be an insult to fiascos everywhere. It was so bad that it sent 75 to 100 fans into the lobby only four songs into the set, all of them grumbling loudly and demanding refunds. Those were the smart ones – the rest of us remained in our seats and watched what amounted to a two-hour train wreck.

[From The San Jose Mercury News]

Aural audience response was divided between cheers and boos. Others sat and stood in silence, their mouths agape at what they were hearing and seeing.

Her hair in an unkempt rust-colored Afro, Hill wore a green-and-yellow plaid jacket that appeared to be made of wool and an ankle-length black skirt, looking not unlike a bag lady one might encounter at a taco truck on International Boulevard. She held a microphone in her right hand and a black handkerchief in her left, frequently wiping sweat from her face as she paced the stage…

Most of the music, including old favorites such as “Ready or Not” and “To Zion,” as well as newer material recorded locally last year but reportedly rejected by Columbia Records for being too uncommercial, was treated to highly syncopated arrangements drawing on Afro-pop and reggae elements. Few featured the backbeats with which fans of her older material are most comfortable, but rather a frenetically throbbing pulse driven by a three-man percussion section that included former Tony Toni Toné drummer Brian Collier. There’s nothing wrong in experimenting with new rhythms; the primary problem was in Hill’s slipshod presentation.

Some concertgoers who had paid as much as $89.50 for tickets were requesting refunds even before Hill hit the stage — two hours and 15 minutes after the concert’s scheduled 7:30 start and 80 minutes after the opening act, Jupiter Rising, had finished its set. This was an improvement, however, over club shows last summer in San Francisco and Santa Cruz at which her performances began more than two hours behind schedule. Other patrons started their exits during her first song, and the trickle turned to a flow after a speech late in the show during which the vocalist attempted to explain her new musical direction.

“When you’re young, gifted and black — and female — you have to have a lot of endurance,” she said, borrowing from the title of a song made famous by Nina Simone, a singer who’d had a somewhat similar meltdown more than three decades earlier.

“I can’t fit into a stereotype that makes me comfortable for you,” she added. “If that makes me feel uncomfortable to you, I need to find some new company.”

[From SFGate.com]

Hill took a tumble and fell on her back at one point, blaming her high heels. She also assured the audience that she was sober.

Here’s a recent clip of Hill performing in Rio. You can hear the odd beats in the one song and she is holding that black towel that was mentioned in the SFGate article:

Hill is not known for being a team player. At a December, 2003 Christmas benefit concert at the Vatican, she gave a scathing speech about the Catholic Church’s implicit role in the child sexual abuse scandal, saying at the end that “Holy God is a witness to the corruption of your leadership, of the exploitation and abuses which are the minimum that can be said for the clergy. There is no acceptable excuse to defend the church.” (I agree with her and was rather inspired to hear that she was so outspoken about it.) [From Wikipedia]

The Fugees had a brief reunion tour in 2004 and 2005 playing at Dave Chappelle’s Block Party in September, 2004 in Brooklyn, and at the BET Awards in 2005. They toured Europe in December, 2005. A planned Fugees album to be released this year was scrapped and member Pras said that Hill had “some issues she needs to deal with.”

The 32 year-old mother of four has not had a studio album out since her critically acclaimed release “The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill” in 1998. She did release some acoustic songs on the 2002 album “MTV Unplugged No. 2.0.”

Hill took a hiatus after “The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill,” and was quoted as complaining about the way that the studio tried to pigeonhole her for commercial gain. Maybe that’s what she’s rebelling against, or maybe she just needs to go to rehab like so many other celebrities who have fallen from grace.

Photos from SFGate.com