Why Did We Play This? A Series: 9/29/26 Thunderbird Tuesday Bluegrass Sessions, Pgh., Pa.

I'm not sure how the Wolf Tones' Rolodex of bass players is so deep. But every time we find ourselves in a jam (the unavailable-bass-player kind, not the musical kind), we end up finding yet another hella dope bassist to sit in.

This time, Kyle was under the weather, Nemo was doin' family stuff, and the first three people we reached out to were also busy. Mind you, this is less than three hours before the gig.

Enter our homeboy Dave Busch, bassist on probably my favorite album ever by a Pittsburgh band, Wreck Loose's OK, Wreck Loose. I can't recommend it highly enough. That being said... it's very much a pop-rock record. No bluegrass in sight. 

Now listen, I'm not gonna sit here and act like bluegrass as a musical form is super-complicated. It certainly can be at times, but one of the best bluegrass bassists I know has a basic mantra of, "It's all the same song." Lotta fifth intervals in bluegrass bass. But it does have its little nuances, and if you're not used to them, it can trip you up.

Like I said, though: We just keep finding hella good bassists to sit in.

As soon as we kicked into the first classic bluegrass rhythm, I knew things were gonna be good. At the same time, Dave was doing us a huge favor, and I wanted him to enjoy himself rather than sitting back there learning a ton of songs on the fly.

That meant being a little more conservative than usual as we randomly pick the setlist. Our homeboy Glenn Strother from Norside Organ Trio was sitting in for the whole evening on guitar. And that meant we could dip back into the blues tunes we started pulling out last week when Glenn stopped by. Let's get into it:

Early set: Whiskey, Woodpecker*, Jambalaya, Kiss & Tell > House by the Sea > Burning & Looting > Breathe > Colt 45, Big River, My Sisters and Brothers

*Semi-original (1st verse by S. Silverstein)

We started nice and easy with Charlie Daniels' "Whiskey," my expanded, reggae-fied version of Shel Silverstein's two-sentence poem "Woodpecker" and Hank Williams' "Jambalaya" to get our feet underneath us.

These are all pretty deliberate choices. "Whiskey" is a slightly modified version of the standard blues progression. "Woodpecker" is what we call a "1-4-1-5," referring to the song's numbered chord progression. It's an extremely popular song form in bluegrass and folk music. And "Jamabalaya" is literally just two chords (D and A) repeated over and over. These are all song forms I know Dave and Glenn will be familiar with, and this gives us all a chance to settle in, figure out the overall vibe and decide where to go. Again, Dave's doing us a last-minute favor, so I don't want him to feel like we're just tossing him in the deep end and seeing if he can swim.

From there, however, it was off to the races. G. Love's "Kiss & Tell" employs the same basic structure as "Whiskey," and then we shifted the jam down into E-minor and banged out Iron & Wine's "House by the Sea," Marley's "Burning & Looting," Pink Floyd's "Breathe" and Afroman's "Colt 45," which are typically all late-set tunes when we're stringing a big long jam together. 

In this context, that means two things:

• #1: Things are going well and it doesn't feel necessary to stop playing and explain the next tune for Dave or Glenn. 

• #2: Maybe this is a musical trick I shouldn't give away, but every song in the jam aside from "Kiss & Tell" kind of leads well into the next one, in terms of chords and structure... "House by the Sea" is E-minor and D... "Burning & Looting" is E-minor and A-minor... "Breathe" is E-minor and A-major and so is "Colt 45." It allows us to subtly change the jam to keep things interesting as we go along, and to improvise our way into the next song. This is also where being able to vamp is helpful. If I do need to tell the other band members something, I can do it as we're transitioning out of one song, usually by playing over two, perhaps three chords.... "This next one has a weird little hitch at the end of the verse," or "This one goes to the four when the chorus comes in," or "We're about to go from D to E-minor, I'll cue you."

Archie got everyone hyped with "Big River" and then we rounded out the early set with a tune we haven't done for a while, Jerry Garcia Band's "My Sisters and Brothers." Things felt good and we were pretty geeked going into the...

Late set: Don't Let Your Deal Go Down, Georgia On a Fast Train, Drivin' Nails in My Coffin, I Got My Mojo Workin' > Sweet Heaven When I Die, Shady Grove > The Cisco Kid, The Vape Machine*, Big Black Train, Columbus Stockade Blues, In Tall Buildings** > Werewolves of London

*Original / **feat. Carrie King (vocals)

The early part of the late set was some pretty standard 'grass tunes, and then we started getting funky with Muddy Waters' "I Got My Mojo Workin'." I thought it would be an easy pivot back to bluegrass with "Sweet Heaven When I Die," but something got miscommunicated and it took until the second verse for everyone to really lock in. I'm listening back to the recording right now, and I still don't really understand what happened... I think maybe someone was going to the four when the rest of us are going to the five. 

But no matter. We got it together and then made up for it by diving deep into D-minor with an extended jam on "Shady Grove" and War's "The Cisco Kid." 

Joe called our newest original, "The Vape Machine," a true story about the Thunderbird replacing the jukebox with a literal vape vending machine. Midway through, I realized I was singing this song with one of the venue's owners in the crowd, possibly the person who made the decision to buy the vape machine. Whoops. Alas... we press onward.

We hit a couple more regular-repertoire tunes and then had the emotional centerpiece of the evening. Last week, Carrie King came up and sang a lovely version of John Hartford's "In Tall Buildings." She did so again last night, but it was also her last night in Pittsburgh. Today she's moving to Colorado, so this version turned out to be a beautiful little goodbye for one of the people who've been coming out to see us almost from the start. 

Then it was "Werewolves of London" to round out a super-fun evening of music. Go listen to OK, Wreck Loose. It's f***ing awesome.

A Shameless Plug for My New Beat Tape!

More beats!

The past few years, I've gotten back into beatmaking, a hobby I indulged in heavily from about 2004-2015. When I got an iMac in '04, it came with Garageband and I discovered that I essentially now had a built-in sampler and at least a rudimentary recording studio, and I went bananas. 

Somewhere amid this process, I started getting the urge to actually release some beats as a record, and quickly ran up against the terrifying specter of sample clearance. I had no interest in that, despite most of my favorite beats coming complete with at least one sample, if not more.

Looking back, that's probably good, because it forced me to get more creative.

In recent years, I started revisiting those tracks, eliminating the samples and rebuilding with the remaining parts, which also gave me a chance to play the Les Paul Studio ("L.P.S.") electric guitar that I essentially cast aside in 2016 when Charlie Hustle & the Grifters morphed into the Sweaty Already String Band. It's so much fun to play, and I discovered I had a whole new control over it with 6-8 years of additional guitar playing under my belt.

In parallel with this, I was also sampling live recordings of The Wolf Tones to create a separate series of original "bluegrass beats." Throughout, I started thinking more about how to create a consistent sonic atmosphere and especially about some of the post-recording/polishing/mastering things that I really hadn't gotten into in the early days. 

Vol. 1 of L.P.S. Breaks was called Saturday Breakfast Buffet, a reference to the overall sound palette and how it reminded me of going to the neighborhood breakfast spot on a weekend morning. This new volume is called Electrosonique, which is in fact a fake French-sounding word that does not mean anything. But I do think it somehow fits the outer-spacey vibe of this collection. 

It will be available on all major streaming services in the near future, but you can listen and buy a copy now at Bandcamp.com.

Why Did We Play This? A Series: 9/5/26 Unity Brewing, Latrobe, Pa.

[This is (maybe) an ongoing series looking at older and newer gigs by my band The Wolf Tones, which places a strong emphasis on improvisation and does not pick a setlist in advance... so why did we play these songs this time? Let us explore...]

I was bemoaning the state of my soloing ability last time. As punishment for my self-pity, the music gods threw one high and inside, and gave me a gig where I had no choice but to play solos. 

This gig was originally going to be at the Beck-Ringland Tavern down in Washington County, but they unexpectedly closed earlier this summer. We quickly pivoted and booked this Unity gig, but the memo did not reach all members of the band, and Joe had already booked a gig with Org Dröl, his dark-wizard heavy-metal-and-flute ensemble. 

Archie was out at Nelson Ledges in Ohio, so it was up to Kyle and me to hold the fort down for a gig in Latrobe. This shouldn't really be terrifying to me, because I started out playing three-hour solo gigs. But those really didn't involve taking solo breaks. It was more just singer-songwriter stuff and doing some fun stuff with percussive rhythm and chord inversions.

To be fair, I wouldn't be on my own, and technically Kyle was bringing multiple musicians because he had a series of looping pedals that he uses at his solo gigs. But my shortcoming with breaks, especially in bluegrass tunes, is the speed. I can slowly find my way into a chord progression and start feeling comfortable moving more quickly around the fretboard. But just banging out a 120bpm, two-times-through-the-form bluegrass break is a real challenge for me.

Early set: Jam > Tipitina, Feelin' Alright, Jam > Columbus Stockade Blues, Deep River Blues, Digging a Ditch, Jam > Fishing in the Dark, Georgia On a Fast Train, Jam > Keep On Moving, Positively 4th Street, Pound On Me*

*Original

I wanted to lean into my strength (such as it is), and I had my pedalboard with me as well, so I could provide a whole palette of textures for Kyle to loop over. We started a lot of the first-set songs with a looper jam, Kyle setting up a bassline and some rudimentary percussion while I picked between the phaser, tremolo and various wah-wah effects to do little funky intros to a bunch of the tunes.

Was it perfect? No it was not. But it certainly was not the Donk-a-Palooza that I had feared, in terms of hitting clunker notes. Playing with only a bass offers the guitarist a lot of opportunity to move the music to a new place without clashing against the rest of the band. I could move very easily between the major and minor, for example.

Late set: Possum, Neon Moon, Sweet Heaven When I Die, Traveling Mood, Breathe > Colt 45 > Breathe, Way Downtown, Wild & Wicked World, Woodpecker*, Whiskey, Such a Night, That Was Your Mother, Salty Dog Blues, Buckets of Rain, Glass Onion > Money, Rider in the Rain

*Original

Phish must have been occupying some extra real estate in my brain for this gig. We opened the late set with "Possum," and during Dr. John's "Traveling Mood," my break quoted heavily from the goofy chromatic section of Phish's "Bathtub Gin," owing to the off-kilter D-Am7 chord progression. 

I would never have expected that we could crank out a 12-minute sandwich with Pink Floyd's "Breathe" as the bread and Afro Man's "Colt 45" as the meat. It sounds kind of gross when you put it that way, but in person it turned out surprisingly funky.

As the late set progressed, I started to feel a little more comfortable taking some more-traditional breaks, even if some of the time they were just extra-syncopated rhythm parts.

Speaking of Dr. John, I don't do "Such a Night" as often as I'd like. It's such a fun tune, with a deceptively simple structure that sounds complex and jazzy. I'd also like to do Paul Simon's "That Was Your Mother" more. On the Graceland record, it's a zydeco tune, but that's just bluegrass with an accordion and a washboard!

We did a ska-ish version of "Salty Dog Blues," similar to the version Joe and I did on our reggae-bluegrass record (not a joke). Then I pulled out Dylan's "Buckets of Rain," which we haven't done since Howl-O-Ween 2025 when we played the whole Blood on the Tracks album.

I wouldn't want to do this type of gig all the time. Especially since I was stuck singing every song the whole gig. But for one night, it was a pretty good time.

Why Did We Play This? A Series: 8/30/26 Allegheny City Brewing, Pgh., Pa.

[This is (maybe) an ongoing series looking at older and newer gigs by my band The Wolf Tones, which places a strong emphasis on improvisation and does not pick a setlist in advance... so why did we play these songs this time? Let us explore...]

My prediction was mostly accurate.

Playing a bunch of closely-grouped gigs in the past couple weeks had us primed to form like Voltron and put together a strong set for Allegheny City Brewing's Post-Pedal-PGH Party. It wasn't a big jam-fest, likely because we didn't run fully plugged like I was anticipating. 

But that just offered more opportunities to listen closely to each other and create in new ways. We ended up blending a good deal of reggae into this setlist, which I'm all for. I got a chance to do a Lee "Scratch" Perry cover, which is not something I would've thought possible a few years ago. Let's run it down:

Early set: Crawdad Song, Way Down in the Hole > Sweet Heaven When I Die, Salty Dog Blues, Don't Let Go, Keep On Moving, Tipitina > Fishing in the Dark, Georgia On a Fast Train

This set turned out to be a good general mix of what you get at a Wolf Tones gig: An old-school bluegrass opener, followed by the theme from HBO's "The Wire" that gets jammed into another old trad tune, followed by jam-band grooves, a reggae song, some Professor Longhair, Nitty Gritty Dirt Band and Billy Joe Shaver.

For me, the unexpected set highlight was "Don't Let Go," a Jessie Stone tune that jam-band fans know from Jerry Garcia Band setlists. I'm honestly not sure why I even have it in the tablet... it rides on that Bo-Diddley-type rhythm that doesn't really hit the right way without a drummer. We've done it once or twice, trying to speed it up, and it just didn't work the way we'd hoped. So this time, I figured let's just try the OG tempo, and our bassist Kyle came in with some nimble little bass runs that augmented that Bo Diddley feel and kept us grooving at a slower speed. We worked the jam up and down, energy-wise, and it turned out much cooler than I anticipated. 

Yet again, I was not able to establish the right tempo for "Fishing in the Dark," and it was a lyrical race to the finish. Dammit. 

Bob Marley's "Keep On Moving" has become a reliable vehicle for jamming over the past handful of gigs. There are a good number of reggae tunes that kinda just work the 1 and 4 chords the whole time, and that leaves a lot of open space for musical fun. I would work that same structure in the late set to sneak a bonus reggae tune into the setlist. To wit:

Late set: Traveling Mood, Raleigh & Spencer > Soul Fire > Raleigh & Spencer, Big River, Tulsa Time > 9 to 5 > 54-46 Was My Number, Columbus Stockade Blues, High On a Mountain, Money > Bananas & Blow, Sittin' On Top of the World

More Dr. John!! I gotta pick and choose Dr. John covers carefully. Back in my electric-band days, we did "Gris-Gris Gumbo Ya Ya" a good bit, and there's a real fine line between capturing that eerie swamp vibe and just doing a bad caricature of Dr. John. But he's got plenty of stuff in the repertoire, including "Traveling Mood," that has the potential to be countrified or grassed up.

"Raleigh & Spencer" is always fun, and I was able to sneak my Scratch Perry cover, "Soul Fire," into the middle. I mainly picked this song for the line "Soul fire, and we ain't got no water," and now I'm wondering if Rockmaster Scott & the Dynamic Three heard this song and cribbed part of that line, which of course led to the only Bloodhound Gang most people know.

Archie finally gave me a break from singing lead and took the reins for "Big River," and then it was off into one of my favorite new tunes we've been doing, Don Williams' "Tulsa Time." I thought it would lead nicely into a quick key change and then our Dolly Parton tribute, "9 to 5." Joe wanted to take a break between the two... and then when it came time to do that, he changed his mind, which turned out to be a blessing in disguise... it gave me time to realize that, for the second show in a row, I thought I put the chart in the tablet and didn't, and had to look up the lyrics on my phone. Dammit. ("Dammit" is turning out to be a common theme for me during this gig.)

While we were doing number-based songs in the key of A, I swiped the tablet over to Toots & the Maytals' "54-46 Was My Number," which follows the same 1-4 structure as "Keep On Moving"... and, as it turns out, the same structure as Bob Marley's "Bend Down Low," which we also tossed in for good measure before circling back to Toots for a reprise.

You already know about "Columbus Stockade Blues" by now. This was a standard version, nice little 3:30-minute banger.

We took a rare request and did an old trad tune, "High On a Mountain." I whiffed a little at the outset because it's a pretty high vocal lead, and at least once things got a little froggy, but it turned out alright.

Back to reggae! This time it wasn't me being pushy. We put a hypnotic spin on Cornell Campbell's "Money," doing a little manual dub-echo work on guitar. I almost prefer doing the "dub" effect manually as opposed to my tape-delay pedal. The jam worked up into my first chance to cover a tune that Nemo usually sang, Ween's "Bananas & Blow." It's super-dumb and super-fun. Was it entirely appropriate for a Sunday afternoon on East Ohio Street in the North Side? Who could say for certain? I know at least a few people were singing along... "Stuck in my cabana, livin' on bananas and bloooooow..."

We rounded out the set with Joe singing "Sittin' On Top of the World" and introducing the band with everyone taking a quick solo. 

I've kind of resisted talking about my guitar breaks on here, because quite frankly, I'm not very proud of them. I've managed to scrape together a decent few pickin' lines on a trad tune like this, but I don't take breaks in either of the bands I'm in. I much prefer to be a rhythm guitarist who slides in and out with little solo lines or new musical ideas. On a slower tune like "Walking On the Moon" or "Money," I have the confidence to try and take a break, but bluegrass breaks are too fast for me. We were movin' at too many BPMs for me to play anything good, so I resorted to whistling, which I am very good at. If only I could make the guitar do that.

One thing I also haven't actually done that much is talk about how we're picking the next song, and it's really situation-dependent. For example, "Raleigh & Spencer" is in the key of A, and we usually end up doing a big fat jam in the middle before circling back for the final verse or two. All I had to do was push the jam into A-minor territory and bring up "Soul Fire" on the tablet. We'd never played it before, but I started bringing the dynamics down, started doing some reggae guitar chukking and we were good to go.

Sometimes I'll hear Joe or Archie play a lick or a line that reminds me of another tune, and I'll start wondering how close that song is in terms of keys. If we're playing in E-minor, for example, it's easy to make a quick transition to D, A or G. I don't know the music-theory terminology for it, but it sounds very natural to transition to any of those keys, and that opens up the songbook to literally hundreds of options.

When we were nearing the end of late set and playing "Money," I knew I wanted to do "Bananas & Blow" at some point. "Money"'s chord structure is just Am and G, so I cued everyone to hold on G for a second, then move down to E-minor, and just like that, we're in position to play some Ween.

It's a fun puzzle to solve, and even more fun when we can pull it off seamlessly.