Why Did We Play This? A Series: 8/29/26 William E. Anderson Library Live Music Series, Penn Hills, Pa.

This one is gonna be a lot easier to write, because it's fresh in my mind from last night. Let's run it down:

One set: Jambalaya, Don't Let Your Deal Go Down, Goin' Down > Fishing in the Dark > Jam > House by the Sea > Natural Mystic, Southern Flavor, Loved You Enough, If I Had a Boat, My Gal, Woodpecker*, Positively 4th Street, 9 to 5, The Harder They Come > Jam > Columbus Stockade Blues

*Semi-original (see below)

It's always a tricky spot for The Wolf Tones to play for an audience that is predominantly older. Make no mistake, we do a lot of old-school, traditionally-structured bluegrass songs... there's no shortage of Flatt & Scruggs and Stanley Bros. tunes in the repertoire. But we're upfront with the slogan: We're wolves. We play bluegrass. It gets weird.

It always gets weird. A good deal of the time, we're a jam-band that plays on bluegrass instruments, and that offers a lot of versatility. But we're also not morons. You gotta play to the room, or at least get 'em on your side before you try to pull them into a musical area where they're less familiar or less comfortable.

Hank Williams' "Jambalaya" and a little Flatt & Scruggs ("Don't Let Your Deal Go Down") set the mood nicely, but I was already in my own mood to throw a curveball or two, so I called Freddie King's "Goin' Down," which is a standard blues form, not uncommon in bluegrass, but it's got some pentatonic riffing that puts a little extra stank on things.

One of the nice things about this band is that because we're listening to one another, we can all take turns pushing and pulling the music in different directions. But no matter where you're going, to my mind a good improvisational band needs to be able to jam on the tonic, the root note of whatever song you are (or were, or are about to be) playing. And not every band can do that. Some bands try, and they end up just sort of vamping — which is also an important skill, for sure, that can buy you a few seconds to tell everyone where you wanna go, or talk to the crowd and introduce the band or the next tune. But truly building a jam on the tonic chord, adding a new chord or being able to change keys quickly is something that takes time to hone, and musical trust that everyone is going to participate and not let things fall apart.

That being said... I neither properly communicated nor initiated the proper action to slow our jam down by enough beats-per-minute when I called the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band's "Fishing in the Dark." 

Y'know... sometimes you don't think about how fast you're playing until you have to spit the first line of lyrics out. "Fishing in the Dark" is a wordy song, and as soon as I tried to get "Lazy yellow moon comin' up tonight" out and nearly did the vocal equivalent of tripping over your own feet at the line of scrimmage, I knew it was too fast. Alas. We press on. It turned out fine. It usually does.

We took our first detour into some minor-key jamming and churned up "House by the Sea," and then I couldn't resist the temptation to keep slingin' curveballs. We were in E-minor and bringing the energy down a little, so I called Bob Marley's "Natural Mystic," which we always start as full-on acoustic reggae. But with its lyrics about the first and last trumpet and call for justice, it takes on a very Pentecostal-revelations quality when you we 'grass it up, and that's familiar territory to old bluegrass heads.

I was hoping we would blast right through into "Southern Flavor," but Joe wanted to stop first, and then we played some Lyle Lovett ("If I Had a Boat")... Archie did his signature tune, which we've always called "My Gal," but every time I try to look up the lyrics, the song that comes is an old blues called "Charmin' Betsy." (This is a thing that sometimes happens with older songs, bluegrass standards in particular, and also folk blues. You find different variations on songs, phrases and verses that show up in multiple peoples' tunes. I'm getting off-track.)

We did our latest "original" tune, "Woodpecker." I'm putting it in quote marks because it's only semi-original. The first verse is a four-line poem from Shel Silverstein's "Where the Sidewalk Ends," one of my favorite childhood books. And to be clear: The poem does not need expanded upon. It gets the point across about human manipulation and destruction of the environment very concisely. But the melody came to me almost immediately, and I thought, "Well, I can't just sing the same verse three times." So I wrote the additional ones, and it's been very well-received.

Bob Dylan's "Positively 4th Street" has been making regular appearances in our setlists over the past year or so. This is another example of the great musical synergy between Joe and me that got this group to its current state. I've wanted to play that song for a long time. I put it on the tablet but for months, I hadn't brought it up as a possibility at a show. Then one night at the Thunderbird, Joe picked it randomly, and it's been a mainstay in the repertoire ever since.

We paid tribute to the queen, Miss Dolly Parton, once again with "9 to 5." I don't have the vocal range to cover "Jolene," so Nemo had to help us out with that one this past Tuesday night at the Thunderbird. I was speed-learning "9 to 5" on the way to the gig, listening in the car and trying to get the lyric timing down. Structurally, it's a run-of-the-mill bluegrass chord progression, which helped a lot and let me focus on trying to get the verses right, which I did. Mostly. The song is structured weird in the sense that the chorus is twice as long as the verse. That doesn't happen very often but then again, that lift up to the 4-chord as they hit the chorus is the best part of the song, so I can see why they kept going back to it. Matter of fact, we might keep goin' back to it; it's a lot of fun to play and sing.

We took one final detour into reggae with Jimmy Cliff's "The Harder They Come," which is a great jamming vehicle, and has some dope hits that really rev up a good crowd. Kyle's bass solo coming out of that tune led us into a little jam flipping back and forth between E-minor and A-minor... and you know when A-minor is hangin' around... it might just be "Columbus Stockade Blues" time, and it damn sure was, a nice way to wrap up a strong one-setter. 

A lot of nights it'll take us a few tunes to really get going, and sometimes with one-set gigs it feels like it's over just as we're hitting a nice strong groove and ramping things up. But when I was writing about the Berry Bush setlist, I mentioned that it came at the tail end of a bunch of close-together gigs, and this is a similar situation. This was our third gig in the past week, and we have a two-set gig coming up on Sunday afternoon where we're plugging in and using effects rigs — so needless to say, I'm pretty excited.

Why Did We Play This? A Series: 8/9/25 Berry Bush Farms, Pittsfield, 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...]

There are no photos available for this show. Everyone was having too much fun. It makes sense, because to my ears, this is one of the best musical performances I've been part of. This show came at the tail end of a quick succession of six shows in 10 days (including the 8/2/25 set in my last post). We were packin' a lot of gigs into the summer of 2025, and the entire band was primed and ready for what turned out to be a three-hour double-set monster. It also came after our first few months of playing more gigs using effect pedals. During our monthly engagements at the Thunderbird, there's no room for all that gear on the bar stage. But I think that worked to our benefit — we learned to listen closely to one another and create new sounds and jams first, without having to lean on effects to make the weirdness happen... so once we did add the effects, we could really take things into the outer reaches of space.

Was it perfect? No. Were there things I'd have done differently? Sure. But let's not dwell on the negatives. Let's get into it:

Early set: Roving Gambler (soundcheck), Good Hearted Woman > Natural Mystic > EMD > Jam > Money > Columbus Stockade Blues, Cat House, Ghost Train, Loved You Enough > Raspberry Beret > Down Where the River Bends > Sound System > Colt 45 > Breathe > That's It*

*Original

Right from the soundcheck, things were clicking. We hit "Roving Gambler" at a breakneck pace and kept things humming with Willie Nelson's "Good Hearted Woman." In what I personally consider a good sign, we started getting jammy with the quickness and dipped an early toe into reggae with Bob Marley's "Natural Mystic," detouring into a pretty short version of David Grisman's "EMD" before hopping back on the reggae bus with another appearance of Cornell Campbell's "Money."

We capped off a 25-minute show opening jam with "Columbus Stockade Blues," which could pop up anytime we're in A-minor. It's a great dramatic punch, with some well-timed stops and a driving chord progression.

I don't know who wrote "Cat House," but it's great, just a funny, funky blues about living in a house full of stray cats. And "Ghost Train" by Earl Taylor has a dramatic energy-lifting quality similar to "Columbus Stockade."

And then, unbeknownst to us, it was time for the 45-minute jam that would lead all the way to end of the first set. We kept the traditional tunes going with Yonder Mountain's "Loved You Enough," but then the funk took over, as a Nemo bass solo provoked me into firing up the auto-wah pedal and launching into a rare first-set "Raspberry Beret."

Coming out of "Raspberry," however, some things began happening that were the start of something very good. With a quick stomp on the "Godzilla pedal," Joe tossed off some rusty distorted banjo blasts, and just like that we shot off into dissonant, menacing spacey weirdness that exploded and then rapidly settled into the lovely soldier's ballad, "Down Where the River Bends."

I remember thinking how cool it was that we were able to dissolve into chaos and just as quickly re-form and start the next song.

Put a pin in that.

We slowly cranked it back up and did our only punk cover, Operation Ivy's "Sound System," but the funk snuck right back in and Joe was feelin' Afro Man's "Colt 45." That darkened and slowly blossomed into Pink Floyd's "Breathe," before we funked things up one last time to end the set with my tune, "That's It."

Late set: Way Down in the Hole > Jam > Glass Onion > Space > Southern Nights > Jam > Neon Moon, Jaw Jam > Let It Shine** > Later On, By the Rivers of Babylon > Jam > Bananas & Blow, Cold Cold Heart > Two Hits & the Joint Turned Brown > Jam > N.I.B. > Shady Grove > Werewolves of London, E: Clinch Mountain Backstep > Rainbow in the Dark

This second-set opening jam is, to me, the most enjoyable 35 minutes of music I've helped to create, starting with the theme from HBO's "The Wire." It slowly dissolved into a sort of "All Along the Watchtower" jam (a chord progression that would return later in the set) before we settled in for the next song. I'm a big fan of odd chord progressions, and the Beatles' "Glass Onion" tickles all the right parts of my brain. There's a G-minor chord in the verses that flips the mood from weirdly ominous to slightly dreamy.

But it's the jam out of "Glass Onion" that really stands out, and to be sure, it's not going to be for everybody.

Our operating philosophy in this band, as I've stated before, is just keep playing. Listen closely to everyone else and strive to create new sounds. And in terms of pure creativity, this "Space" jam was up there for us. The chord structure of "Glass Onion" begins to fall away, and soon we're drifting slowly into outer space. Then Joe hit his "Freeze" pedal at just the right time to make his banjo sound like a far-off train-whistle drone, the floor dropped out from beneath us and we dove into pure free musical space. 

Where is this going to go? There is a brief moment where you hear all of us sort of hesitating a second to ponder the question. Then Joe starts activating The Godzilla Pedal, Nemo starts a bass arpeggio way up on the neck, and just like that we begin drifting back down to Earth through the chord progression for the next tune.

One of my very favorite things about an excellent Grateful Dead show was the band's ability to pick the exact right moment to start the next song. At this show, we come out of this spacey jam and, in my opinion, drop perfectly into the riff to start Glen Campbell's "Southern Nights." And that's probably not something we could've planned at a rehearsal. In the moment, it felt right, and we went for it.

We rounded out the set-opening jam with a '90s country ballad, Brooks & Dunn's "Neon Moon." Then we brought our pal Pat Keddie onstage. Initially it was to do a fun little jam with him on the jaw harp, but being that we were in such a rare mood, it quickly expanded into a mystical musical space, with some very spiritual spontaneous lyrics in a tune that's now called "Let It Shine."

The next little section is the only place where I would change anything about this show. Coming out of a very serious, somber piece of improv with Pat, I absent-mindedly started playing the beginning of Dan Bern's "Later On." It's a goofy song about beer and titties that we'd talked about doing at some point. I thought it made sense because Pat and Nemo used to sing it together at their duo shows, and Pat was already onstage. But if you listen to the tape, you can hear Joe say, "Is this what we wanna play coming out of that?" And if I'd thought about it a little harder, I'd have said no. What we should've done is swap it with the plaintive reggae tune "By the Rivers of Babylon," that came afterward. That would have been another perfect transition/song drop. But hey, you can't nail 'em all in the moment.

Next we cranked things up a little and —speaking of the Grateful Dead — teased a little bit of an "Other One" jam before bringing out one of our favorite late-set tunes, Ween's "Bananas & Blow," during which Joe busted a string. That prompted a quick return to classic country with Hank Williams' "Cold Cold Heart." Joe rejoined us and we made a quick pivot to Yonder Mountain's "Two Hits & the Joint Turned Brown," which got a bit spacey before transmogrifying into a neat little descending jam that took its cues from the "Watchtower" jam earlier in the set.

I think that perked up Nemo's ear, because all of a sudden he called out a song none of us knew and had never played, Black Sabbath's "N.I.B." But as with many one-off tunes, he was able to quickly turn to us and map out the chord progression. And again, this is something that never would have happened in a planned-out setlist. It brought the energy level way back up and kept it going through the final two songs of the late set, the traditional "Shady Grove" and one of our perennial closers, Warren Zevon's "Werewolves of London."

We wrapped the night with an encore that perfectly encapsulates the philosophy of The Wolf Tones: The old trad instrumental, "Clinch Mountain Backstep," mashed up with a grassy version of Dio's hair-metal classic, "Rainbow in the Dark."

I think it's hilarious that this show is one of our best, and yet it's nowhere close to the top in terms of most-streamed sets on Archive.org. 

Why Did We Play This? A Series: 8/2/25, Densylvania, Wilkins, 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...]

When this band is really firing on all cylinders, our general operating philosophy is: Just keep playing. When the early set ends up featuring a big jam, that's usually a good sign, both for us and for the audience. Playing a private party at our buddy Denny's place already offered fertile ground for jammy weirdness, so we got right down to it. Here's the rundown:

Early set: Lonesome Road Blues, Columbus Stockade Blues > The Harder They Come > Jam > Money > Library Song*, Raleigh & Spencer > Hobo Song, Chattahoochee > Jam > Jambalaya > Fishing in the Dark > Raleigh & Spencer > Easy Skanking

*Original

I imagine the audience probably considers "Lonesome Road Blues" to be a soundcheck at this point, we've opened with it so often. With a trad tune under our belts, it was off and running. I really can't get enough of the New Grass Revival's version of "Columbus Stockade Blues" with Leon Russell, where they flip the song into a minor key. Those old bouncy major-key bluegrass songs are a lot of fun, but we really excel in a minor jam. For example, is there any reason why I needed to put a foreboding start on "Columbus" in A-minor? No. But I turned on my phaser pedal for a second, Joe started playing along, and before I knew it, things were getting super-funky, and it just turns out that was how we started the song on this particular evening. And that's one of the things I really love about this band, and about live music.

"Columbus" ends pretty abruptly on normal nights, and there's usually a break before the next song. But again, in the spirit of "just keep playing," Joe started a little banjo figure that I followed. The rest of the band hopped in, finding an open space and filling in, and Joe began to drop little musical hints that we were heading toward Jimmy Cliff's "The Harder They Come."

Things drop back down into a minor-key jam and we work our way back toward A-minor to do one of my very favorite things lately — a reggae song played on bluegrass instruments. There's a very strong link between the two in their percussive nature, but also in the way that if you cut the typical bluegrass tempo in half, all of a sudden you have a reggae song. We've found some great dramatic potential in bouncing back and forth between those two. I'm always a big fan of hopelessly-obscure covers, and Cornell Campbell's "Money" fits that bill nicely, along with providing some timely political commentary.

We rounded out a 28-minute early-set jam with one of Nemo's originals, "Library Song."

"Raleigh & Spencer" is one of several songs from the Yonder Mountain String Band/Jeff Austin Band repertoire that's been part of our sets almost back to the start of the band. It's a great major-key jamming vehicle, and this time we brought it up into Old & In the Way's "Hobo Song."

Then it was time to get a little country! I hate a whole lot of the '80s and '90s pop-country catalog, but Alan Jackson's "Chattahoochee" never gets old. We got a little introspective with it coming off the end and then bounced things along into Hank Williams' "Jambalaya" and Nitty Gritty String Band's "Fishing in the Dark." 

Just. Keep. Playing. 

A tender little outro jam gave Joe the time to flip back to "Raleigh & Spencer" on the tablet, since we hadn't done the last couple verses yet. To me, things like this are a series of fun musical problems to solve onstage. "Problems" is not the right word. Puzzles. We're playing in D...  what's a fun way to get back down to A? What's a fun way to end "Raleigh & Spencer"? How about for Joe to start singing Bob Marley's "Easy Skanking" over the R&S chord progression? From there the only question is, do we start playing the actual chord progression? And thus ends the early set.

Late set: That Was Your Mother, Sweet Heaven When I Die, Southern Nights > Jam > Old & in the Way, Godzilla > Jam > I Got Five On It > Jam > Breathe > Southern Flavor > House by the Sea > Dark Star > Shuckin' the Corn, Werewolves of London**, Colt 45**

*Original

**feat. Josh Brown, flute

If I could, I'd make "That Was Your Mother" the new "Lonesome Road Blues." It's got a perfect bluegrass progression, just wailing away on the 1 and 5 chords, and you can always count on Paul Simon for some good, slightly-snarky lyrics.

Nemo brought "Sweet Heaven When I Die" into the repertoire when he joined the band, and it's become a favorite and setlist regular. The great Glen Campbell tune "Southern Nights" was also making regular appearances throughout the spring and summer 2025 setlists. It took us a minute to work out how we were going to do the little riff that opens the song and pops up a couple other times, but from then on it's served as a nice launching pad. On this night, it launched into a jam that went from heartfelt to menacing to raging, with Joe playing a heavy-metal banjo solo, spinning 32nd notes out into the night with the aid of a distortion pedal.

Every chance you take isn't a hit. I will be the first to admit that we had to make a pretty clunky transition into "Old & In the Way." There's a simple explanation for it. The song is in the key of G, but on the chart in our tablet, the first chord is C, because the chorus starts on the 4 chord. Joe thought C was the home key, and he was setting us up to play it that way. On the tape, you can hear me telling him that the song is in G, and that we can just play through the chorus chords once and then get into the song. We wrapped that one up pretty quickly after getting thrown off, but you could tell everyone was itching to keep jamming.

So we didn't waste any time getting to Blue Oyster Cult's "Godzilla," whose outro jam was my favorite of the night. Joe and I both turned on some effects at the same time, and things really began to spin into the stratosphere with weird, metallic, robotic-sounding shards of banjo and guitar flying everywhere until we acheived some sort of nightmare-circus jam... which of course we transformed into a cover of "I Got 5 On It," by The Luniz, a classic bluegrass tune!

We hushed things down at first as we headed toward the next song, but the jam kept winding around itself. Joe found a banjo drone he liked, I was circling it with wah-wah acoustic guitar, Nemo was doing some melodic classical-sounding bass down below, and Andy was plucking little twinkly notes way up high. There are definitely times when it feels like we're functioning more as a chamber-music quartet in these moments, everyone finding a spot and settle in as we move the energy in one direction or another. Joe made some good use of what I keep calling "The Godzilla Pedal," generating a distorted drone that helped lead us nicely into Pink Floyd's "Breathe." We cranked that up into a great minor-key instrumental, "Southern Flavor," and another tune that's been part of the repertoire ever since we started, Iron & Wine's "House by the Sea."

As that song began to slowly melt into a dissonant puddle, I heard Joe teasing the riff for the Grateful Dead's "Dark Star." This is a Holy Grail moment for an aspiring jam-band nerd. I honestly wasn't sure if I was prepared to try and take it on. Musically speaking, the basic skeleton of "Dark Star" is not difficult to learn, but it comes with a lot of baggage. The Dead regularly ran it out to the half-hour mark in their late sets, taking it to deep space and back. We'd already taken two pretty spacey detours in this late set, and I wasn't sure where this one would head. All things considered, we kept it pretty down-to-Earth, really working the triplet feel to the max. 

For a moment after we finished the final verse, I did think it might spin out of control, but then I realized that what I was hearing as a weird, dissonant, spacey banjo line was actually a little lick from the old-school instrumental "Shuckin' the Corn." One look from Joe to the rest of us, and we knew what was up. We joined in on the riff, cranking the weirdness up before Joe hit the opening riff and we galloped to the end of a 45-minute jam.

In retrospect, we should've brought our buddy J.B. onstage sooner to put some flute on "Dark Star"... oh well. He joined us for a couple standard late-setters to round things out, "Werewolves of London" and yet another hip-hop cover where we really can only do the chorus, Afro Man's "Colt 45" (or is it actually called "Crazy Rap"? It might be, but I've never heard anyone refer to it by that name. It's "Colt 45" to me).

Hear the full show at Archive.org.

A Few Words in Defense of Our Country

I was just rambling on and on when I initially started this post, about the way social media has degraded human discourse and turned far too many of us into attention-seeking pieces of sh*t. Which is true.

But really, the political events of the past few days have put something into focus that a great many of us do not seem to understand.

When cancel culture was going full-tilt a few years ago, a segment of this country objected to it through a fundamental misunderstanding of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. They argued that people's right to free speech was being violated if they were fired for making statements deemed objectionable by their employers. And that is not what the First Amendment protects. Your employer has every right to decide that your public-facing social-media bullsh*t reflects poorly on the company and that maybe you should find a job elsewhere.

The First Amendment protects you from retaliation by THE GOVERNMENT. And make no mistake, that is what is happening now with Trump targeting late-night television hosts for making jokes about him and suing the New York Times for $15 billion, a case I'm 100% confident he will lose if the Times is willing to sink enough money into it to fight the inevitable tsunami of appeals.

Traditionally speaking in political history, one of the litmus tests for a free country is the ability to criticize the government without retaliation. 

We are currently failing that test.

Republicans spent the entire Biden administration saying vile things about Joe Biden, his family, his dead son. Not jokes. Just mean, horrible sh*t. And yet can you EVEN IMAGINE if Joe Biden had tried to get Fox News shut down over Greg Gutfeld's jokes? All of the people cheering over Jimmy Kimmel's suspension would have been screaming themselves deaf about our First Amendment rights. Some of the same people who are tearing their hair out over posts denigrating Charlie Kirk, were also posting about how we may need an armed revolution to "take the country back" under the Biden administration. 

That is where I truly don't understand how a lot of us seem unable to see the larger picture, which is the continuation of these policies under a presidential administration that you DON'T agree with. It's all fine and dandy when he's going after "the left," but what happens if it gets enough people motivated to put a Democrat in the Oval Office?

Try as he (probably) might, Trump is not going to be president forever. Someone else is going to get into that office. And I think a significant cross-section of Americans has not taken the time to ask themselves — do they want THAT person to have all of the same power that Trump has tried to grab for himself, especially if it turns out to be a Democrat? Because that's the way it works — what's good for the goose is good for the gander. Trump is setting a precedent for the future of the presidency, and I don't think it's one that either party should get to utilize.

It would be truly wild to see Republicans twist themselves into pretzel knots trying to say that a Democrat president can't do the same things Trump has done, when they just spent four years letting him do it. It's not as though this is like the Republican Revolution in Congress in the '90s, when the president and Congress worked in concert to enact the GOP agenda. This is the president usurping power from the other branches of government, deliberately defying the checks and balances in the U.S. Constitution that people claim to hold so high and holy. But only when it suits them specifically, I guess.

I used to think it was borderline-hilarious the way that Trump just constantly lied in a way that seemed almost designed to get himself caught. It's not funny now. Now it seems like more of a definite strategy of purposely muddying the water at every opportunity. Because we're now reaching a point where so many people are lying so often (on both sides of the political fence) that it's nearly impossible to determine what is the actual truth.

No one of any political stripe should be happy about that.

I see a president who is teaching a generation of children that it's OK to be a rude d*ckhead in any situation. I see elected officials posting blatantly-fabricated "breaking news" horsesh*t. We're all screaming at one another on social media and then going to high school softball games with some of the same people we demonize all day on Twitter. Massive corporations have figured out how to harness and monetize our rage, and while we yell ourselves hoarse into the digital void, they spend their days reverse-funneling more money to the top.

In the immortal words of George Carlin, "They don't care about you. They DON'T care about you. THEY DON'T CARE ABOUT YOU."

My ability to write this should be a mark of pride in my country. But honestly, in September 2025, that really depends on who ends up reading it.

And that should frighten you, whether you agree or not.

In Praise of Phil & Friends, the Most Ass-Kicking Band I've Ever Seen in Person

This poster has been burned into my medulla oblongata since 2001...

I was a late arrival to the Grateful Dead. Despite immediately recognizing the cover of Workingman's Dead from my Dad's record collection when I saw it, it would be generous to say that I was barely aware of their status as live legends.

But in the fall of '99, my freshman year of college, I went to the Civic Arena in Pittsburgh — soon to be the Mellon Arena, and soon after that, a pile of rubble — with the sole purpose of seeing Bob Dylan for the first time. I couldn't wait, and you can read all about that in the post below, should you desire. 

This post is about the opener, identified on my yellow Ticketmaster ticket as "Phil Lesh & Friends." Like I said, I was there to see Dylan. 

But then this opening band started to play. 

As a big jazz fan already by this time — and particularly having recently fallen in love with the skronky funky gumbo that is Miles Davis' Bitches Brew — I was immediately down with the all-electric version that this band was churning up as they jammed for TWENTY-FIVE MINUTES BEFORE ANYONE SANG ANYTHING.

That's not a complaint. The opposite, actually.

My completely-sober brain was leaking out my ears. Who were these guys? They were very, very good. And for an opener, they certainly had the place going. Indeed, it seemed like a lot of the crowd was here for them. 

You heard me earlier pleading ignorance to 99% of Dead knowledge in my late teens, and I stand by that. I had no clue that a number of incarnations of the Grateful Dead were drawing small-arena crowds all over the country. 

I had no clue that one of the two lead guitarists was Warren Haynes, who, oh, you know, filled the Duane Allman role in the f***ing Allman Bros. Band. 

I had no clue the other lead guitarist playing what I could only describe as "anti-gravity jam-jazz" was Steve Kimock, who I would see live several more times and also briefly share the stage with during one of theCAUSE's D-Jam benefit shows. 

I had no clue why everyone was going nuts in the middle of what I thought was just a jam, not realizing that this crowd could tell the next song coming as soon as someone hit a certain guitar figure.

If I had been a full-on Deadhead at the time, I would've been ecstatic too. The show opened with a 25-minute instrumental jam that skronked its way into "Dark Star" and "Dear Mr. Fantasy" before truly blowing my mind.

Like I said, I was a big jazz fan. Weird time signatures and little two-beat tags on the end of a musical phrase are things I was used to hearing. But when the band launched into the big instrumental section of "Unbroken Chain" — an 11-count jam followed by a 15-count jam split into seven- and eight-beat measures — I couldn't handle what was happening in my ears. 

That song smoothed back out into its ending, and before I knew what was going on, Kimock and Haynes had both cranked up the distortion on their guitars and we were detouring back into "Dark Star" by way of the Allman Brothers, all big fat bluesy licks and GOOD F***ING GOD MAN WHO IS THIS DRUMMER, THEY ONLY HAVE ONE BUT IT SOUNDS LIKE THERE'S TWO OCTOPUSES' WORTH OF ARMS ON PERCUSSION WTF IS GOING ON?!?!??

Here's the best part of this tale — this isn't even the best version of this band.

During most of the '99 Phil & Friends tour, it was sort of a who's-available-this-month kind of situation, at least in the guitar department. Warren Haynes was around a lot, but there are shows where Kimock's gone and Derek Trucks is around.... there's the Warfield run of shows where's it's basically Phil Lesh & Phish. And all those shows are really good.

But for the majority of 2000-'03, Phil & Friends was a single, world-destroying lineup: Lesh, Haynes, Rob Baracco from the Zen Tricksters on keys, Jimmy Herring (another occasional Allman Bros. alum) from Aquarium Rescue Unit and Widespread Panic on second lead guitar (no one really played rhythm guitar in this band), and the "Mighty White Cloud," John Molo, on drums.

When I say that this is the most ass-kicking band I've ever seen live, it's just my opinion, but damn, they really could do just about anything. Forget sets where they start playing and don't stop 'til it's over, because that was every single show. That was the low bar, generally speakin... moving effortlessly from one tune to the next, changing rhythms, meters and keys on the fly during jams... playing a Miles Davis tune from out of nowhere, and not just something vampy and modal, friggin' "Milestones," a full-on jazz standard.

My college roommate and I went to see them in the spring of 2001 at our school's basketball arena, and it remains to this day the greatest concert I've seen. They jammed "Cumberland Blues" and "Friend of the Devil" for a good 35 minutes, tore through "Shakedown Street," "Eyes of the World," covered Howlin' Wolf's "Smokestack Lightning" and served up "Like a Rolling Stone" to open the late set... they played one or two songs I didn't know but enjoyed immensely, turned my entire head to mush closing with "Scarlet Begonias" and I was so out of my mind at the end that I told my roommate we needed to walk down to the stage so we could meet Phil.

Needless to say, that did not happen. Many other things happened that night which, in fact, did not happen.... damn you, Spiderman..... I think we're wandering off course here........

Phil & Friends took all of the things I already liked about the Grateful Dead — the writing and the songs, the head-spinning jams, the lengthy no-pause second sets — and cranked them up into a Deadhead's Dream Setlist every night. They shied away from Bobby songs, but they also dove deep into stuff the Dead rarely ever brought out in concert. They truly took on the ethos of "The Music Never Stopped," both in terms of carrying on the Dead's catalog as well as rarely pausing during either set.

There are several later versions of this band, starting in 2004 with a really weird lineup fronted by, of all people, Chris Robinson from the Black Crowes. I'm not real big on most of them, although I've gotten into a lot of the bands Lesh has fronted at his Terrapin Crossroads club in San Rafael.

In the same way that the Dead could occasionally catch lightning in a bottle and roll out a rip-roaring show from top to bottom, for a brief three-year period, this jamband ably continued the Dead's original mission of lighting out for unknown musical territory.

There's a ton of tapes on Archive.org. They're great.

I Have Ignored Bob Dylan For Too Long... At My Own Peril

"I ain't no false prophet..."

The night of Nov. 5, 1999, was a magical, mystical moment in the musical journey that my life had become at that point in my late teens.

It was the night I saw Bob Dylan perform live for the first time, after hearing his records for literally my entire life via my Dad's record collection. It was one of the first times where I found it almost difficult to believe what I was seeing, this guy who loomed larger than life over at least 30% of the music I grew up listening to. I'd seen Bruce Springsteen, and this was Bruce's idol.

The other thing that made it magical: it was also the night that started me on a Challenger-Deep-level dive into the Grateful Dead. Phil Lesh & Friends were the opening band, with Steve Kimock and Derek F***ing Trucks on twin lead guitar. Before we'd even gotten to Dylan, I had my mind blown by these guys I'd never heard of who started playing and didn't stop for almost two hours. I'd go on to see Phil & Friends as often as possible. (the main incarnation of that group with Lesh, Haynes, Herring, Baracco and Molo is the most ass-kicking band I've ever seen live, they could do anything)

But while that turned out to be a great discovery, I was there for Dylan... and he didn't disappoint. 

This show came in the midst of his tour supporting Time Out of Mind, the '98 or '99 record produced by Daniel Lanois that is one of his best, in my opinion — a beautiful, dusty, bluesy collection of songs that had several tunes ("Not Dark Yet," "Cold Irons Bound") that hinted at the balladeer he would become starting around 2010.

He opened with a rocked-up version of the old Stanley Brothers tune, "Roving Gambler," which is now one of the songs my own bluegrass band covers the most... and we do the Dylan arrangement. I could never find a recording of that show, but I did find a 2001 bootleg from Japan where they opened with the same tune.

The setlist was awesome, and included "Desolation Row," "Cocaine Blues," "Tangled Up in Blue," "Shelter from the Storm," "You Ain't Goin' Nowhere," "Highway 61 Revisited" and a high-energy "Not Fade Away" closer. The only minor disappointment for me was I'd hoped to hear more live versions of the Time Out of Mind tracks — I only got one, "Love Sick," but that was Dylan. He's gonna play what he wants, and I was plenty happy with what I got.

I saw him again almost exactly three years later, a Nov. 8, 2002, show in the A.J. Palumbo Center at my alma mater, Duquesne University in Pittsburgh. I was crazy excited. It was great — a three-minute stroll from my dorm room to go see the Master again, and this time with my Dad, who'd introduced me to Dylan in the first place. 

Dylan had released Love & Theft the previous year, another record I thought was really great, if not exactly groundbreaking. Look, some people are bothered by the fact that a whole lot of Dylan tunes are just various iterations of 1-4-5 blues, and I get it. Doesn't bug me at all. A lot of his music is a backdrop for the lyrics. If you're going to a Dylan show strictly for the music.... I dunno what to tell you. Some people dislike his penchant for re-arranging his greatest hits when he performs them live. Not a problem for me. When I go to a show, I wanna hear something I've never heard before. 

The 2002 setlist was, again, a BANGER. In addition to a bunch of my favorite tunes from Love & Theft, he broke out "Tombstone Blues," "It's Alright Ma," "Masters of War," "All Along the Watchtower," I mean DAMN. 

But.... this was also around the time he'd started playing most of the set from behind the keyboard. And I was just not into it. I remember thinking how glad I was to have seen him in '99. 

He released several more records, I bought a few, and they were each decent in their own way. Modern Times had a little more energy than some previous efforts, and I'm never gonna get mad at having Los Lobos as your studio band (Together Through Life). He released an album of old pop standards, and that was okay. For me, it was mostly notable because of the new melodic quality Dylan had discovered when a song was paced properly. He still talked his way through a lot of the verses, but it was more of a back-porch-storyteller situation, and not just a guy kind of yelling rhymes. None of it, however, convinced me that I wanted to go see him live again.

That was probably a dumb idea. And once again, I had to go all the way to Japan to find what I was looking for.

I recently discovered that Dylan released a 2020 record, Rough & Rowdy Ways, and it's real good. In addition, I also stumbled across a bootleg of an April 20, 2023, show from Nagoya, Japan. And it's just sooooo goooooooood.

This is, I believe, a completely different band than the Larry-Campbell-led group that was with Dylan for a good while — it's Doug Lancio and Bob Britt on guitar (not Dylan, not at all, strictly piano), Donnie Herron on mandolin, violin and steel guitar, Tony Garnier on bass and Jerry Pentecost on drums. And they're fine.

But it's the way that Dylan seems to have settled into more of an old-school mode that really caught my attention. His piano acumen has certainly improved since I last heard him tinkle the keys, but it was the way he eased into almost every tune. It was very reminiscent of guys like Ray Charles or Isaac Hayes on the Live from the Sahara album... most every song starts with Dylan teasing the chords on piano while he mumbles the opening lyrics and the band slowly creeps in behind. He usually gets through a verse and then the band kicks the song proper. 

•••

•••

Most of the songs on Rough & Rowdy Ways are pretty laidback, and you can just as easily imagine much of the Nagoya setlist happening in a dark nightclub as opposed to a venue that seats thousands. But then the band launches into a cover of the Grateful Dead's "Truckin'," and everyone's reminded that this is indeed a rock concert.

Is it a good cover? From the band's perspective, sure, they sound great. From a lyrical-performance perspective? Again, opinions have alway differed on Dylan's delivery. To me it doesn't matter. If I'm Bob Weir, I'm ecstatic that The Man is covering one of my tunes. If anything, it's even more of a tribute to the Dead that Dylan flubs several of the lyrics. It makes little difference that the song is mostly out of his vocal range. It's a touchstone in the New Great American Songbook, and worthy of inclusion in the repertoire of one of the artists whose tunes make up that book's early pages.

So, in a very long and rambling roundabout way, this is my apology to Bob Dylan. Plenty people have doubted you along the way in what is now a vastly successful career spanning more than a half-century. I was briefly one of them, but in what should be common practice (and all-too-frequently isn't), convincing concrete evidence has shown me otherwise. 

In the immortal words of Jeffrey Lebowski, "New sh*t has come to light."

You Got Bluegrass in My Reggae! No, You Got Reggae in My Bluegrass!

What has two thumbs and didn't even make it TWO WEEKS

with 'posting new remixes'? THIS GUY.

• • •

I made a bluegrass/reggae crossover record.

What started out as a one-off goofy project for 4/20/20 eventually blossomed into a full half-hour of old bluegrass tunes recast as reggae, along with three original dub tunes to create Red, Gold, Green & Bluegrass with musical partner-in-crime Joe Dep. We released it July 1 on Bandcamp. ($7, get your copy today!)

I can trace the deepest roots of this project back to a cassette tape of Puerto Rican reggae. That's what was playing — specifically, a band called Gomba Jahbari — when I walked into one of my now-best-friend's dorm rooms, and it was immediately captivating. Partly because it was Spanish-language reggae, which I'd never heard before, but also because they were using a synthesizer that I always referred to as "the Wubbly." It's just a certain way of filtering and tweaking a square-wave synth that gives it this nice, fat, round sound that works great in a reggae context. Gomba Jahbari uses it a lot, as well as my other favorite PR reggae group, Cultura Profética. 

With the banjo originating in Africa, and its use in the Caribbean dating back to the 1700s — and its general percussive nature — Joe and I figured there was no reason it wouldn't fit right in with a reggae soundscape. And I think it does, very well. It works as a sort of melodic substitute for the hand percussion common in rocksteady reggae.

Anyway, it turned into a real labor of love, we had a great time putting it together, and hope that you might think it's worth checking out.

Snag a copy at patrickvarine.bandcamp.com.