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 lack of break practicing, the music gods threw a real curveball 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 gig, but the memo did not reach all members of the band, and Joe had already booked a gig with Org Drol, his dark-wizard heavy-metal-and-flute band

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 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.