Sizzling Bluegrass Road Warriors Town Mountain Headline at the Rockwood Tonight

A good night at the Rockwod tonight. In the little room, there’s down-to-earth, wryly lyrical acoustic Americana songwriter Joanna Sternberg kicking off the evening at 7. Across the way, cult hero Ward White – who is unsurpassed at menacing rock narratives – plays the big room at the same time. Later on in the big room, there’s excellent acoustic Americana guitarist Bennett Sullivan at 10 and then raucous Asheville, North Carolina bluegrass band Town Mountain.

If memory serves right, the last time Town Mountain played New York, it was at the now-defunct Zirzamin on the coldest night of the year…and the place was packed. They’ve got a healthy following here, for good reason, so if you’re going, you ought to get there early (and you’ll probably like what Sullivan does too).

Town Mountain’s latest album is Live at the Isis, recorded last year in front of a liquored-up hometown crowd and streaming at Spotify. They sound like they’re about to jump out of their shoes on the blazing, careening opener, You Weighed Heavy on My Heart, Bobby Britt’s nimble fiddle and Phil Baker’s precise mandolin contrasting with Jesse Langlais’ absolutely unhinged banjo. Britt’s instrumental Four Miles – reputedly the first song he ever wrote – manages to be gorgeous and dangerous at the same time. Then Barker and bassist Nick DiSebastian push the energy even higher with the lickety-split Tarheel Boys

Up the Ladder gives guitarist/frontman Robert Greer a chance to team with Barker and Langlais for a spot-on and revealing look at where Chuck Berry got his guitar harmonies. Likewise, Greer gets the crowd howling along with him on the snide band-on-the-run anthem Lawdog, Britt firing off a solo that spins and spirals like a pair of lights on the roof of a police cruiser.

Their choice of covers aren’t the usual standards all the other bands play, either. They give Hank 3’s 5 Shots of Whiskey a subdued, morosely half-in-the-bag treatment and then immediately pick up the pace again with George Jones’ The Race Is On, with a surreal, bluesy banjo solo after which Britt jumps in and serves as the voice of reason until he decides to say the hell with it and go straight down the rabbit hole too. Jed Zimmerman’s Texas New Mexico Line, another road song, is barely more restrained. They pull it back a bit more with Sugar Mama and then wind up the album with a noisy, rapidfire Orange Blossom Special, Britt’s machinegunning riffage front and center. Once you hear this thing it won’t come as any surprise that these guys are racking up IBMA’s (International Bluegrass Music Awards). Grammies – who watches them, anyway?

Jim Lauderdale Goes Deep Into His Roots at Madison Square Park

Jim Lauderdale may be best known as a songwriter, but he’s also a first-rate performer. Rock fans know him as one of Elvis Costello’s Sugarcanes; he’s just as much at home playing jamband rock as the Americana roots he’s returned to in recent years. Saturday at Madison Square Park, Lauderdale and his excellent five-piece band – Jay Weaver on bass guitar, Randy Kohrs on dobro, Ollie O’Shea on fiddle, and a first-rate mandolinist – went deep into the bluegrass that Lauderdale loves so much. Vocally, his obvious influence is George Jones: with No-Show Jones past eighty now and not so likely to make many if any more New York visits, this show was a good approximation. Lauderdale has also done a lot of recording with both Dr. Ralph Stanley and Grateful Dead collaborator Robert Hunter, so it was no surprise that the set drew heavily from those tracks.

Lauderdale’s voice was in top form. He went up into uneasy George Jones territory on the waltz Lost in the Lonesome Pines, a Stanley collaboration that, for what it’s worth, won a Grammy in 2002 – and deserved to. Then Lauderdale aired out his low, low register on a slinky, pulsing version of his country gospel tune Can We Find Forgiveness, Kohrs adding stingingly energetic high lonesome harmonies as he did on many of the other songs. They opened with the oldtime, churchy I Feel Like Singing Tonight and followed that with the first of the Hunter co-writes, the lickety-split bluegrass tune Love’s Voice, fueled by some tasty handoffs from mandolin to the dobro. Zaccheus, another Stanley collaboration, featured Kors handing off nimbly to O’Shea – they may have been playing acoustic instruments, but the chemistry in the band was electric.

For the rest of the show, the band varied the dynamics, rising and falling, from the steady sway of Hummingbird, to Redbird, a rapidfire bluegrass vamp that gave O’Shea a launching pad for some soaring leads. The most memorable of all the songs could have been the honkytonk song Looking Elsewhere, with its wickedly catchy dobro hook – or, it could have been the song afterward, It’s a Trap, an edgy diversion into gypsy-tinged swing. Another song written with Hunter, the aptly topical Tiger and the Monkey, sounded like a bluegrass-flavored take on the Grateful Dead’s Mexicali Blues. When they reached The King of Broken Hearts, Lauderdale finally owned up to his George Jones fixation – and then took his voice up to the rafters for all it was worth. There didn’t seem to be many people recording the show, but some generous soul with a camera took the time to catch all of the unselfconsciously warm version of The Apples Are Just Turning Ripe. This show was yet another reminder of how much great live music there is in this city for absolutely free, if you look for it.

Lauderdale really gets around. His site lists his next show as a headline act at the Gram Parsons Guitar Pull on October 13 at 10 PM at the Okefenokee Fairgrounds in Waycross, Georgia.

Bettye LaVette: Stunning and Intense in the Flatiron District

Last night at Madison Square Park, soul survivor Bettye LaVette took care to emphasize her “surgence,” rather than resurgence. Throughout a riveting, electric hour onstage, she made it clear that her fifty years in the music business had been just as much of a struggle as her love life. Looking sleek and strong in a shimmery black dress and evoking Tina Turner, but with more range and more rage, LaVette and her impressively subtle four-piece backing band ran through a series of cult favorites as well as a handful of stunning reinventions of classic rock standards from her most recent album Interpretations: the British Rock Songbook. One of the most affecting of those was Neil Young’s Heart of Gold, which pianist Alan Hill opened by vamping on the hook from Tracks of My Tears, a riff that the band had toyed with to powerful effect on a handful of earlier songs. LaVette recalled how her version had been released as a single just a few weeks after the 1972 original, only to see her record label shelve it – as had happened to her so many times in the past – when it didn’t click with radio execs. The band took their time with this one, swaying pensively and adding a cruelly unresolved jazziness at the end of the verse. When she hit the line “And I’m growing old,” angst stretching across her face as her voice broke up into grit, the effect was shattering.

As it was on the evening’s most intense number, Paul McCartney’s Blackbird. LaVette recalled that her inspiration to record the song came from story about the Beatles taking a shortcut through a park to enjoy a post-gig joint, where McCartney noticed a black woman alone on a bench, singing at the top of her lungs, giving him the impetus for the song. She admitted that the tale was apocryphal, but that it made a good story – and then rewrote it as a theme for her own life. “For me, the British invasion was a nemesis,” she revealed, speaking for the legions of black artists whose songs suddenly disappeared from AM radio as the Beatles and their legions of imitators moved in on their turf. “A bunch of young British white men, who were stoned,” she added dryly, who’d left behind their songs “To be interpreted by a 66-year-old black woman who’s drunk.” While LaVette’s reputation as a party animal has considerable basis in fact, she actually seemed the furthest thing from intoxicated. Transforming the song into a slow anthem in 6/8 time, she methodically worked her way up from matter-of-fact to the longing of a literally transcendent crescendo: “All of my life, I’ve been waiting for this moment to arrive.”

And the rest of the show left no doubt that it had arrived. LaVette’s “surgence” actually began back in the 90s; as she was quick to acknowledge, she’s finally reached the point where her entire body of work, dating from the 60s, has finally made it into print. She and the band – Hill on a variety of keyboards, plus Charles Bartels on bass, Brett Lucas on guitar and Darrell Pierce on drums – opened the show on a defiantly insistent note. On They Call It Love (from The Scene of the Crime, her collaboration with the Drive-By Truckers), she went off mic, shrugged her shoulders and asked the audience if they had any more idea than she did about how to keep a relationship afloat: nobody did. Choices, a country ballad originally written for George Jones, was transformed into a quietly regretful soul ballad. Likewise, George Harrison’s It Don’t Come Easy made a clenched-teeth cautionary tale.

LaVette joked that “the only woman who can drink more than me…possibly” was Lucinda Williams, author of Joy, which LaVette turn turned into a slinkily careening, desperation-tinged one-chord jam. She closed with a towering, wrenching, angst-fueled version of the bitter ballad Close As I’ll Get to Heaven, Hill’s string synthesizer adding a symphonic edge. The audience roared for an encore, so she treated them to a gospel-drenched, a-cappella take of Sinead O’Connor’s I Do Not Want What I Have Not Got. Of all the veteran soul musicians who came thisclose but ultimately never reached the mass audience they deserved back in the records-and-radio era, LaVette reaffirmed her reputation as the most intense and emotionally vivid of them all. She’s at Highline Ballroom celebrating the release of her forthcoming album and book, A Woman Like Me, on September 28 at 8 PM; $26 advance tickets are still available as of today but won’t last.

Good Drinking Music from Bryan Dunn

When’s the last time you heard a really good drinking song? Not some cliched attempt at a drunken singalong, but a real clever, George Jones-worthy one? Bryan Dunn has one. It’s called Flowers. It’s country music, it’s very funny, it rocks pretty hard and there’s a pun midway through that’s worthy of Uncle Leon & the Alibis, that’s how good it is. Grab a free download here.