Holly Bowling first appeared on our vistas when she did her incredible cover of Eyes for Songs Of Their Own, in the lead-up to the Dead's 50th in 2015. This immediately got her enshrined in the inner circle of great Dead-style musicians, though her individual style is unmatched. And of course we're huge JRAD fans, including guitarist Tommy Hamilton (who's also played in Billy and the Kids), and he has a unique style of his own.
Those two recently announced that they were making a record and soon would be on tour with a new band, Ghost Light, that also includes guitarist Raina Mullen, bassist Steve Lyons (apparently not the guy who played first base for the Red Sox), and drummer Scotty Zwang. This caused quite a stir in the Dead continuum naturally, and when a date at Thunder Road in Somerville was announced the tickets went quickly. I don't think they sell out very often, but the tickets were sold out (we were hoping to get one for Sally) and they were *packed* for the show on Saturday, April 14.
We were in agreement with Dead Nation and got there early so we could get good seats on the left side (they were still doing sound check when we arrived) where we could hopefully catch a view of Holly Bowling's fingering. You should stop reading right now and watch some of her videos. If 100 monkeys spent a thousand years practicing one particular version of Eyes they could probably do it pretty well, but she not only can kill those arranged set-pieces, her improvisation, her ear, her quickness, her fingering, her dynamic sound is incredible. She'd played in Boston about a year ago but tickets for that went immediately and we missed it. We weren't about to miss this!
Well anyway, they cleared up their scattered cases, clothes, and other stuff after sound check and we had a nice dinner at the counter on the left of that really nice room and then had a few beers. And we had another beer. The show was supposed to start at 8 but didn't until 8:50 or so and by then the place was full, and I mean full. The rows right in front of the stage were shoulder to shoulder with rowdies ready for a Saturday night musical experience of the highest kind, and though we were having a hard time seeing over the 10 or so rows in front of us, people were milling back and forth so much we caught quite a few great views.
Holly on the left with electric piano, Rhodes, and electric organ, Tommy on the right with scarf, Scalley cap, and leather jacket (he soon discarded most of the above, it got so hot), and in the middle Raina Mullen with Lyons behind her and Zwang over on the left tucked behind Holly.
Here's the setlist, pretty much all "originals" (some were done by Tommy's earlier band) except for the Dylan song, the Dead song, and the traditional encore:
Set One: Jam> Lead Weight >Tangled up in Blue* > If You Want It (title unconfirmed) > Lead Weight
Set Two: Epic Battle Between Light and Dark > untitled (d riff) > Isosceles > Greatest Story Ever Told % **, Boy > Epic Battle Between Light and Dark > 100 Years Ago > untitled (d riff)
Encore: Old Time Religion ***
* w/ Lead Weights & Isosceles teases | ** w/ untitled (D Riff) teases | *** w/ Greatest Story tease | % Ghost Light Debut (Grateful Dead)
And I should say that Tangled was incredible, seeming to go on for hours and then to weave back into the rest of the set. And GSET was deep and spacey and got way out there and then came back (they blew the words a few times, but it's complicated), and then went way out there again and again. This was enough to send a Dead fan into paroxysms.
In all, this was 3.5 hours of ecstasy, great music with a pretty short set break in the middle, enough to get a beer and a toke and hit the bathroom. There was a guy right behind us who very carefully set up his rig to stream the audio and video and I hope it appears on IA or elsewhere. And there were people dancing like crazy in the crowd and around the edges. This was incredible stuff.
Bowling was as good or better then I anticipated, which is saying a lot! I expected her to be ethereal and technically great, and she was, but she was also rocking and listening to her band and responding. And she was playing with the panache of a great piano player, using her large hands to cover and dominate parts of the keyboard and then hammering the chords until the keys were a milky swirl. Her left hand was just incredible, pounding out the rhythm and crawling up your back to scratch that boogy-boogy itch that had been bothering you all week (if not longer than that). And her talent for getting one roll going on one of her keyboards and then switching to another to follow it up left me smiling and laughing.
And I was incredibly impressed by Raina Mullen. On the videos I'd seen she didn't come across as the incredibly talented musician I saw that night. She's probably written a bunch of their original material (guess I'll have to wait for the record to come out to get that background), and she sure was singing a lot of it incredibly well. Not only was her lead singing spot on, her
backup of Tommy was surreal, who needs Scott Metzger? But the most wonderful bit of her performance was her rhythm playing on (what looked like) Bobby's green guitar. Take a look at the pictures at the bottom of this review.
Gee, who else was on stage? One of the guys was Tommy Hamilton who was playing as well as I've ever heard him and leading the band through the changes (though if Holly disagreed with him, a glance sufficed). Some of his leads were mind-melting ... ok, most of them.
Lyons and Zwang were a very solid rhythm section and did not miss a beat. Zwang had a solo near the end of the evening and shone on that.
But as good as those guys were, I couldn't help but think what the band would sound like with Billy Kreutzmann on the traps and Reed Mathis on the spacey bass. They could call it Billy and the Kids if they wanted. But we'd all know that the women in the band were *not* the kids. And Reed would have to take a back seat to Raina on the vocals.
Yikes, what a great night! They encored with a traditional, though they played the shit out of it. We'd parked a couple of blocks away and got out of there pretty fast, past the phalanx of tow trucks who were removing late arrivals from the Stop & Shop parking lot. Took the local roads back through Cambridge and Medford and Winchester on a cold early Spring night, and eventually got to bed at 1:19 by my clock.
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