Good thing I opened that Bull Run newsletter in a timely fashion a couple of months ago. It announced that Molly Tuttle with her bluegrass band, Golden Highway, had just been signed for a date there. I got quick buy-ins from psyched people (including Scott and Michelle) and got 5 seats at the front-center table for Sunday, April 3rd. And then the Sawtelle Room sold out, packed to the gills!
Dave was up for the weekend and we got on the road and out there at around 6 for dinner before the 7:30 show. The room was half full when we got there, and I can't over-emphasize how many people were stuffed in by the time the show started. You could barely find your way through the tables to get to the bathroom it was so full.
Bella White opened, we'd seen her at the Green River Festival last summer. She apologized with her wry sense of humor that all her songs were so sad. She complained that even when she wrote a happy one it ended up kind of melancholy. But this was great songwriting and her singing backed it up. All of her songs are so long, like she was arguing with herself, "Oh just one more verse might really get the point across!" I was just thinking that some of her themes seemed really familiar to me, and then she covered Guy Clark's Dublin Blues, which has exactly that theme she was hammering at! Melancholy and distance and fear that you may have missed the best thing in your life. A very enjoyable set and you could tell she was pumped to play for such a packed house.
The break before Molly was a little long, but we needed that to get in a last bathroom break and order another beer. Then she came on with her incredible new band. Left to right it was Bronwyn Keith-Hynes on fiddle, brother Kyle Tuttle on banjo, Molly, Shelby Means (ex-Della Mae) on a huge double bass, and Dominick Leslie on mandolin. They jumped right into the first song and proceeded to rock our world. As I was telling people, there's nothing like a bluegrass band firing on all cylinders, and there's nothing like sitting in the first row at the Bull Run and seeing those instruments being played in all their glory from 10-20 feet away. At one point they left their mikes and moved right up to the edge of the stage like acoustic musicians do sometimes and Molly was right in Sarah's lap, she could have reached out and touched her.
Molly had just released a new record on Friday, Crooked Tree. Some of the tracks have Dominick and Bronwyn, but besides that it's not her touring band. It's just a few stray musicians like Jerry Douglas (who co-produced), Ron Block, Jason Carter, Mike Bub, Dan Tyminski, Margo Price, Gillian Welch, Billy Strings, Viktor Krauss, Darryl Anger, blah blah. And the co-writer on many of the songs is Ketch Secor of Old Crow Medicine Show. But the band did almost all of the songs on the new CD and they were tight and excellent.
And Molly is one of the best bluegrass guitarists I've ever seen! I've had the privilege of seeing Del McCoury, David Rawlings, Tim O'Brien, Peter Rowan, Tyminski, Charles Sawtelle, etc. But she was standing right in front of us and racing with her fingers up and down the fretboard with a rare nimbleness and touch. And beside that her right-hand technique was at the same time both traditional and personal. She switched between finger-picking and flat-picking effortlessly (she didn't have a stand to put the picks in and so dropped them on the floor). And she did a claw-hammer technique on the guitar that was incredible (and must have hurt!).
This was riveting, and the rest of her band was keeping up with her to say the least. Keith-Hynes is a great, atmospheric fiddle player who can also saw that thing in half when needed. Kyle Tuttle on a large 5-string banjo and Shelby Means on bass were just fantastic and provided excellent backup vocals. And Dominick Leslie payed an effortless mandolin that distracted from his technical acumen; you could have missed how good he was. Shelby's brother also joined the band for one song on electric mandolin. Here's the set list (Sarah snapped a picture of it):
- Friend and a Friend
- Nashville Mess Around
- Wheel Hoss (Bill Monroe)
- Castilleja
- The River Knows
- Side Saddle
- She'll Change
- San Francisco Blues
- Super Moon
- Dooley's Farm
- Goodbye Girl
- Helpless (Neil Young)
- Over the Line
- Grass Valley
- Boogie
- She's a Rainbow (Rolling Stones)
- Rain and Snow (Traditional)
- Crooked Tree
- White Freightliner Blues (Townes van Zandt)
- Take the Journey
Holy crap, what a setlist! The packed house at the Bull Run all jumped to their feet and went crazy after her epic Take the Journey. At one point earlier in her set we wouldn't stop applauding after some of her brilliance, and she graciously nodded and smiled until we were done. She has a great smile and knows how to charm an audience, but when she was playing her guitar a look of steely determination crawled down her face, like a shadow. As much as the claw-hammer technique looked like it hurt, she was oblivious to minor things like that at those points.
Bella White came out and joined them for Helpless, which was just crystalline. I'd been raving about Molly's covers of She's a Rainbow and Cold Rain and Snow before she started, and then she did both of them! As great as her guitar playing is, she's got such an ability to go from a quiet almost little-girl vocal tone to the power and the element of epiphany that you need to sing songs like that. And after hearing her CR&S, you would not want to play lightly with her affections ... even if she is a rainbow.
Wow, after that and final band introductions and a group bow and the room just pulsing with excitement, I wasn't sure if there would be an encore. But the boffins were setting up a ribbon microphone for the band to cluster around, and they soon came back out for a three-song encore!!!
Encore:
- Across the Great Divide (Kate Wolf)
- Back Up and Push (Bill Monroe)
- Big Backyard
The vocals around one mike on that excellent Kate Wolf song were extraordinary. They had tried to get people to sing along with Helpless, and they closed with a great sing-along in Big Backyard, but we were all listening too hard to sing! Kyle kindly told us it was all right to just boogie in our seats. Molly threw her pick out into the crowd, and then they all disappeared downstairs to sign and chat at the merch table.
We talked to Scott and Michelle for a while and then took off, meaning to stop for a quick bathroom break downstairs. But the entire basement was wall to wall with all the people from upstairs who had rushed down there to buy her record and schmooze with Molly and the band! We were glad Dave had picked up her new CD before the concert.
Wow, that was great. Back in the car and quick ride back to Woburn, it's just 50 minutes and almost every time we've been out to Shirley we've seen a fantastic show. This was one of the best!
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