TTB Way Up in Maine

We're always ready to go see the Tedeschi Trucks Band, and we were psyched when they announced a Spring swing through New England.  They seemed to be concentrating on small theaters this time and were going to play the Cabot in Beverley.  But by the time they had completed a pre-sale for the Cabot Club and for their own fan club (which also costs) there were just some corner balcony seats available!  But we saw they were then going up to Maine and so we went with Plan B and got seats (very expensive but 4th row center balcony) at the Waterville Opera House for April 15th.

I know there are plenty of great music fans up in Maine and they must have been delighted to have one of the best bands in the world show up in Waterville, which is kind of halfway between Augusta and Bangor (Colby College is in Waterville).  The Opera House is actually in the same building as City Hall, upstairs!  They played Portland the next night and then were off to Pennsylvania or something.

Dave had Thursday and Friday off (as well as Monday, Patriots' Day) and so we drove up to Sedgwick on Thursday, where the construction site that used to be (and will be again) our house was a little less muddy and more welcoming then the last time we were up.  Friday was a beautiful day and we had a great drive cross-country through farmland to Waterville, though a cat standing in the middle of the road tried to scare us off at one point.  We crossed into downtown by the lovely Ticonic Falls, which were raging with the water that's everywhere this early Spring.

Got a great parking space right across from the Opera House/City Hall and had a dinner that couldn't be beat at the Silver Street Tavern.  Then we followed the sudden crush into the second floor, picked up our tickets at the Will Call table, got drinks in adult sippy cups (they didn't want us to spill them), and sat down in the balcony to admire the Opera House, which featured plentiful swoops and flourishes and very small seats.

Great stuff and an electric sense of anticipation, but I was a bit disappointed to see that they weren't set up for the full band, just for the "Fireside" version.  Susan later commented that they couldn't have fit the full band on the tiny stage there, but I think they could have, they've done some squeezing in the past.  In Waterville they were just Susan and Derek, Gabe in his nest of keyboards, Falcon with an average-sized drum kit in the back, Brandon Boone on bass next to Susan, and Mike Mattison on vocals and acoustic far right.  Can't argue with that, especially when they put on a show like they did that night!

This was truly an excellent show.  The setlist was a little quirky/obscure but that was great.  Highlights were Made Up Mind, Walk On Gilded Splinters, and a long Angel From Montgomery/Sugaree.  Susan was having a great night on vocals and also on guitar, she ripped off a number of great leads, more than usual.  Derek is a force of nature of course, watching his effortless professionalism is almost as good as hearing the amazing stuff he plays on slide and with his fingers.  At one point they were deep into a jam and a subtle nod to Gabe, a slow turn, and then a mouthed "one two three" to Mike brought them out of it and back into the verse so smoothly ... this was magic.

• Set 1:
• Don't Drift Away
• Made Up Mind
• It's So Heavy
• Gin House Blues
• Keep On Growing
• Just as Strange
• Just Won't Burn
• Anyhow
• Key to the Highway

• Set 2:
• I Walk on Guilded Splinters (Dr. John)
• Misunderstood
• Everybody's Got to Change Sometime (Taj Mahal)
• Whiskey Legs
• Laugh About It
• The Feeling Music Brings
• Outside Woman Blues
• Angel From Montgomery / Sugaree
• How Blue Can You Get?

• Encore:
• Get What You Deserve

But I'll have to say the player of the night was Tyler Greenwell, just rocking the Opera House.  The sound was surprisingly good for a not-high-ceilinged hall and they got the sound on the drums just right, it was awesome.  And of course Susan and Derek play some fine-sounding instruments too!

They played a good three-hour concert with a small set break, it was almost exactly 11 when they ended.  Needless to say, the crowd in Waterville loved them.  Though the median age was perhaps a little higher than at most TTB concerts we've attended and very few people stood through the whole thing, the crowd was raging.  A funny thing they do at the Opera House is just as the show starts, they let people up into the orchestra pit.  When they did that this time the pit was full within a half a second!  They also encouraged people to dance around the edges of the balcony, very different than most concerts.  You don't get one of the best bands in the world playing the Waterville Opera House every day.

Made our way downstairs, back to the car, and on the road East in no time.  This time no cats and we made it back to Sedgwick in about 90 minutes ... not bad!

Molly Tuttle and Band in Shirley

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!