The world is a better place w/ the rock show in it. Deets later. Perhaps uncle rickey or the wordman will oblige w/ a setlist?
One Set:
01. Intro
02. Tornadoes
03. A Ghost To Most
04. Sink Hole
05. Shit Shots Count
06. The Company I Keep
07. Women Without Whiskey
08. Plastic Flowers on the Highway
09. 3 Dimes Down
10. Ronnie and Neil
11. Made Up English Oceans
12. Rosemary With a Bible and a Gun
13. Slow Ride Argument
14. Let There Be Rock
15. Marry Me
16. Hell No, I Ain't Happy
17. Shut Up and Get on the Plane
18. Outro
So, Green River Festival, Greenfield, MA 29 August 2021.
I'm not a festival guy so I didn't know quite what to expect, especially since, while DBT was far from the opening act, it was not their crowd and not their night. I knew it would be only a 90 minute set and I hoped it didn't rain. Well, the weather turned beautiful and the 90 minute set was worth the almost 4 hour round trip drive.
Knowing that my favorite DBT cover, "Play It All Night Long" is back in the rotation, I had hopes of hearing it, but realistically it was unlikely to be part of a short set, and it wasn't. It seemed like it took the band a few songs to find its groove, but once it did they put on a first class rock show all the way. And that's it for remotely negative comments.
The band needed to open w/ "Tornadoes" (for their friends in New Orleans) and did. It was a bit ragged but it was the right song at the right moment.
I thought the band really clicked for real with "Shit Shots Count." Matt in particular was monstrous on that one. Cooley had to switch guitars midsong (broken string? I didn't see from where I was) but didn't miss a beat. That's the place where he might have missed a verse or muffed a line in the past but he doesn't seem to be doing that these days. [Hat tip to the wordman].
I love the new arrangement of "Plastic Flowers" and was glad to get the chance to hear it live.
Jay did his Jay thing w/ notable keyboard solos on "The Company I Keep" and "Women Without Whiskey" (well more fills than solo on the latter, but still) and then really warmed up on guitar from midset on especially on "Ronnie & Neil" and after the first verse of "Marry Me."
"Let There Be Rock" through "Shut Up" was old fashioned rock show roar, 3 guitar madness plus organ from a friend of the band's whose name I didn't catch but who was not Josh Kantor. It was also interesting to see Jay playing guitar while shouting out the chords to the organ player in real time and the organist seemed to have no problem just going with it on that basis. Professional musicians are different from you and me. The band just killed what was effectively an encore substitute and while I was sorry it had to end, they went out in fine style. I will leave it to the philosophers among us to decide whether it's possible to blow the roof off an outdoor venue, but literal or not, the rock show was most definitely back.
I wasn't sure how the crowd would be - the festival is much more oriented to folk and granola than rock and beer and for sure a fair number of people left before DBT came on, which was to be expected as they were the last act of a 3 day festival. The remaining crowd was still good-sized and seemed to be divided between a gratifyingly large number of DBT faithful and the curious. One measure of the performance might be that after every single song, the crowd in the standing room section in front grew until it was pretty much full by the end. And the appreciative response to the band at the end of the set (it was spontaneous and really LOUD!) seemed to indicate that the band had made some new fans that night.
What used to be is gone and what ought to be ought not to be so hard
It's always a bit of a letdown for me to hear SU&GOTP as a closer not followed by A&F.
IIRC, there was a large stretch of time, maybe on both sides of 2010, when Cooley played "SU" and Patterson virtually never played "A&F," so playing them together is a renewed but relatively recent thing. Again, IIRC.
What used to be is gone and what ought to be ought not to be so hard
