I think we can all agree that thinking about the early days of lockdown isn’t a particularly fun or constructive activity. Four years on, it’s still hard to process the traumatic strangeness of normal everyday life being put on pause while we all became medium-term shut-ins. The plans that were made and then unmade, the experiences that you didn’t even know you were missing, the life that was unlived — it’s too much to take in, even now.
In the grand scheme of things, missing out on a concert might not amount to much in this context. But for the sake of conversation: The show I’m saddest about not seeing in 2020 is Sturgill Simpson’s truncated Sound & Fury tour, which began in January and like everything else ground to a halt in early March, about a month before it was originally scheduled to hit my town. I had been eagerly anticipating that night for months, ever since downloading a bootleg recording of a gig from the previous fall in Washington D.C., part of a pre-tour warm-up club tour. The music on that tape was thick, gnarly and above all furious, which matched Sturgill’s personal temperament at the time. When I interviewed him in February 2020, he talked about the tour with palpable dread. His previous road campaign in 2017 drove him to substance abuse, he confessed. He also pledged he would never do a “big tour” like this ever again. So, when the Sound & Fury tour was subsequently canceled, I suspect that Sturgill was the opposite of disappointed.
Flash forward to 2024. Sturgill is back on the road, and he has apparently broken the “no more big tours” pledge. Or maybe not — since Sturgill made that promise and this jaunt — dubbed the Why Not? tour — is official billed as a “Johnny Blue Skies” show. No matter. The semantics are irrelevant. What matters is that Sturgill Simpson is playing live again and his current tour is 2024’s most musically thrilling and flat-out life-affirming live experience.
The optimal word here is joy. I saw Sturgill last week at one of the dumpier venues in the Twin Cities area, and for three hours he played 31 songs with his brilliant band and positively radiated ebullience. The music just poured out of these guys like well-aged bourbon into a well-worn tumbler — honky-tonk stompers, revved-up electric bluegrass, stoned southern rock, duel-guitar psychedelic jams. They played originals from throughout Sturgill’s catalog with muscular authority, successfully merging the traditional country and soul sounds of the early records with the gut-punch rock of the Sound & Fury era. And they skillfully inserted covers that acted as signposts acknowledging where this music comes from: The Allman Brothers’ “Midnight Rider,” William Bell’s “You Don’t Miss Your Water,” Procol Harum’s “A White Shade Of Pale,” an absolutely apocalyptic version of The Doors’ “L.A. Woman,” and Prince’s “Purple Rain,” which merged seamlessly with Sturgill’s own gently weeping guitar elegy, “One For The Road.”
It was the best show I’ve seen all year, and possibly in the past few years. It was one of those nights where you might think, I’m clearly exaggerating how good this was, this has to be a “rose colored glasses” situation. But I know it’s not, because you can stream (or download) the shows on this tour as you’re walking back to your car in the parking lot. Sure enough, I am listening to this show as I type this, and it plays like the live album of my dreams: A little Waylon Live, a little Live At Fillmore East, a little Absolutely Live, a little Rock Of Ages, a little Europe 72. The good shit, in other words.
Let’s circle back to the optimal word: Joy. It’s not a feeling that comes through on Passage du Desir, Sturgill’s studio debut as Johnny Blue Skies released this summer. Passage contains some of the loveliest music the man has made. It radiates more beauty than any album in his catalog, with the possible exception of 2016’s fatherhood opus, A Sailor’s Guide To Earth. But the overall tone is desolate, even mournful. Many listeners picked up on themes of marital discord and mid-life angst recurring in the lyrics. As someone who has tried (and often failed) not to go overboard with armchair psychology when perusing an album’s liner notes, I’m wary of speculating on those particulars. But Passage Du Desir undeniably is concerned with loss, and the struggle to recognize one’s own identity when what has defined you has gone missing.
In light of this tour, I wonder if that sense of loss wasn’t romantic in nature so much as musical. Sturgill has talked recently about how he almost lost his voice in the past few years. He even lost of his love of playing. In a recent interview with the British music magazine Uncut, he says a switch flipped in his mind when he was invited to sit in at the annual Dead Ahead festival, and was tasked with learning dozens of Grateful Dead songs. “I wasn’t really familiar with them, because in my early twenties in Kentucky there was a jam band scene which I dismissed as unstructured noodling, and I lumped the Dead into that,” he told the magazine. But after looking at the songs, “I thought, why is this so easy? It’s almost like I could anticipate where Jerry was going. And it was because Jerry played folk, country, bluegrass and blues, the same way I play guitar.”
Once he got home, “all I could think about was playing guitar for 10 hours a day again. I called my booking agent and said, ‘I wanna go on tour.”
That’s what I’m talking about: Joy. Listening to these shows — you can hear them all on Nugs.net — I hear one long and cathartic exhale, a sigh of relief after an extended period of stress and depression that comes when one finally realizes that life’s simple pleasures are still there to be had. Like getting together with friends and absolutely whipping ass for three hours every night.
Special attention must be paid to Sturgill’s band, one of the finest units you’ll see on the road this year. Their excellent ensemble playing aside, there’s a narrative here as well about rediscovery and reconciliation with the muse. Two of the players, guitarist Laur Joamets and bassist Kevin Black, are back with Sturgill after departing in the mid-2010s. And then there’s stalwart drummer Miles Miller, who has been with the man since the beginning of his ascent more than a decade ago.
The newcomer, keyboardist Robbie Crowell, might very well be the MVP. Equally adept at the barroom boogie-woogie of “Life Of Sin” and the more interstellar tones gliding through “Right Kind Of Dream,” the man can also take out a saxophone in the middle of “All Said And Done” like he’s Garth Hudson bringing “It Makes No Difference” home in The Last Waltz.
Then, of course, there’s Sturgill. Not to belabor the point, but he is having a goddamn ball on stage these days. He’s smiling wide, he’s standing on amps, and he appears intent on destroying every audience standing before him. (The army jacket he donned on stage underlined the “joyful warrior” posture.) The show I saw ended with “Call To Arms,” which at nearly 14 minutes was also the longest number of the night. Every second of that was earned, with Sturgill imploring his band to play harder and louder and faster. Then the band drifted into a space-rock jam, with Joamets sending slide-guitar lines to the outer rings of Saturn. Right when nirvana was about to be achieved, Sturgill steered the song back into “harder and louder and faster” territory, guiding the band to an overpowering climax of sound. It was part Jerry Garcia in 1972, and part the E Street Band on the Darkness On The Edge Of Town tour. Like I said: Live album of my dreams.
That night, you could sense that Sturgill simply did not want to leave the stage. What had once been a public prison — and a facilitator of personal bad behavior — had been reclaimed as a forum of celebration. I didn’t want to leave, either. I wanted to follow these guys to the next show in Kentucky. Alas, I was able to do it virtually by listening to the live recording online. In Kentucky, they played even longer: 38 songs over three and a half hours. They did Roy Orbison’s “Crying,” which I wish I had seen in person. And they tinkered with perhaps the show-stopping sequence of the St. Paul show — the progression from an instrumental jam on ZZ Top’s “La Grange” to “A Good Look” to the titanic “L.A. Woman.” In Kentucky, they put “La Grange” in the middle, which was nice but didn’t have the same sense of crazy momentum.
Nevertheless, the joy was still there. And the joy is what counts. When it first appeared on Sound & Fury, “A Good Look” registered as a bleakly cynical pisstake on the music business and Sturgill’s belief (or conviction) that he would not be part of it for much longer. “Well then, how’re you gonna eat when you’re bitin’ the hand? / Well, you know they don’t like it when you take a stand / So enjoy it while you can / And say hi to all the boys in the band / ‘Cause it’s all over now / Just a flash in the pan.”
But on stage, “A Good Look” is now the sound of guys playing like nobody is watching. It’s just pals bashing away in a garage. Are The Doors cool? Who cares? When we play it, it rules. Sturgill called it the Why Not? tour for a reason: Why not choose life? Who not rock? Why not be great?