Sturgill Simpson
The Spin has never come closer to feeling guilty for making it on the comp list as we did Saturday night at 3rd & Lindsley, where country music’s great white hope Sturgill Simpson performed the first of a two-night stand at the 500-ish-cap club. Not only did each show sell out instantly (an impressive albeit unsurprising feat, considering the remarkable year Simpson has had); we talked to multiple fans who paid scalpers triple-digit sums for tickets on the secondary market.
"Now that we're on a major label, the conspiracy theorists come out of the woodwork," Simpson said at one point in the show, the singer’s first gig since canceling a run of recent dates due to illness. He was smirking over the idea that the cancellations were a "major money grab" rather than a health concern. "Can't win for losing," he said. If The Sturge still felt under the weather, we couldn't hear it in his buttery delivery, which at times sounds like he’s grunting beautifully in a monosyllabic, made-up language. Seeing as how so many attendees paid McCartney prices for this club show, the mood in the shoulder-to-shoulder-packed, personal-space-bereft room was rowdy and reverent from the moment Simpson sauntered onstage, backing band in tow, and spat out the opening lines of “Sitting Here Without You.” Simpson hardly paused before getting right into the soulful country-blues epic “Water in a Well,” making for an opening one-two punch from his 2013 debut, High Top Mountain.
Sturgill Simpson
For better or worse, Simpson’s minions (from hippies and hipsters to good ol’ boys and Nashville cast members) were damn excited to be crammed in together. For better, because people getting down and dancing as they did to the hoedown-worthy opening number was a pretty rad change of pace for the normally dinner-theater 3rd & Lindsley vibe. For worse, because a random assortment of noodle-dancing hippies who’d cleared space for themselves in various areas across the room made our multiple trips to the bar and back all the more challenging.
The pros and cons presented by this predicament were illustrated pretty vividly by a hippie couple who danced intensely a few feet away from us for the duration of Simpson's set, especially during the elongated bluegrass-jam sections of many prime set-list selections: He in ponytail and she in flowing skirt, the couple rolled and twirled and bobbed with little to no awareness or concern for the personal space of those near them, even though they seemed good-natured enough and more than made up for their distracting presence with endlessly entertaining lyrically interpretive hand gestures. And when we say good-natured, we mean really good-natured, as the guy, out of the blue, handed a sizable amount of what looked like some pretty dank weed to a friend of ours for seemingly no reason at all. We can only cackle at the thought of the couple sobering up hours later and wondering where the fuck they left their weed.
Gratis grass aside, The Spin was inspired when considering how, just a few years ago, all we had to do to see Sturgill Simpson was go get lunch at Turnip Truck in The Gulch. Late in the show, (during the band introductions, if we recall correctly), Simpson looked back on his check-out-clerk days, reminiscing about how he and his co-worker turned bandmate, bassist Kevin Black, used to sneak out back and get high between shifts. Such humble beginnings were probably on the minds of more than a few folks in the room, as the hometown crowd held many longtime fans (including Simpson’s producer Dave Cobb, who the singer thanked effusively at one point). That made for all the more poignant a moment when Simpson sang the now-prophetic key line of “Water in a Well": “Someday if I'm standing on some big old stage / and you're down in the crowd trying to tell your friends I used to know him when.” Indeed.
But most of Simpson’s die-hard fans, despite paying out the nose for tickets and passionately singing along like they’ve had a life-long obsession with the singer, found out about him via last year’s breakout long-player (and album of the year picks in both the Scene’s Year in Music and Country Music critics' polls) Metamodern Sounds in Country Music. “Long White Line,” the first track of the night from the album (which recently hit 100,000 in sales), drew hoots and whistles as soon as the recognizable first notes were plucked. While the crowd shouted every lyric, and Simpson’s deep, emotional, Kentucky-bourbon-smooth croon sounded crisp and crystal clear, what most defined the performance, and many others in the 90-or-so-minute set, was the instrumental interplay between Simpson and his brimming-with-chemistry three-piece backing band, thanks especially to ace guitarist (and Estonian expat) Laur Joamets.
Sturgill Simpson
It’s worth noting how many non-Metamodern selections made Saturday night’s set list, along with how the entire room embraced the older material. "We're gonna play a little bluegrass if that's OK," Simpson said, introducing High Top’s “Poor Rambler” and “Time After All.” Judging from the emphatic response the songs, it definitely was OK. “It’s good to be home,” he said, explaining his recent cancellations before barreling into another run of back-to-back songs. But Metamodern tunes like “A Little Light” and “Living the Dream” were the obvious show-stoppers, practically begging us to shout their lyrics back at Simpson, and you could feel a particular smugness during the latter. When he’d hit that fateful lyric, “I don’t have to do a goddamn thing but sit around and wait to die,” Simpson seemed to give a little more emphasis, and we all followed suit. Simpson continued with songs like “Life of Sin,” “The Storm,” “Old King Coal” and “Some Days” before taking a minute to thank Nashville for his landmark year. “We’ve got a very small and very dear team,” he said. “It’s been a crazy year. ... You guys did this, not us.”
No song filled the venue like “The Promise,” on which Simpson’s rich vocals commanded a particular stillness in the room, and he took advantage of that rapt attention with a brief introduction for “Just Let Go,” his favorite song on the record. “I got smartass and told some journalists about drugs,” he said of the song, which has Buddhist influences. “If you think it’s about drugs, you need to go back and listen to it again.”
Sturgill Simpson
After “Just Let Go” was “You Can Have the Crown.” (“Here’s a song I wish I never did write.”) He thanked opener Anderson East, who performed while The Spin was circling the block looking for a parking space, and whose Dave Cobb-produced LP is due out in July. “Kid’s sick as shit and he came out here and gave it to you,” Simpson said of East, before kicking off a suitably psychedelic, main-set-closing “Turtles All the Way Down.” After a brief break, an jammy encore set spanned several covers, highlighted by a blazing rendition of The Osborne Brothers’ “Listening to the Rain.” The nod to his predecessors made for a fitting end to a night that seems like just the beginning for this much-needed voice in today’s country music landscape.
While Simpson still doesn’t seem like he’s comfortably reconciled himself with being held up as the savior of country music, he’s not afraid to raise his voice as part of the movement. That much was clear at the following night’s show, which was broadcast live on Lightning 100, and during which the singer bantered: “We’re on the radio! That means we exist.” That's a smart-alecky dig at Sony Nashville honcho Gary Overton’s inflammatory comments in The Tennessean last week. Rock on, Sturgill.
Editor's note: Photos are from Sunday night's show.
