June 04--Sturgill Simpson's three albums get lots of props for their adventurous spirit, the way they stretch the definition of country music in the spirit of the '70s outlaws and the '80s progressives.
But they offer only a hint of what the Kentucky-born singer brought Friday to a sold-out Riviera. At the front of an eight-piece band that included a horn section, Simpson leaned over his acoustic guitar and two-stepped across the stage as if stalking an invisible dance partner or preparing to deliver a haymaker. He scowled as he sang, the stolid, conversational growl heard on record ratcheted up in intensity and sharpness, a knife piercing through the roar.
Simpson occasionally gets lumped in with artists such as Jason Isbell and Chris Stapleton as a millennial answer to country individualists from the past -- from Steve Earle and Lyle Lovett to Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings. These artists share little in common other than their aversion to Nashville bro-country hegemony.
Simpson's bedrock is country, and his deep-as-a-well voice has Jennings' instant unvarnished authority. The singer's a late bloomer -- he spent time in the Navy and worked in shipyards, and he brought those experiences to his plainspoken songwriting. His opener, "Sitting Here Without You," was taken direct from Jennings' book of honky-tonk, brooding and ornery, with a brisk take that didn't allow for self-pity. One sensed instantly that Simpson's narrator was already stepping out the door into the night after deciding that he'd had just enough of his two-timing ex-lover.
More significantly, Simpson established that the set list would not be about faithful re-creations of the album tracks. Instead, the horns stretched out on the tune, and the singer wandered from side to side, directing his musicians in the moment: stretching, compressing, punctuating. The first two-thirds of the show found the songs from the first two albums blown up and out, with Laur Joamets and Simpson trading guitar solos over the locomotive churn of "It Ain't All Flowers" and the horns strutting into New Orleans for "A Little Light."
His choice of covers was just as wide-ranging: a 1920s-blues-gone-metallic "When the Levee Breaks," a forlorn "Never Go Around Mirrors" via Lefty Frizzell, a gut-wrenching twist on William Bell's soul classic "You Don't Miss Your Water (Till Your Well Runs Dry)," a low-key stroll through Nirvana's "In Bloom" (one of the night's few missteps).
The songs from his latest album, "A Sailor's Guide to Earth," served as the road journal of a weary troubadour and an open letter to his young son, a mix of parental advice, lost-at-sea longing and tall tales (with likely the first reference in a country song to "king cobras fighting in boxing rings").
The decision to finish the two-hour concert with the album played in order start to finish was a bold if not entirely successful one. A couple of songs tamped down the escalating momentum, the penultimate "Oh Sarah" in particular. But on "Brace for Impact (Live a Little)," the blend of Bobby Emmett's Hammond organ and Joamets' slide guitar evoked the explosiveness of the Allman Brothers in their prime, and the corrosive protest song "Call to Arms" built from a T. Rex-like chug into a hailstorm of guitars and screams.
It was a show that made genre distinctions irrelevant, as Simpson embraced a multitude of traditions from his native South: country, certainly, but also soul and funk (most explicitly in "Keep it Between the Lines"), blues and Southern rock. He gave the band plenty of latitude to explore the triangle that binds Nashville, Memphis and New Orleans, and his vision translated into blue-flame conviction. The final line in the final song of the night was about refusal: Don't dictate to me, don't box me in. "That bull--'s got to go." Who was going to argue?
greg@gregkot.com
Sturgill Simpson set list Friday at the Riviera:
1. Sitting Here Without You
2. Water in a Well
3. Long White Line
4. When the Levee Breaks (Memphis Minnie Kansas Joe McCoy cover)
5. Living the Dream
6. Life of Sin
7. I'd Have to Be Crazy (Willie Nelson cover)
8. Life of Sin
9. Never Go Around Mirrors (Lefty Frizzell cover)
10. Some Days
11. Time After All
12. Voices
13. Living the Dream
14. A Little Light
15. The Promise (When in Rome cover)
16. Turtles All the Way Down
17. It Ain't All Flowers
18. You Don't Miss Your Water (William Bell cover)
19. Welcome to Earth
20. Breakers Roar
21. Keep it Between the Lines
22. Sea Stories
23. In Bloom (Nirvana cover)
24. Brace for Impact (Live a Little)
25. All Around You
26. Oh Sarah
27. Call to Arms
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